Recently, Miss Wednesday Martin, PhD, asserted in a tweet:
To clarify: You have a constitutional right to bear a musket made in the last quarter of the 18th century.
Her statement is so alien to the political philosophy of freedom and the political science of the United States Constitution as presented in The Federalist Papers, I was in disbelief. I thought maybe the whole thing was just a bad joke.
IS SHE FOR REAL?
So I checked. It appears Wednesday Martin does indeed hold a PhD. From Yale University. Following her undergraduate work at the University of Michigan.
Her specialty? Anthropology and cultural studies. She taught these brands of multiculturalism at The New School for Social Research — a place that once welcomed some of the best minds who fled Nazi-style total government in the 1930s, including my teacher’s teacher, Leo Strauss.
In those days, The New School offered a home for those who questioned the tyrannical, totalitarian, authoritarian doctrines that were washing over much of the world, wave after wave after wave, doctrines of historicism, socialism, communism, fascism, nihilism, and moral relativism.
But then the New School quickly became a hotbed of old-school Marxism, which it remains to this day so far as I can tell. It was no longer a safe harbor for the political philosophy of freedom. It started to teach the very doctrines that its most famous graduate faculty of old had fled.
FREEDOM DOESN’T REQUIRE CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS
Dr. Martin might think that Americans have a Constitutional right “to bear a musket made in the last quarter of the 18th century.” I assume her statement is based on her reading of the 2nd Amendment and is meant to suggest that Americans have no right to any kind of gun or weapon invented after the ratification of the Bill of Rights.
Very well.
I, Dr. Thomas Krannawitter, will go farther than Dr. Wednesday Martin. She might be unwilling or unable to think through her own line of argumentation to its conclusion, but it’s worthy of consideration for free, self-governing citizens. So here we go:
Dr. Krannawitter happily asserts and can defend in argument that he has no Constitutional rights whatsoever. None. He has no Constitutional right to a gun, or any other kind of Constitutional right.
He doesn’t need Constitutional rights to live freely. He’s a free being, by nature, because he’s a human being!
Dr. Krannawitter and his fellow citizens need merely for elected servant members of the United States Congress, as well as the President and Supreme Court, to exercise ONLY the very few enumerated Constitutional powers that We The People granted to them. And nothing else.
Then Dr. Krannawitter and fellow citizens will choose, individually and freely, what guns to own or not. Because We The People granted to our national government zero Constitutional power to regulate our guns.
(Remember when Congress was filled with Constitutionalists who wanted to regulate and prohibit the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors? And yet they realized they had zero Constitutional power to do so? And therefore they submitted a Constitutional amendment asking American citizens to grant that power to them? Yeah, that’s how Congress gets additional Constitutionally legitimate power — not by redefining and limiting the Constitutional rights of the people. And even in the case of Prohibition, while Constitutionally legitimate, it turned out to be a disaster, so I wouldn’t recommend repeating the same experiment with guns.)
WHERE GOV’T IS LIMITED, PEOPLE LIVE FREELY
When elected servant members of the United States Congress, as well as the President and Supreme Court, exercise ONLY the very few enumerated Constitutional powers that We The People granted to them, and nothing else, the results will be:
- Dr. Krannawitter and fellow citizens will freely speak their minds, freely write and publish what they want, worship God however they please, assemble peaceably with whomever agrees to assemble. Because We The People granted to our national government zero constitutional power to regulate our speech, our writing, our worship of God, and our assembly with friends.
- Dr. Krannawitter and fellow citizens will be safe in their homes and papers and personal belongings because We The People granted to our national government zero constitutional power to conduct arbitrary searches or seizures of private property.
- Dr. Krannawitter and his fellow citizens will thus live freely, run their businesses as they please, raise and educate their children as they see best, make their own choices and use their own property however they want — and it will have nothing to do with any constitutional rights that Dr. Wednesday Martin thinks others do or do not posses.
Rather, it will be the natural human result of a government exercising limited constitutional powers and otherwise staying out of people’s way. It’s called: Freedom. Perhaps Dr. Martin might consider adding that subject to her studies and teaching?
