Thirty-three states have what are called open carry laws, which allow persons to carry unconcealed weapons in public — for example, holstered pistols or rifles.  Yet, as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas points out, the Second Amendment is treated as an inferior right.  In some states, the carrying of a gun puts one at risk of imprisonment.  Why are such restrictions allowed?

The state Constitution of Maine is unambiguous about it. Maine Constitution, Art. I, §16: To keep and bear arms.  “Every citizen has a right to keep and bear arms and this right shall never be questioned.”

One might ask, how can it be illegal in any state to openly carry firearms?  Broadswords?  Battleaxes?  No, I am not being facetious.

Ask any person of the politically leftist persuasion, and he will tell you that if everyone can walk around with a gun in his belt, then every minor confrontation could result in murder and mayhem.  Lunatics would commit massacres wherever crowds convene.  People under the influence of alcohol or drugs would become crime scenes waiting to happen.

Although that is not occurring in Maine, so many thousands of murders per year are committed in the U.S. that it is easy to understand those fears.  Given that many of them occur in locales that have the strictest anti-gun laws to be found, the contrary argument for the right to (and need for) self-defense is even easier to understand.

So why, nearly a quarter-millennium after our constitutional republic’s founding, has this issue not been emphatically resolved nationwide?  Why isn’t the Constitution enforced?

The answer must begin with the very real fear that much of the government currently has of its law-abiding citizens: They are free.  The Second Amendment to the Constitution was ratified by free men who had only recently emerged from the overthrow of their former government.  They were forming a new government, a self-government, but doing so with the concern that it might eventually become the old government.  How could they prevent that?

Their answer was the Second Amendment.  It gives to the ordinary citizen the power to enforce the First.  That is the purpose and essence of it, and the reason why unjust government dreads it.

The trepidation of the Founders has become justified.  We now have state governments that recently exercised not their right, but the power to lock entire populations into their homes, forbidding them to exercise their First Amendment rights, requiring them to submit to injections of unproven so-called vaccines, all the while inviting millions of illegal aliens across our borders with no such requirements.

That there was no armed uprising is a sad testimony to the degree to which U.S. citizens have surrendered, with barely a whimper, their most basic rights and abdicated their most serious responsibility: to defend liberty.  We can only hope their patience will soon run out.

But how?  If the Second Amendment becomes once again exercised, both in law and in common practice, then how do we prevent the mass murders, the everyday death duels, that critics of the Second Amendment predict?

That question should have been resolved decades ago, with the moral courage that we hope still resides in the hearts of our fellow Americans.  The promise of a prompt death penalty for murder used to be the sure and certain expectation of would-be killers, and a strong protection for would-have-been victims and their loved ones.  Compassion for murderers is lethal.

More than that, the ill advised removal from schools of the history of Western values; the abandonment of Jewish and Christian moral teachings in education and law; and the irrational definition of liberty, confusing it with libertinism, have all brought about the very rational idea that if everyone open-carries, in some places, there will be mayhem, or the constant fear of it.  For when uncivilized people have been told that their corrupt values are just as good as those of others, then those uncivilized behaviors will result in the exact atrocities that the left says it abhors. 

The downward slide into barbarism is real, and it is accelerating.  We must reverse that trend.  The rabid objections of the political left must not be allowed to prevent us from retaining the constitutional republic that is our rightful inheritance.

Sadly, it is not true that violence never settles anything.  When it is forced upon the just, it settles everything.  Liberty is dangerous, risky, and often painful, but until it is resurrected from what otherwise will soon become the dustbin of history, it is our only option.  We must fight to seize it again.  We must expect always to have to fight to keep it.

Let’s get started.

Image via Pexels.