Court Rules: Armed Self-Defense Is a Right NOT a Privilege Needing Permission

Opinion

Second Amdnment Gun Permision Slip twitter.com/LilSouthernSass/status/1539992520356237312/photo/1
Second Amendment Gun Permission Slip IMG twitter.com/LilSouthernSass/status/1539992520356237312/photo/1

New York – -(AmmoLand.com)- The Supreme Court Has Spoken on This and In the Clearest Language yet seen to date.

The long-awaited and highly anticipated Bruen case decision is out! It is better—much better—than we had anticipated.

Justice Clarence Thomas delivered the Opinion. Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett joined him. Justice Alito filed a concurring opinion. Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett also filed concurring opinions.

Justice Breyer, who filed an extensive dissenting opinion in Heller, filed a dissenting opinion in Bruen. The two other liberal wing Justices, Sotomayor and Kagan, joined him.

So that there would be no mistake, Justice Thomas provided, for the Nation, the Bruen Holding upfront in the first paragraph of the detailed majority opinion. He said,

“In District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U. S. 570 (2008), and McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U. S. 742 (2010), we recognized that the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect the right of an ordinary, law-abiding citizen to possess a handgun in the home for self-defense. In this case, petitioners and respondents agree that ordinary, law-abiding citizens have a similar right to carry handguns publicly for their self-defense.”

“We too agree, and now hold, consistent with Heller and McDonald, that the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.”

How Important Is Bruen——

Bruen now joins, in the clearest language possible, the distinguished pantheon of seminal Second Amendment cases that, together, make categorically clear that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

It is much more concerning and disconcerting to the Nation’s Destructors than a High Court decision in the Dobbs abortion case—a leaked version of which created a furor among the Nation’s Neo-Marxist and Anarchist malcontents.

Bruen is at the apex of critically important High Court cases defending our Country as a free Constitutional Republic and establishing our people as Sole Sovereign over Government.

Unrestrained exercise of this Fundamental God-Given Right by the people goes to the heart of our Nation’s history, heritage, traditions, ethos, culture, and ethical and legal foundation.

The Nation’s enemies, both inside it and outside it, detest America’s armed citizenry. They hate the Nation’s freedoms and liberties. They disdain the Nation’s belief and faith in Divine Natural Law.

The Bruen decision won’t change the attitudes of the would-be killers of the one, true free Republic on the face of the Earth. The naysayers will become only more hardened, more entrenched. But, in that fact, even the most naïve of Americans must now come to know the danger that the treacherous creatures among us pose to the preservation of a free Republic and to the continued sovereignty of the American people, over their Government.

The abhorrence of this Nation’s Obstructors and Destructors toward our Armed Citizenry isn’t grounded on more than mere aesthetics or even on ethical concerns.

It is based on frustration, rage, and fear. After all, the Bill of Rights prevents America’s domestic and foreign enemies from taking control over the Nation and its people. And, at least one branch of our Government, the U.S. Supreme Court—it is now clear—is intent on defending, rather than denigrating and revoking, our most cherished and sacred Rights and Liberties, without which, a powerful Nation-State and a Sovereign People cannot continue to exist.

An armed citizenry of a 100 million people or more can never be vanquished; the Republic can never be undone; the sovereignty of the American people can never be effectively usurped, and the will of the American people can never be undermined. Americans can now gain further encouragement from the fact that the Third Branch of Government has its back.

The fundamental Right of Armed Self-Defense is our Birthright. The Court’s Majority knows that and they asserted that now in no uncertain terms.

Armed Self-Defense As A Fundamental Right Cannot Be Rationally Denied

The fundamental right of Armed Self-Defense is subsumed in the more general natural law right of Self-Survival which is itself subsumed in the supernal Right of one’s Self-hood: The sanctity and inviolability of one’s immortal Soul, Spirit, and Psyche. It is Man’s greatest gift—an eternal gift—bestowed on and in Man by the Divine Creator. It is that gift which the Neo-Marxists and Neoliberal Globalists deny and abhor and therefore intend to destroy, but which they cannot touch as long as Americans remain armed—and armed to the hilt.

Yet, when speaking of this elemental, immutable, illimitable, and eternal natural law Right, the publishers, editors, reporters, and commentators of the seditious New York Times, cannot even bring themselves to mention the right of the people to keep and bear arms as a Right at all, whether fundamental and unalienable or not.

A Fundamental Right is Not to be Mistaken for Mere Privilege Contrary to What Malefactors and Imbeciles Maintain!

To the Disrupters and Destroyers of a free Republic, the Right of armed self-defense is nothing more than a privilege—a privilege that, from the Times’ perspective, too many Americans cherish and endorse and too many exercise.

In colorful language, The NYTimes explains its frustration, rage, and fear over armed self-defense—frustration, rage, and fear borne of Americans’ insistent adoration for its Bill of Rights, and especially for the fundamental right of armed self-defense.

A few weeks ago, the Times said this about “‘the privilege’ of the people to keep and bear arms”:

“Most Republicans in the Senate represent deeply conservative states where gun ownership is treated as a sacred privilege enshrined in the Constitution, a privilege not to be infringed upon no matter how much blood is spilled in classrooms and school hallways around the country.” ~ from an article in The New York Times, May 26, 2022, by Carl Hulse, Chief D.C. correspondent for the NYTimes.

This substitution of words here is no small thing. It isn’t a careless misuse of words. It isn’t a benign, innocuous, trivial slip-up.

It is no accident at all that the people at the Times would use the word, ‘privilege,’ in lieu of ‘right’ when referencing the language of the Second Amendment. Buts this word choice is one the author of the article, Carl Hulse, didn’t even come up with.

An attorney, Warren Freedman, an outspoken critic of the Second Amendment wrote a reference book titled, “The Privilege to Keep and Bear Arms: The Second Amendment and Its Interpretation,” in 1989, nineteen years before Heller; thirty-three years before the publication of the Times/Hulse article and the Bruen case decision.

A critique of the Freedman book, written by William Walker, appeared as a law review article published by the University of Michigan Law School, in 1990.

The writer of the afore-referenced NYTimes Article, Carl Hulse, must have known this. Yet he never credited Freedman; odd that!

The Framers of the Constitution, no less than, and probably a good deal more astute than Hulse, Freedman, and Walker, were meticulous in their choice of words when drafting the Constitution, especially when drafting the words to the Bill of Rights. Nowhere in the BOR does the term, ‘privilege,’ appear.

Yet the Destroyers of our Nation don’t deign to call gun possession a Basic Right—the most basic of Rights: one grounded on personal survival, be it from a predatory creature, predatory man, or predatory Government. Rather, they prefer to utilize the word, ‘privilege,’ in lieu of ‘right,’ to describe those who seek to exercise it.

Tacit in the word, ‘privilege,’ is the idea of something beneficial that some people obtain by dint of special birth, advantage, or by connection whether made or acquired—and that, by implication, most do not.

The words, ‘right’ and ‘privilege,’ are often conflated. And that is dangerous. For, once the public adopts language that the propagandists intentionally and diabolically propagate through the media, that verbiage becomes a viral meme. As a viral meme, the verbiage lodges in one’s mind. It infuses one’s speech. It suffuses and litters one’s thought processes, embedding itself inextricably in the public’s psyche, replicating itself a million-fold into every corner of one’s being and outward to every individual in the Country.

One must always be vigilant to avoid being misled by terminology utilized by nefarious forces to control one’s thought processes, one’s belief systems, and one’s actions.

Consider the subtle distinction between the two words in a common dictionary definition.

In the Merriam-Webster dictionary, one sees——

“A privilege is a right or advantage gained by birth, social position, effort, or concession.”

Note, in that definition, the word, ‘right’ qua ‘privilege’ denotes a thing with parameters. The term ‘right,’ in the colloquial definition, clearly means something less than a ‘fundamental right.’

A “Right” qua “Fundamental God-Bestowed Right” is something beyond mere “Privilege.” It is a thing intrinsic to a person—derived from natural law and it has no limit or boundary. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy elaborates on this:

  • “To have a right is to have a ‘valid claim.’”
  • “‘In the strictest sense’ all rights are claims.”
  • “A right, in the most important sense, is the conjunction of a [privilege] and a claim-right.”
  • “All rights are essentially property rights.”
  • “Rights are themselves property, things we own.”

A critical distinction in meaning between ‘fundamental right’ and ‘privilege’ rests at the heart of Bruen, whether one knows this or not.

The Bruen case has more impact on the preservation of a free Constitutional Republic than many Americans can appreciate or that the legacy Press and Government will let on.

In its Brief supporting the writ for certiorari, filed on December 17, 2020, the Petitioners presented the issue thus:

“Whether the Second Amendment allows the government to prohibit ordinary law-abiding citizens from carrying handguns outside the home for self-defense.”

The issue as stated goes to the heart of the import of the Second Amendment. Do Americans have a fundamental, unalienable right to keep and bear arms, or not? Petitioners meant to bring that salient issue front and center for High Court review.

Heller ruled that a person has the inalienable right to keep and bear arms in defense of hearth and home. But the underlying basis for that ruling and the substructure of it is this—

The right of the people to keep and bear arms is an individual right. Bruen emphatically reasserts this.

This means, by logical implication, that the right doesn’t reside only within the confines of one’s home, stopping at the doorstep once one ventures outside his home. It exists everywhere. Bruen now, correctly interpreting the language of the Second Amendment, explicitly asserts this.

And the tacit implication of that pronouncement is this: exercise of that right is grounded on natural law, and beyond the power of the State to meddle in it, i.e., the Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms is God-bestowed, and, therefore, Absolute. The Bruen Court has issued a warning to the First and Second Branches of Government and to the State Governments as well: Don’t meddle with the Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms.

Roberts And the Liberal Wing Of The Court Had Hoped To Lessen The Impact Of An Expected Strong Ruling In Bruen By Reconfiguring The Issue, But, Fortunately, To No Avail.

To lessen the impact of a ruling expected to favor the Petitioners, the Roberts’ Court limited the issue on review to consideration of the Constitutionality of the NYPD’s procedures for issuing concealed handgun carry licenses. The High Court redrafted the issue on review to this:

“Whether the state of New York’s denial of petitioners’ applications for concealed-carry licenses for self-defense violated the Second Amendment.”

Chief Justice Roberts and the liberal wing of the Court attempted, through reconfiguration, to chop the legs of Bruen off at the knee, to reduce the reviewable issue to one merely looking at the propriety of NYPD procedures for issuing concealed handgun carry licenses. The aim was to prevent the Court from reviewing the basic constitutionality of Government licensing of/meddling in the exercise of a fundamental, God-Given Right.

Justices Thomas and Alito would have none of that. They stuck by their guns.

The New York City Gun Transport case fiasco was in their mind.

Rather than be caught on the losing side of one of the most important case decisions in our Nation’s history, which would diminish his influence as Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Roberts joined the Court’s majority, however, apparently reluctantly.

Chief Justice Roberts had to accept the majority’s holding and tacit reasoning that the God-Given right of armed self-defense is the most important Right that any human can exercise if he is to retain his sacred and inviolate Right of Selfhood and Free Will against the tyranny of Government.

Thus, despite the drastic whittling down of the Bruen issue for review, the arch concern we originally had, that concern is fortunately laid to rest.

The Bruen case holding isn’t lame and feeble. Justice Thomas and the Court’s majority responded to those lunatics that sought to intimidate them, in the furor made over Dobbs.

The U.S. Supreme Court, unlike the First Two Branches, is not, in its present arrangement will not be intimidated, and that frustrates the Biden Administration and the Democrat Party-Controlled Congress.

Unlike the first Two Branches of Government, the Third Branch is determined to do its duty to defend God, Constitution, the Country, and the Sovereign American People.

How will the Malcontents and Miscreants Respond to the Bruen Decision?

The High Court has thrown down the Gauntlet to the Obstructors and Destructors intent on dismantling our Republic and subjugating our people.

How will the corrupt, seditious legacy media respond? How will New York State Governor Hochul and New York City Mayor Adams respond? How will their counterparts in other affected jurisdictions respond?

Also, how will the corrupt Biden Administration respond? How will the poisonous vipers in the Democrat Party in Congress respond? And last, how will the effete Eunuchs in the Republican Party respond?

We will discuss these questions and issues and analyze Bruen and its impact on Neo-Marxist and Neoliberal Globalist influences and responses to Bruen in upcoming Arbalest Quarrel articles.

For the moment, at least, the Nation can breathe a shared sigh of relief, and the late eminent Justice Antonin Scalia can smile down upon both our Nation and its people from Heaven above and lay serenely at rest.

Here is the recent court opinion in full for your reading pleasure.


About The Arbalest Quarrel:

Arbalest Group created `The Arbalest Quarrel’ website for a special purpose. That purpose is to educate the American public about recent Federal and State firearms control legislation. No other website, to our knowledge, provides as deep an analysis or as thorough an analysis. Arbalest Group offers this information free.

For more information, visit: www.arbalestquarrel.com.

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Chuck

The recognition, at our Founding, and over 200 years later, that Americans have the Right to Defend Themselves, and that We’re Born With That Right, I would argue is truly the core of American Exceptionalism. No other country has codified that Right so completely in their Founding Documents, Charters or Constitutions. It is the one Right that separates us and places us above Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the UK and any other country with which the Progressives often compare us too. They do not have that at birth Right as we do, as they’re beholden to a warped NeoFudalism Europe… Read more »

Raconteur

The other word too often conflated with “rights”, is “authority”. Notice that Hochul claims NY state has a right to control its citizens. Politicians are constantly using “right” when they are obviously referring to “authority”. Thus, the word “authoritarian” is most apropos and they will do and say whatever is necessary to hide their intent.

john

Every victory for freedom is another fail for the elite in this case the Biden Administration; There latest attacks coming from this White House and the democratic socialist party on our right to own firearms will continue. What has now come into the light are those 15 or so elected republicans who have voted alongside the socialist in power.The supreme court is under attack from the same group of elected politicians in Washington and there party members. The leaders of the democratic socialist party have bluntly called for protesters to go to the homes of the justices which is a… Read more »

Stag

If the headline is true then that would mean all permitting schemes are now null and void.

Deconflictor

The author’s point of rights vs. privileges is spot on. This decision is even more far reaching: when analyzing cases involving “rights” under the 2A, it requires all federal courts to use strict scrutiny of that right, not a two-step process of also considering the scurrilous arguments of the government’s “public demands or welfare.” This changes everything.

Cruiser

Every time the Democrats are in charge of the country nothing gets done. They hold their silly investigation that have no substance and no out come.
They blaime honest for people all the problems caused by law-breakers and their failed policies. Come the next elections we need to gut that snake once and for all. The Democrats are not a political party, they are a criminal enterprise.

Russn8r

Great!

How long till Bruen, Heller etc are reversed thanks to the SC’s subversive denial of standing in TX v PA that gave states a de facto right to steal elections?

Elections have consequences, like changing SC composition. See Roe v Wade.

swmft

this may undo 1986 gun control law ,it will throw a wrench in magazine bans , remember the reason for the 1968 law was partial strike down of the 1934 law cant charge a criminal with not registering machine gun because that would be self incrimination hoping scotus has one more ruling in them a right is a right anyone with rights restored is good to go on all counts

Russn8r

Sorry, I don’t follow. If they’re going to strike GCA68 or NFA, they better do it before Xiden or another DemCom steals another term. And they better figure out a way to reverse their state’s right to steal elections horseshit. The only loyal justices on that were Thomas and Alito.

Terry

I totally concur! Mitch the Bitch and his merry band have proved they will just roll over and get their belles scratched by Schumer and the rest of the socialist party.