Here we go again. The United States has been rattled to the core
by an unspeakable act of evil perpetrated by a hater of humanity. A quiet,
wealthy loner rented a hotel suite in Las Vegas, armed it with shooting
platforms and automatic weapons, knocked out two of the windows, and shot at
innocents 32 floors below. Fifty-nine people were murdered, and 527 were
injured.
The killer used rifles that
he purchased legally and altered illegally. He effectively transformed several
rifles that emit one round per trigger pull and present the next round in the
barrel for immediate use (semiautomatics) into rifles that emit rounds
continuously when the trigger is pulled — hundreds of rounds per minute
(automatics). Though some automatic rifles that were manufactured before 1986
can lawfully be purchased today with an onerous federal permit, automatic
weapons generally have been unlawful in the United States since 1934. Even the
police and the military are not permitted to use them here.
I present this brief summary
of the recent tragedy and the implicated gun laws to address the issue of
whether the government can keep us safe.
Those
who fought the Revolution and wrote the Constitution knew that the government
cannot keep us safe. Because they used violence against the king and his
soldiers to secede from Great Britain, they recognized that all people have a
natural right to use a weapon of contemporary technological capabilities to
protect themselves and their liberty and property. They sought to assure the
exercise of this right by enacting the now well-known Second Amendment, which
prohibits the government from infringing upon the right to keep and bear arms. Suicide Pact: The Radi...Best
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When the Supreme Court
interpreted this right in 2008 and 2010, it referred to the right to keep and
bear arms as pre-political. “Pre-political” means that the right pre-existed
the government. It is a secular term for a fundamental, or natural, right. A
natural right is one that stems from our humanity — such as freedom of thought,
speech, religion, self-defense, privacy, travel, etc. It does not come from the
government, and it exists in the absence of government.
The recognition of a right as
fundamental or natural or pre-political is not a mere academic exercise. This
is so because rights in this category cannot be abrogated by the popular will.
Stated differently, just as your right to think as you wish and say what you
think cannot be interfered with or taken away in America by legislation, so,
too, your right to own, carry and use arms of the same sophistication as are
generally available to bad guys and to government officials cannot be
interfered with or taken away by legislation. That is at least the modern
theory of the Second Amendment.
Notwithstanding the oath that
all in government have taken to uphold the Constitution, many in government
reject the Second Amendment. Their enjoyment of power and love of office rank
higher in their hearts and minds than does their constitutionally required
fidelity to the protection of personal freedoms. They think the government can
right any wrong and protect us from any evil and acquire for us any good just
to keep us safe, even if constitutional norms are violated in doing so.
Can the government keep us
safe? In a word, no.
This is not a novel or arcane
observation but rather a rational conclusion from knowing history and everyday
life. In Europe, where the right to keep and bear arms is nearly nonexistent
for those outside government, killers strike with bombs and knives and trucks.
In America, killers use guns and only stop when they are killed by law-abiding
civilians or by the police.
The answer to government
failure is a candid recognition that in a free society — one in which we are
all free to come and go as we see fit without government inquiry or
interference — we must be prepared for these tragedies.
We must keep ourselves safe,
as well as those whom we invite onto our properties.
Surely,
if the president of the United States were to have appeared at the concert
venue in Las Vegas to address the crowd, the Las Vegas killer would never have
succeeded in bringing his arsenal to his hotel room. Government always protects
its own. Shouldn’t landowners who invite the public to their properties do the
same? The Freedom Answer Boo...Best
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Add to government’s
incompetence its useless intrusive omnipresence. In present-day America, the
National Security Agency — the federal government’s domestic spying agency —
captures in real time the contents of every telephone call, email and text
message, as well as all data sent over fiber-optic cables everywhere in the
U.S. Thus, whatever electronic communications the Las Vegas killer participated
in prior to his murders are in the possession of the federal government.
Mass surveillance is
expressly prohibited by the Fourth Amendment, but the government does it
nevertheless. It claims it does so to keep us safe. Yet this exquisite
constitutional violation results in too much information for the feds to
examine in a timely manner. That’s why the evidence of these massacres — from
Sandy Hook to Boston to Orlando to San Bernardino to Las Vegas — is always
discovered too late. At this writing, the government has yet to reveal what it
knew about the Las Vegas killer’s plans before he executed them and executed
innocents.
This leaves us in a very
precarious position today. The government cannot keep us safe, but it claims
that it can. It wants to interfere with our natural rights to self-defense and
to privacy, but whenever it does so, it keeps us less safe. And in whatever
arena it keeps us less safe and falsely fosters the impression that we are
safe, we become less free.
Reprinted
with the author’s permission.
Andrew P. Napolitano [send
him mail], a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is
the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written
nine books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent is Suicide Pact: The Radical Expansion of Presidential
Powers and the Lethal Threat to American Liberty. To find out more
about Judge Napolitano and to read features by other Creators Syndicate writers
and cartoonists, visit creators.com.
Copyright © 2017 Andrew P. Napolitano
