Your Feelings Have Nothing to Do with the Second Amendment

By William Sullivan
American Thinker
February 24th. 2018

Looking to capitalize on the public whirlwind demanding gun control measures, Ohio governor John Kasich took to Twitter to ask:

If all the sudden you couldn't buy an AR-15, what would you lose? Would you feel your second amendment [sic] rights would be eroded? These are the things that have to be looked at and action has to happen.

The Second Amendment could not be clearer in declaring that the federal government has no such right enumerated in the Constitution.

It's important to note that while the majority rabble may undoubtedly care immensely about its own feelings, it does not care about your liberty. What the popular majority desires and what your liberty requires are two distinctly separate conversations. To quote Lord Acton: "At all times, sincere friends of freedom have been rare, and its triumphs have been due to minorities."

And yet, though it has been mercilessly attacked and subverted by past federal legislation, the Second Amendment remains perhaps the most primal touchstone of the American people. The left crafts villainous straw men to attack in efforts to account for that devotion, and for the failure to achieve expansive federal regulation of guns. But the real culprit that often keeps expansive gun control legislation on the drawing board is the sheer will of the American people, who continually hold their lawmakers accountable for actions they undertake. That is how a representative republic, not a pure democracy, works.

Perhaps what people should be clamoring for is accountability for the FBI's failure. Or perhaps people should recognize that all but one mass shootings since 1950 were committed in "gun-free" zones, and that this simple fact alone signifies that making the zones we live in less "gun-free" is a logical recipe for fewer mass shootings.

Perhaps any of those things might be a better response to the Parkland shootings than demanding some arbitrary federal action based upon how you "feel" about my Second Amendment right.