The Natural Right to Self-Defense

While the FBI continued to analyze the emails Hillary Clinton thought she deleted and her advisers pressed her to hire a Republican criminal defense attorney in Washington, a madman used a lawfully purchased handgun to kill a professor and eight students at a community college in Roseburg, Oregon. Looking to change the subject away from her emails, Clinton was quick to pounce.

She who has ripped into Republicans for seeking political gain from the four American deaths in Benghazi, Libya, now seeks her own political gain from the dozens of murdered children and young adults in Newtown, Connecticut, and Roseburg. On the heels of the latter and referring to both tragedies, she launched an emotional attack early this week on the two most recent Supreme Court decisions upholding the personal right to keep and bear arms. She offered to “fix” them should she be elected president.The Constitution does not permit public no-gun zones any more than it does public no-free-speech zones. If the right to keep and bear arms is truly fundamental, the government cannot interfere with it based on geography. If the Army veteran/college student who stopped seven bullets with his body last week and saved the lives of his classmates (and survived!) had been permitted to carry a gun into the school building, the madman who murdered nine innocents would have been stopped long before police arrived — long before he completed his killings.

The right to keep and bear arms has more than just the Second Amendment to protect it. By characterizing the right as fundamental and pre-political, the high court accepted the truism that this right is merely a modern extension of the ancient right to self-defense. And the right to defend oneself does not come from the government; it comes from our humanity. It is a natural right.

Who among us, when confronted with the terror of nearly certain annihilation, would concern himself with the niceties of the law? Life itself is at stake. The right to self-defense is a manifestation of the natural instinct for survival, borne in the hearts of all rational people.

But Hillary Clinton rejects that instinct because she prefers we become dependent upon the government — as long as she is running it.

The police cannot stop mass killings, because they cannot be everywhere all the time. And madmen willing to kill do not fear being lawbreakers. Guns in the hands of the people give not only tyrants second thoughts but also madmen.

Even madmen fear an early death.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.