Orwellianisms come naturally to totalitarians. Arbeit macht frei reads the inscription over the Auschwitz concentration camp. "Work makes one free." So you are most truly free when you are worked to death as a slave.
The unarmed are defensively naked.
I defend your right to go around (defensively) naked, but only on condition that you defend, or at least not interfere with, my right to go around 'clothed.'
A friend remarked:
Paraphrasing Machiavelli: Why should a man who is wrong pay any attention at all to a man who is right, and not armed?
Just so. In the world as it is, appeals to what is right carry little or no weight unless backed by might. Suppose you are hiking in the wild. You come across a girl being raped by some brute. If you are unarmed, all you can do is appeal to the brute's conscience. "Sir, don't you see that what you are doing is both morally and legally impermissible? Please stop!"
If, on the other hand, you are armed, then then you have the means to intervene effectively should you decide to do so. Whether you should intervene is a difficult decision that depends on the exact circumstances, your level of training, and other factors. I am making just one very simple and indisputable point: an unarmed man lacks the means to defend himself or anyone else. Now for a second indisputable point.
The right to self-defense follows from the right to life. No government counts as legitimate if it interferes with a citizen’s exercise of that right.
Geraldo Rivera appeared on Sean Hannity’s show the other night. The topic was the Second Amendment and the law-abiding citizen’s right to own an AR-15. Rivera took a verbal beating once again, as he had in the past from Dan Bongino on Hannity’s show on the same topic. The other night it was Pete Hegseth’s turn to lay into the personable Rivera. But Hannity and Hegseth missed an opportunity to deliver the decisive blow when Rivera trotted out the musket canard.
In interpreting the Constitution and amendments thereto, Neil Gorsuch bids us distinguish between meaning and application. The original meaning of the Constitution remains fixed; it is the range of applications that changes. Speech remains protected despite the fact that at the time of the Founding, electronic means of communication did not exist. (First Amendment). The Fourth Amendment still protects us against "unreasonable searches and seizures" despite the fact that there were no means of electronic surveillance in the early days of the Republic. (See Neil Gorsuch, A REPUBLIC, IF YOU CAN KEEP IT, Crown Forum, 2019, p. 111.)
An example Gorsuch does not give pertains to the Second Amendment. There were no semi-automatic firearms back then; indeed, there weren't any revolvers either. But "the right to keep and bear arms" has the meaning now that it had then. It is just that the application or extension of the term 'arms' has widened to include such semi-automatic long guns as the AR-15.
This is what Hannity and Hegseth should have said to Rivera when he brandished a prop he had brought along, an ancient muzzle-loader, and trotted out what I am calling the musket canard. Rivera’s ‘argument’ was that when 2A was written, the long gun of choice was the muzzle-loading, smooth-bore musket, and that therefore the amendment did not apply to the long guns developed thereafter. The argument is obviously worthless because it ‘proves too much.’ If it were sound, then the First Amendment would not protect speech and expression via telegraph, telephony, radio, television, and the internet. But surely it does. Ergo, etc. Similarly for the Fourth Amendment.
You would think that the lovable and well-informed Rivera, who has had legal training, would be embarrassed to give such a transparently worthless argument. But like most ‘liberals,’ he allows his emotions to suborn his intellect. This is shown by his use of the emotive phrase ‘assault rifle’ when he knows full well that the ‘AR’ in ‘AR-15’ does not abbreviate ‘assault rifle.’