The libertarians and purists of the Second Amendment community generally fail to understand how our social and government system works. The Constitution, contrary to Roy Moore and his acolytes, did not drop out of Heaven with its own angelic choir of interpretation. It is a human document written in the context of centuries--even millennia--of traditions and judgments by men. In a certain sense, the statements of "rights" actually are bumper-sticker shorthand for vast amounts of legal and social background.
Libertarians want to deny that.
Purists want to ignore that.
But it is the reality. We are NOT a libertarian system.
American law operates under the Common Law system we inherited from the Mother Country. Traditions, precedents, and caveats carried over, and were presumed in the writing of our governing documents, even without being explicitly mentioned. Americans were said to have the same rights as Englishmen--meaning the same guarantees with regard to what they could do without government preventing it. Yet in that, the same limits applied, subject to how precepts had developed--dare I say, "evolved"--in their own direction in Colonial America.
Much of what I have written about RKBA and 2A is based on applying this history. The 2A "right" carried with it the same limitations it had held in general terms at the time of its writing. So when a Common Law history is used to explain why, say, artillery is not 2A-protected (TDF 10), it's immaterial to counter, "But... 'Shall Not Be Infringed!'" The "right" not to be infringed was understood in a context, and artillery can be seen outside the protected realm of that context. (Please, do read TDF 10.)The problem is that libertarians have so taken their distinctive trait--a focus on personal "liberty"--to heart that they think EVERYTHING in governance is to be understood from that perspective. A form of selfishness derived from generations of "freedom" and prosperity building an odd sense of entitlement, it goes to why so many uneducated conservative-types think "Rightwing" is "liberty," and "Leftwing" is "tyranny." Finding themselves largely correctly labeled "Rightwing" by political science, they assume--that is, "ass-u-me"--then that "Right" must mean "liberty," since they can't understand anything else. Of course, they are "Rightwing" because they hold to traditional thinking and act as the base against which the "Leftwing"--the "progressives"--hits to push their anti-traditionalism agenda. Add in Teabrainish lack of education on things like the French National Assembly of the 1780s, and the basis for Teabrainish failure here is clear.
The upshot for RKBA is that libertarians need to understand that laws, and especially constitutions, carry a vast history with them without that history being repeated as nauseum. "Right to keep and bear arms" has a limited context, and we must understand that context put into the context of our time and technology. TDF 10 is my classic on this. Citing overreach of the "liberal" rights in 1A does not justify similar--and politically dead-end--arguments for 2A. Rather, it points to the need for rolling back that overreach--i.e., Fake News can be justifiably destroyed, and "Resistance" reporters executed, as their actions exceed what has been in Common Law considered their realm.
In conclusion, when libertarians attempt an overreach of the Bill of Rights, they are often pushing simply a false understanding of how our governance philosophy is. It is NOT libertarian. The Constitution is not a libertarian document. And for libertarians to use libertarian arguments as if they were worth more than a pile of dog shit is disingenuous. Simply because a libertarian approach requires one outcome doesn't mean that the Constitution requires it, or that it is what our foundation demands. It simply means that libertarians have let their pot smoking and conspiracy theories, along with denial of human nature, have led them to another politically DOA position that handicaps the conservatives and the Patriots in their struggle against the Globalist/Left (TDF 38).
Arguing a libertarian approach makes no more sense to trying to jam Sikh theology into Christianity. They are not compatible, and doing so is self-destructive. Maybe their drugs and conspiracy theories have given them a twisted view of how things should be, but it's not how they are. And the view is dangerous.
Focus on what is--that is, our system--not what you want it to be. The time has come to grow up (TDF 72).
