For those who support "gun rights"

[TPaine7]

16. Ok

1) Please define "gun rights" in your own words.

Gun rights are rights pertaining to guns--the rights people have to own, store, carry and use guns for moral and appropriate reasons like self-defense, defense of family and others, sport, hunting, investment, sentimental reasons, etc.

The term "gun rights" does not imply that guns have rights any more than the terms "water rights," "land rights," "property rights" or "abortion rights" imply that water, land, property or abortions have rights.

The angst that some people have with the term "gun rights" can be seen for what it is by putting it in this context.

2) Please explain how you interpret the 2nd amendment to grant "gun rights."

The Second Amendment does not "grant rights." The American philosophy is that people exist who have rights and then governments are established to secure those rights. Read the Declaration of Independence; we have rights because we are human beings.

Government may respect rights, government may violate rights, but government may not create and destroy rights.

If I accept your premise, my ancestors in slavery had no right to be free, since the government said they had no such rights. If I accept your premise, the recognition of their rights was the same thing as the creation of their rights. Furthermore, to take your premise to its logical conclusion, they were not even human, because the government did not acknowledge them to be covered by the term.

To say that I resent the idea that government "grants" rights is an understatement. Rights transcend government; rights are above government; government exists for rights, not the other way around.

My ancestors had no less rights the day before the Emancipation Proclamation than they did the day after. Jews had no more rights after the defeated German government was forced to acknowledge the truth than before the Nazi's defeat. The only thing that happened was that government officially recognized a truth it had previously denied.

3) Please give an example of how a regulation has personally infringed your "gun rights."

I have traveled to New York City, Chicago, New Jersey and Hawaii. Had I carried a gun on my prerson and been caught with it by the local police, I would have been charged with an imaginary crime--but with real consequences. By forbidding me to exercise the right to bear arms in those places, their unconstitutional, illegal, immoral regulations clearly infringed my right to bear arms as they are explicitly forbidden to do by the Second Amendment.