Opinion
Armed Self-Defense As A Basic Human Right
New York – -(AmmoLand.com)- Is armed self-defense a basic human right? That is the crux of an ongoing debate for many people in the United States. It shouldn’t be but it is.
The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution makes clear that armed self-defense is a fundamental human right. If anyone harbors doubt about that, the United States Supreme Court settled the question in 2008, in the seminal Second Amendment case, Heller vs. District of Columbia.
The late eminent Associate Justice, Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, opined “the inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right.”
This means armed self-defense is not to be perceived as a thing apart from the broader notion of self-defense, but, rather, is subsumed in it.
The sole issue in Heller was “whether a District of Columbia prohibition on the possession of usable handguns in the home violates the Second Amendment to the Constitution.”
In ruling that an outright ban on the use of a handgun for self-defense in one’s home does violate the core of the Second Amendment right, the majority also held that the right of the people to keep and bear arms is an individual right unconnected with one’s service in a militia. This ruling is consistent with and is implied in the Court’s ruling on the salient issue.
Moreover, the High Court made patently clear that Government didn’t create the right of armed self-defense but simply codified it, for the right of armed self-defense exists intrinsically in one’s being.
The Court said,
“Putting all of these textual elements together, we find that they guarantee the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation. This meaning is strongly confirmed by the historical background of the Second Amendment. We look to this because it has always been widely understood that the Second Amendment like the First and Fourth Amendments codified a pre-existing right. The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it ‘shall not be infringed.’”
The recent Kyle Rittenhouse case is a textbook study of the utility of a firearm in effective defense of self against aggressive predatory attack.
But this idea doesn’t sit well with Anti-Second Amendment proponents:
“Gun rights are not human rights.”
So says “democracy and human rights advocate,” Rukmani Bhatia who had served in the Obama Administration.
Her assertion is posited not as a thesis to be proved but as an assumption to be accepted as self-evident, true, notwithstanding the plain meaning of the Second Amendment and the High Court’s rulings in Heller.
No matter——
Bhatia makes the assertion in a “Report” published by the George Soros funding Marxist think tank, “Center for American Progress,” on August 12, 2020. The Report is titled, “Untangling the Gun Lobby’s Web of Self-Defense and Human Rights,” and is subtitled, “Peddling False Rights, Profiting Off Fear.”
Bhatia writes, in pertinent part,
“Today, alongside this rights-based narrative, a parallel narrative exists that is perpetuated by the U.S. gun industry as part of a multifaceted effort to increase gun sales. This so-called gun-rights narrative manipulates the ideals of human rights to establish not only an inalienable right to life but also an unfettered right to armed self-defense to protect oneself from any perceived threat of harm. This narrative hinges on fear and the need to defend oneself and loved ones from unknown but ever-present threats through whatever means necessary and without regard to the rights of others. It is grounded by the false claim that the most effective means of self-preservation involves using a firearm.”
From her remarks, dubious and outlandish as they are, one detects a note of irritation and frustration, borne of a deep-seated ethical or aesthetic abhorrence of guns and of the citizen’s right to keep and bear them. But there is more to be gleaned from this account.
The Marxist antagonism directed to armed self-defense, as reflected in Bhatia’s “Report,” hides a sinister agenda.
It is an agenda at loggerheads with the sanctity and inviolability of personal selfhood and one inconsistent with the preservation of the United States as a free Constitutional Republic.
Grounded on the tenets and precepts of Collectivism (See e.g., Arbalest Quarrel article on the differences between Collectivism and Individualism), the Marxist intends to thrust their vision of reality on the entire Nation. Most Americans find that vision disagreeable if not thoroughly reprehensible and repugnant.
The Marxist isn’t unaware of this and resorts to artifice and chicanery to seduce the polity. The Marxist relies on the legacy Press and social media to assist in making it palatable to the public policy goals designed to transform a free Republic into a Marxist Dictatorship.
Marxists mask their disdain for the dignity of man by disingenuously claiming to venerate it.
At the outset of her Center for American Progress Report, Bhatia cites Article 1 of “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights” (“UDHR”) a document crafted by the United Nations, where, citing Article 1of the UDHR and then expanding on the sentiments of it, Bhatia writes,
“Every human life has inherent value and dignity, and every person has the right to life, liberty, and personal security. These truths are codified in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). The UDHR was historic, with nations coming together to explicitly recognize the need to protect and preserve these fundamental rights, structuring constitutions to explicitly defend their citizens’ human rights, and particularly their rights to life, freedom, and security. The protection of human rights continues to be a defining pillar to secure a stable, peaceful liberal world order. But in the United States, some groups—such as the gun lobby—are seizing upon this rights-based narrative to justify, dangerously, the right to bear, carry, and use firearms.”
The United Nations says this about the development of the UDHR:
“Drafted by representatives with different legal and cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world, the Declaration was proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 (General Assembly resolution 217 A) as a common standard of achievements for all peoples and all nations. It sets out, fundamental human rights to be universally protected and. . . is widely recognized as having inspired, and paved the way for, the adoption of more than seventy human rights treaties, applied today on a permanent basis at global and regional levels. . . .”
Extolling the sentiments of the UDHR, as Rakmani Bhatia does in her Center for Progress Report, is all well and good. But how is one expected to effectively confront an aggressive, vicious attack that emanates from the predatory beast, predatory man, or the tyrannical, predatory Government if not through armed self-defense? The Marxist, Bhatia, doesn’t say, which begs the very question at issue in her Report. Is Bhatia not aware of this? Perhaps, she is aware of this but consciously chooses to slither around it, hoping no one perceives the gaping hole that she has left open in her Report.
In an attempt to avoid dealing with the question, head-on, Marxists, like Bhatia, simply take the easy way out. They deny the essence of the problem, claiming, as Bhatia does, and as she argues, that the threat of harm isn’t real, was never real, but is and always was grounded in an unwarranted fear of harm.
But the threat is real, and the fear isn’t unwarranted, and Americans are witnessing all of it. And it is painfully evident through the inaction and empty posturing of effete and impotent Federal and State Governments to the harm generated.
Either the Marxist-controlled Federal Government and similar Marxist-controlled State and local Governments are simply inept and incompetent and, so, wholly unable to deal with the harm, or they welcome, even encourage, the attendant harms to the citizen and society alike. Likely it is a combination of both.
The framers of the United States Constitution had the answer to the threat of harm caused by predatory beast, predatory man, or predatory Government, an unwelcome one for these Marxists, to be sure, as they aim to break apart American society and culture so that they can rebuild society in accordance with the strictures of Marxism.
The answer rests in the Nation’s Bill of Rights (BOR), specifically in the citizen’s exercise of his Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. This, more than anything else, is the answer to the bedlam and mayhem wrought by those that seek the Country’s undoing. Small wonder, then, that these Marxists desire to destroy the Right.
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