To assure that no government would infringe the natural rights of anyone here, the Founders incorporated Jefferson’s thesis underlying the Declaration into the Constitution and, with respect to self-defense, into the Second Amendment. As recently as two years ago, the Supreme Court recognized this when it held that the right to keep and bear arms in one’s home is a pre-political individual right that only sovereign Americans can surrender and that the government cannot take from us, absent our individual waiver

The principal reason the colonists won the American Revolution is that they possessed weapons equivalent in power and precision to those of the British government. If the colonists had been limited to crossbows that they had registered with the king’s government in London, while the British troops used gunpowder when they fought us here, George Washington and Jefferson would have been captured and hanged.

We also defeated the king’s soldiers because they didn’t know who among us was armed, because there was no requirement of a permission slip from
the government in order to exercise the right to self-defense.

(Imagine the howls of protest if permission were required as a precondition to exercising the freedom of speech.) Today, the limitations on the power and precision of the guns we can lawfully own not only violate our natural right to self-defense and our personal sovereignties; they assure that a
tyrant can more easily disarm and overcome us.

The historical reality of the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms is not that it protects the right to shoot
deer. It protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, thus, with the same instruments they would
use upon us.

Most people in government reject natural rights and personal sovereignty. Most people in government believe that the exercise of everyone’s rights is subject to the will of those in the government.
Most people in government believe that they can write any law and regulate any behavior, not subject to the natural law, not subject to
the sovereignty of individuals, not cognizant of history’s tyrants, but subject only to what they can get away with.

Did you empower the government to impair the freedom of us all because of the mania and terror of a few?

Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel.

Judge Napolitano has written seven books on the U.S. Constitution. His latest is “Theodore and Woodrow: How Two American Presidents Destroyed Constitutional Freedom.”

Mark my words, soon IMO we'll be embroiled in another civil war.