The 2nd Amendment And The States - With Dr. Kevin Gutzman

Mike: So Judge Napolitano says that the Second Amendment applies to all the cities and all the states and all the municipalities in the United States. And you, when we lost your cell phone connection, you were explaining that you had reviewed his book “We the Sheeple” or something to that effect for The American Conservative magazine, and then we lost you.

Dr. Kevin Gutzman: Right. Well, his book was called “A Nation of Sheep.” And essentially it was a book I could endorse about 95 percent. The one shortcoming was that he has this idea that all of your rights are based on natural law or that they are somehow suddenly the result of philosophical speculation. And so as we heard in the sound bite you played, if we have a right to self-defense, then that must be a right to keep and bear arms, which means you have a right to own a weapon that you might use in your own defense, and therefore no government in the United States can contravene this right.

Well, if he were right about the origin of your rights, that might be a reasonable way to get to that conclusion. The problem is that your right to keep and bear arms, like the other rights in the federal Constitution, is actually a historic right, not a philosophical one. It’s based on people’s experience as English subjects before American independence, where they had a right to keep and bear arms. And that right to keep and bear arms had certain contours. Now, when the Bill of Rights, when the federal Bill of Rights was adopted, it was intended entirely to reserve control over these questions to the state governments. That is the reason why we had a federal Bill of Rights was further to clarify the limits on federal authority.