USA –-(Ammoland.com)-“Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich says the United Nations should adopt a treaty giving everyone on the planet the right to bear firearms,” the Associated Press reported today, citing the GOP presidential candidate’s address last week at the National Rifle Association annual meeting in St. Louis.
The left-leaning The Daily Beast made the same assumption:
The flagging candidate got a standing ovation with his proposed ‘Gingrich Doctrine’—a promise for a UN treaty to give everyone on the planet the right to bear arms.
That’s not what he said, and it’s curious TDB got it so wrong, especially since they go on to cite what Gingrich actually did say:
“The right to bear arms comes from our creator, not our government”…
As an aside, the Founders capitalized “Creator,” but who were they to argue with Tina Brown’s editorial standards? Still, as the Supreme Court restated precedent in the landmark Heller case:
[I]t has always been widely understood that the Second Amendment, like the First and Fourth Amendments, codified a pre-existing right. The very text of the Second Amendment implicitly recognizes the pre-existence of the right and declares only that it “shall not be infringed.” As we said in United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 542, 553 (1876), “[t]his is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.
Governments do not give rights, although that is the presumption in the UN’s “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” which shows its hand in Article 29:
“(2) In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law. . . [and] (3) These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.”
In other words, that which we grant we can withhold. Or just never recognize it in the first place.
Whether one attributes “unalienable Rights” as endowments from “Nature’s God” or simply inherent to the condition of being human, one thing is clear: No government has a legitimate moral claim to reserve a “monopoly of violence” to itself.
No matter how desperately state-worshiping media cheerleaders might want us to believe otherwise.
About David Codrea
David Codrea is a long-time gun rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He is a field editor for GUNS Magazine, and a blogger at The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance. Read more at www.DavidCodrea.com.
