Our Gun Rights are Imaginary? Well, This Guys Says They Are

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Those are the words. Any fair reading of this should make it abundantly clear that the Founding Fathers saw the right to keep and bear arms as belonging to the people. This is the basis of the argument that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. Well, that and the fact that literally every other part of the Constitution that protects a right protects an individual right, and when it applies to the states or the federal government, it’s explicit.

Still, there are a lot of people who seem to buy into the idea that it’s a collective right. This guy actually seems to think that we don’t have gun rights, and thinks he’s breaking new ground with this.

One person with a gun is not a militia.

OK, that’s just the first sentence, but I’ve already got to get into this drek. 

Yes, one person with a gun is not a militia, but I have friends and neighbors. Many of them have guns. If we get together, we’re a militia. That’s kind of the point, and so starting off with such a stupid point is not a strong start here.

One person with a stethoscope is not a hospital. One person with a whistle is not a referee crew. One person with a playbook is not a football team. The word “militia” means something. It means a group. It means organization, command structure, training, collective purpose. It means multiple people working together as a unit.

You cannot be “well regulated” alone. The phrase is absurd applied to an individual. A clock can be well regulated. A militia can be well regulated. A guy named Steve with an AR-15 in his basement cannot be well regulated. He is just a guy with a gun.

The Constitution does not care about Steve.

Point of order? It actually does.

There’s a reason that the police can’t just bust into Steve’s house withour a warrant, or tell Steve what churches he’s allowed to attend, or what opinions he can voice in public. If Steve wants to start a blog and report on the news or offer commentary, the Constitution protects his right to do that.

Now, I’ll give this guy credit for at least comprehending that well-regulated seems to mean “properly functioning,” but the militia itself is what’s claimed to be well-regulated. Steve isn’t until he’s called upon to serve as part of the militia.

The Second Amendment is twenty-seven words. Seventeen of them describe a militia. “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State.” The right exists in that context. The right exists for that purpose. The founders did not ramble. They were lawyers who fought over every comma. They meant what they wrote.

Then what about “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

There’s no ambiguity in that.

We know what the militia was, and while we don’t call upon it today, it still exists on paper. We’ve got the organized militia that is a role currently filled with by the National Guard and, arguably, various state defense forces/state guards, but the unorganized militia is still a thing, and that’s where people need their own guns.

And yes, writer Matt Stone’s entire argument hinges on the whole “well regulated militia” clause, and he’s not wrong when he said that the founders did not ramble.

But they wanted clarity, and stating why a right needed to be preserved doesn’t mean it’s tied to that purpose exclusively. Stone, for example, points out that paramilitary groups are restricted in every state in the nation, then argues that because that’s the case, there can be no militia, and thus gun rights don’t exist. 

This is asinine, in part because the text doesn’t read, “The right of members of the militia to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” or anything of the sort.

He also clearly hasn’t read some of those laws, though, because they don’t ban the existence of such groups, only where they can do their thing. They can train and rally on private property, just not in public in many cases. That’s why the militia movement has never been shut down by the feds or the states. Instead, he takes the existence of anti-militia laws as de facto proof that gun rights don’t exist.

See, while Stone claims Justice Antonin Scalie just ignored words he didn’t agree with, Stone and people like him do the same thing all the time. They forget “the right of the people…shall not be infringed.”

Regardless of the why, the Founding Fathers, who Stone acknowledges did not ramble, wanted our ability to have weapons kept sacrosanct.

The militia isn’t just a body that serves at the behest of the government. It’s a body that can also rise up when the government goes too far. It’s the check our Founding Fathers wanted in order to make sure that the Constitution was adhered to because they knew that no matter what precautions they took, there would be those who wanted power for its own sake and would ignore the document they worked so hard on. They wanted us, the militia, to be able to rise up and restore the Constittuion.

And honestly, it’s disgusting that we keep having this conversation. It’s because people like Stone need to engage in mental gymnastics to make a claim that something they don’t like isn’t really a right, despite the fact that this isn’t a new concept. Second Amendment Attorney Kostas Moron keeps a running thread on X with references to it being considered an individual right pretty much all throughout the 19th century.

It’s the idea that it’s not which is new and novel, and this whole grasping at the militia clause as an out is idiotic, as are all the arguments that try to use it.

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights, up to and including claiming that they simply don’t exist.

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