The position urged is that there is a right to self-defense,
that it is God given, and that it enjoys specifically Biblical endorsement in
both the Old and the New Testaments.
The position is then asserted that this entails the right to
gun ownership secured in the 2nd Amendment.
After quoting the Bible and John Locke – of roughly equal
authority in the pages of the National Review – in support of a right of
self-defense David French concludes with the question, “What does all this
mean?”
He answers himself with a string of conclusions not one of
which follows.
“What does all this mean?” he asks.
Essentially that gun
control represents not merely a limitation on a constitutional right but a
limitation on a God-given right of man that has existed throughout the history
of civil society.
All rights — of course
— are subject to some limits (the right of free speech is not unlimited, for
example), and there is much room for debate on the extent of those limits, but
state action against the right of self-defense is by default a violation of the
natural rights of man, and the state’s political judgment about the limitations
of that right should be viewed with extreme skepticism and must overcome a
heavy burden of justification.
From the supposition that you have a right of self-defense
it simply does not follow that you have a right to defend yourself with a
nuclear weapon, with mustard gas, with weaponized anthrax, with an RPG – or with
a gun.
And the burden of proof is not on others to show you don’t.
And even if we agree for the sake of argument that there are
natural rights and that gun control is – as has not been shown and would not follow –
a limitation of the right to self-defense it does not follow that it is, by
default or otherwise, a violation of the rights of man, or that the state’s judgment
about the limitations of that right should be viewed with extreme skepticism,
or that it must overcome a heavy burden of justification.
None of that
follows.
And I warned you.
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