It’s been said before that “the Second Amendment protects the First.”
I’d agree with that statement. But I believe that the Second Amendment and the first Amendment have an even closer tie than that.
One of the great Supreme Court decisions of the 20th Century was National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie. The Nazis wanted to march in Skokie because it had the highest per capita percentage of holocaust survivors of any city in America. The Village of Skokie denied the Nazis a permit to march. The Supreme Court eventually decided that the Nazis had the right to free speech and to march in the public square. Simply espousing their ideas was not enough of a threat to the public to justify denying them their civil rights.
What fell out of that decision was the idea that the First Amendment exists to protect unpopular speech. Speech that is popular, that is not inflammatory or controversial needs no protection as no one is (generally) trying to silence it. Unpopular speech, statements that are offensive or controversial, need to be protected because it is princely those words that people try to ban.
This idea is paramount in classical liberalism – the belief in individual liberty. It has been referenced many times, to protect the rights of bakers who don’t want to bake cakes for gay weddings, to protect Milo Yiannopoulos’ right to speak on a college campus, to protect the rights of anybody to say controversial speech.
I would argue that the same idea applies to the Second Amendment.
The Second Amendment exists to protect unpopular guns. It is the duty of the Second Amendment to protect the guns that politicians hate. When a politician says he or she is not going to take away your deer rifle or duck gun, then those guns don’t need Second Amendment protection. It is AR-15’s, handguns, and every sort of controversial weapon that the Second Amendment exists to protect, because they need protection.
When a pundit says the AR-15’s are not protected by the Second Amendment, he is arguing that hate speech is not protected by the First.
Left Wing lower courts have said that the AR-15 is not protected by the Second Amendment and they are wrong. These are also the same courts that forced a baker to bake a cake against his will.
This is completely clear in the popular culture. It is exactly the same culture and group of people who shut down Christina Hoff Sommers’ speech at Lewis & Clark Law School, shut down Ben Shapiro at Berkeley, who burned Berkeley over Milo Yiannopoulos, and have deplatformed conservative speakers.
Not to equate Sommers, Shapiro, or even Yiannopoulos with actual Nazis, but these Progressives think they are.
It’s not just the First Amendment but the Second and all the rest of the Amendments that exist to protect what is unpopular, precisely because what is unpopular is what needs protection.
The more a type of gun is maligned, the more the Second Amendment applies to it. Without that, this nation devolves into mob rule.
Thumbs up. I think your insight is spot on.
Never really thought of it like that. It was always kind of intuitive on the free speech front, but the analogy to the 2nd is perfect.
And, as history has demonstrated, time and time again, the “unpopular” speech or guns will evolved to eventually encompass ALL speech and ALL guns.
I think you miss the mark a bit. Ayn Rand wrote some time ago: “There are two potential violators of man’s rights: the criminals and the government. The great achievement of the United States was to draw a distinction between these two — by forbidding to the second the legalized version of the activities of the first.” Likewise Jefferson understood this theory as well when he wrote in the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798: “…in questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution…The two sentiments are very close on to each other and Jefferson at the least understood that if men were not fettered by the constitution if allowed both authority to act and freedom of action they would run roughshod over enemy and friend alike in their quest for power.
Thus the natural enemy of the criminal is not the threat of imprisonment but the awesome threat of death immediate and sure that comes in the knowledge that good men with guns exist to protect themselves and bystander alike and to bring on the specter of death to those who would flaunt the law.
Thus also is the natural enemy of government. To provide truth to Ayn Rand’s supposition as well as to Jefferson’s advice, For a government’s only true powers rely in the pen and the purse and by protecting the Second Amendment we insure that those in government who’s job it is to represent are fettered by two chains. The constitution and good men with guns who will not stand idly by and see liberties legislated away as an expanding government must do in order to control the people they purport to govern.