David McElroy

It was a year ago this morning that I had surgery to remove a cancerous lump in my left breast. In a way, it seems as though it was just a few weeks ago. In another way, though, it seems as though it was in another lifetime.

When the hospital gave me the paperwork outlining everything I needed to know about the surgery and how to be prepared for it, the pages were filled with pictures of smiling patients. When I arrived at the waiting area before surgery at 6 a.m. on Jan. 30, 2012, I didn’t see any smiling faces. I saw the faces of people who were just as scared as I was.

It’s a surreal experience to be going through the motions of preparing for something such as surgery. In a way, it was very normal, because I had a checklist of tasks to accomplish before I got there. Mostly, though, it felt as though I was stepping into a world that I’d been able to avoid for all the years of my life until then. If it’s not overly dramatic to say so, it felt like preparing for death.

There was no reason for me to think that morning that I was about to die, but the experience was so foreign — as well as cold and antiseptic — that it was oddly reminiscent of what it must feel like to prepare to die. I can’t even explain that. It’s more something I feel. It was very cold and impersonal. More than anything, I felt very alone.

An old friend brought me to the hospital and waited for me. When the nurses were ready for me to come to the pre-op area to get ready, I left her behind with other people’s families and friends and entered a world that felt like death’s waiting room. I had to take off all of my clothes and put them into a bag. I dressed in a gown with hospital socks and a net over my head. One of the anesthesiologists connected a plastic tube to my arm.

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The Second Amendment wasn’t written to protect hunters. It also wasn’t written just to protect the rights of people to defend their own property from thieves. It was written to make it clear that individuals had the right to own weapons to defend themselves against tyrannical governments.

For too many years, supporters of gun rights allowed the lobbyists of the National Rifle Association to define the arguments of the pro-gun side. As a result, many people are fixated on the historically inaccurate view that the Second Amendment is all about hunters and individual protection. Instead, that amendment is far more radical than the NRA was willing to state.

The Second Amendment was written by people who were very serious about the notion that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of [individual liberty], it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it….” The Second Amendment was written by people who had just finished fighting a revolution. It was intended as a guarantee that future Americans would have the ability to fight against a future government that had grown too powerful.

People on the Progressive left tell us that the Second Amendment wasn’t written for today. They say the amendment was written for a day in which weapons were far less powerful. For instance, CNN’s Piers Morgan recently tweeted, “The 2nd amendment was devised with muskets in mind, not high-powered handguns & assault rifles. Fact.” Let’s look briefly at his claim and its implications.

At the time the Second Amendment was written, muskets were the weapons used by individuals and by the government. There wasn’t any difference in the weapons the two could deploy. There wasn’t some high-powered musket technology that the government retained for its exclusive use. The people were on equal footing if it came time to revolt.

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Where does your right to free speech come from? Most people would say it comes from the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Where does the your right to own weapons come from? Most people would say that right is created by the Second Amendment. If you’re among those who would answer that way, you’re mistaken. Let’s talk about why.

A right is something you’re born with simply because you’re a human being. Those who recognize natural rights — including me — assert that the same rights apply to every single person, wherever he lives and whether he’s allowed to exercise his rights or not. We assert that every human being has the natural right to his own life and to the property which he morally acquires or creates.

Because of that, the right to free speech has existed forever, whether any government recognizes it or not. In the same way, you have the natural right to be completely free, as long as you’re not infringing on the rights of others to live their own lives and control their own property. No government document creates that right. A government document can only recognize what already exists. (And the fraud known as the Social Contract is just a lie.)

Read the text of the Declaration of Independence. The men who laid the foundation for independence from Great Britain were very explicit about rights being natural and pre-existing: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The statement further asserts that the purpose of government is to “secure these rights.” So the purpose of government is to protect the natural and unalienable rights that every person is born with. Remember that this was written before anybody ever conceived of the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

Over the last hundred years or so, a peculiar idea sprang up from the Progressive movement. These people somehow came up with the odd notion that rights exist only if a government creates them and gives them to you. Barack Obama is among the people holding this peculiar view. You can see it in much of what he does or says, but here’s a quote that makes it very clear that he believes government creates rights and that he believes government can take away rights.

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