A TV line about who’s got the gun explains the whole Second Amendment. Don’t give yours up. Don’t let it be taken.
Even Hillel understood the principle.
A character on a television show said it in passing, almost as an aside. The natural order of things is whoever has got a gun on them. No music swelled. No one debated it. The line just sat there, true, the way a fact sits there whether or not you like it.
It struck me because it is the entire Second Amendment in one sentence, stripped of the lawyers and the lobbyists and the think pieces. Before there was a Bill of Rights, before there was a Constitution, before there was an America, there was this: power belongs to whoever holds the means to enforce their will. That is not a political position. It is a description of reality, the same way gravity is a description of reality. Governments did not invent this principle. They discovered it, the same way every conqueror, every pogrom, every regime that ever marched a population into a ditch discovered it.
The Framers did not write the Second Amendment because they loved guns. They wrote it because they understood the line in that TV show two centuries before it was written. They had just fought a war against a government that tried to disarm them, and they knew exactly what disarmament was for. It was not about hunting. It was not about sport. It was about making sure that the natural order, whoever has got a gun on them, did not belong exclusively to the state.
By Doris Wise
