One of the great things about the Founding Fathers and the framers of the Constitution is that they made it very, very, very hard for the Government to take away our rights. Having paid a heavy price to secure our independence, they didn’t want it just given away by one judge, a slim legislative majority or a power-hungry executive. That’s why they made it a long and arduous effort to amend the Constitution–and it’s why they built redundancies into the document too.
I was reminded of that as discussions both on-line and on the news channels turned to the potential repeal of the Second Amendment in response to the rash of school shootings over the past decade. Again, such a repeal would take years and the consent of 38-states to ratify a new amendment to repeal the old amendment. There has not been an amendment added to the Constitution since 1992 (not allowing Congress to change its salaries within their current terms)–and it was first proposed 202 years before it was finally ratified. It was just the 17th amendment added since the original Bill of Rights in 1789.
But even if there was somehow a successful repeal of the Second Amendment, that still wouldn’t open the door for Government confiscation of guns. You see, the Fifth Amendment requires the Government show cause before seizing any private property from citizens. That means the owners of all 300-million weapons in the US could demand a court hearing before any confiscation could take place. How long do you think it would take to cycle through all of those cases–plus the appeals to which the citizens are entitled under the Sixth Amendment?
And we are only talking about the people that we already know have guns. To root out those still possessing weapons in unknown numbers, that would require search warrants under the Fourth Amendment. Judges not overwhelmed by Fifth Amendment cases would be inundated with requests from police agencies to search homes and storage units of suspected weapons owners before any action could be taken against them–triggering their Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights.
We may look at the Founding Fathers as relatively uneducated men with beliefs that don’t conform to modern social mores. But they obviously understood human nature–that there would be knee-jerk reactions to things that happened in our society. Or that total idiots might be elected to positions of power. And they built incredible safeguards into our system of governance. And the most important of those is that the rights of the individual have always, still are, and hopefully always will be more important that the power of the Government.
