The Freak Amendment

One defining feature of the American Left is their visceral hatred of the Second Amendment. Conservatives and libertarians accuse the gun-grabbers of wanting normal people left at the mercy of Big Brother. They’re not wrong, but that’s just a practical consideration. It doesn’t fully explain the Left’s rabid loathing of the 2A.

Here’s a news item about a gun owner who resisted Maryland’s tyrannical Red Flag gun confiscation policy. Under this law, your psycho ex-girlfriend, your Bangladeshi dermatologist, or your ex-hippy aunt can snitch on you for wrongthink and have the authorities strip away your Second Amendment rights. Or the cops can cut out the middleman and demote you to second-class citizenship themselves. In this case, it looks like a female relative reported the gun owner for thought crimes. They came for his guns, a struggle ensued, and the cops shot him like a dog in his own home.

That’s not calculated political expediency. That’s vicious enmity. If you’re a gun owner to the right of Harvey Milk, it’s coming to a street near you, so it’s best to understand the underlying cause.

As I recently noted in this post, Liberalism is inherently tyrannical. When you reduce freedom to seeking personal preferences disconnected from the good and try to absolutize it, stories like those linked above are the inevitable fallout. Adherents of an absolute ideology necessarily regard any competing view as an infringement and zealously seek to destroy it. Liberalism is totalitarian.

Which brings us back to the Second Amendment. You may be wondering how Liberals could hate part of the Bill of Rights when the whole American Experiment is an exercise in Classical Liberalism. Therein lies the rub, because contra revisionist textbooks, the Founding Fathers were not a Deist coven. Presbyterian minister John Witherspoon and Catholic congressman Daniel Carroll, brother to the first bishop of Baltimore, are just two prominent Christians who signed the Constitution. Thanks to such Founders, some Christian DNA got mixed into the Liberal experiment.

As came to light when a friend and I were discussing the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment alone states a reciprocal duty. It is explicitly for something–the defense of the man, his family, his home, and his nation. Of all the Constitutional Amendments, only the Second is unequivocally ordered toward a good.

That’s the difference between the Liberal and Christian understanding of rights in a nutshell. The former conceives of indiscriminate license unbound by any positive duty. Christian moral philosophy, on the other hand, insists that every right comes inextricably bundled with a corresponding duty. Every right exists for the pursuit of a specific good.

Once you understand that Liberalism is totalitarian, and that Liberal and Christian conceptions of rights irreconcilably diverge, it’s no mystery why the modern Left despises the Second Amendment. Gun-grabbers call the 2A an illiberal artifact of an age they revile. They are correct. More than any other Amendment, the 2A stands as a constant reminder of America’s original Christian character. That is why the Leftist Death Cult will stop at nothing to destroy it.