A Democratic congressman from Texas challenging Ted Cruz for the Senate seat the latter has held since 2013 once remarked that it would be better if the Second Amendment “had not been written.”
This statement made by former professional football player Colin Allred was discovered in a video appearance he made in 2018.
For the sake of context, here is the rest of Allred’s commentary on the Second Amendment, as reported by Fox News:
Within the confines of the accurately applied Second Amendment, we can do everything we want to do, as far as regulating weapons and all that. The Second Amendment does have, in the first sentence, in order to maintain a ‘well-regulated militia,’ and ‘the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
And it’s two ideas there. The recent trend has only been to focus on the right to bear arms instead of the well-regulated militia part. So I just think we have to accurately apply it.
Would it be better if it had not been written? Of course. But there’s no chance that we’re going to repeal any of the Bill of Rights amendments.I’m not just talking about politically, it wouldn’t happen. It’s not within the bounds of reality in this country. But what we could do, I think, is there’s plenty of room within there to not allow people to have ‘weapons of war.’
The video in which Allred made those remarks was found and resurfaced by Breitbart.
In a statement made to Fox News Digital, Allred’s campaign manager, Paige Hutchinson, said that “Congressman Allred’s record on this is clear: He supports common-sense reforms and respects the rights of law-abiding gun owners.”
As the reader might imagine, we disagree with Allred’s opinion of the Second Amendment. We also disagree with his belief that the government can make “common-sense” reforms to the right to keep and bear arms.
First, four words: “shall not be infringed.”
Infringe, according to Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of 1786, is defined as “to violate, to destroy, to hinder.”
So, read in other words, the Second Amendment expressly forbids the government from violating, destroying, or hindering the right to keep and bear arms. Simple.
It is valuable to note here that hinder is defined in that same dictionary as “to obstruct, to stop, to impede.”
That puts a pretty fine point on it. There is nothing in the Second Amendment that would give Allred or any other gun grabber reason to believe that “common-sense” infringements are OK. They aren’t.
While admittedly there are many commas in the Second Amendment, there is one period — after “infringed” — and yet there are hundreds of supporters of civilian disarmament who have an obsession with treating that one period as if it were just another comma!
In contrast to federal proposals to put a comma at the end of the Second Amendment and then add any number of conditional clauses after it, there are bills authored by state and local lawmakers that would preempt any such effort by the plutocrats on the Potomac to permanently prevent “dangerous” people from ever owning weapons or ammunition.
These state lawmakers know that, as the creators of the federal government and the definers and granters of the federal government’s authority, the states possess the power to refuse to enact any unconstitutional act of the federal government.
Bottom line: If Allred wants to add a clause to the Second Amendment that would grant to the government the power to put limits on the right to keep and bear arms, then he has to repeal the Second Amendment and get some new amendment more to his liking ratified by the states.
Finally, I want to say something about Allred’s wish that the Second Amendment had never been written and how we would be better off without it.
In the way he means this — that people are permitted to purchase “assault weapons” because of the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms — Allred is wrong. The purpose behind the protection of the right to keep and bear arms was not to make sure hunters got to keep their hunting rifles or shotguns. Nope.
Our Founding Fathers protected the individual’s right to keep and bear arms because they knew that such was the only way to avoid being enslaved by tyrants.
They knew from their study of history that a tyrant’s first move was always to disarm the people, generally claiming it was for their safety, and to establish a standing army so as to convince the people that they didn’t need arms to protect themselves, because the tyrant and his professional soldiers would do it for them.
A popular way of defending the Second Amendment is expressed in this statement: The inclusion of the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights guarantees the continuing ability to exercise all the other rights listed there.
Now, believe it or not, in The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton argued against the addition of a Bill of Rights to the Constitution. Here’s how Hamilton explained his position in The Federalist No. 84:
Bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power. They might urge with a semblance of reason, that the Constitution ought not to be charged with the absurdity of providing against the abuse of an authority which was not given, and that the provision against restraining the liberty of the press afforded a clear implication, that a power to prescribe proper regulations concerning it was intended to be vested in the national government.
In other words, Hamilton argued, our Constitution is not a list of the things the government cannot do; our Constitution is a limited list of the only powers the federal government may exercise. Since the Constitution doesn’t grant to the government the authority to regulate the right to keep and bear arms, then there is no need to restrict that power — because that power doesn’t exist!
Hamilton went on to explain that if we set about listing all the things the government cannot do, then those politicians determined to disarm the people will use the words of the restriction on their powers to argue that they may not be able to do everything, but they can do something. That is to say, they would argue that they can make “common-sense” restrictions on that right.
Had there been no mention of the right to keep and bear arms, Hamilton insisted, the government would never have been able to define that right out of existence. And as we know, tyrants have tried to define every word in the Second Amendment in such a way that would justify their desire to disarm.
