If you blow up the Constitution, you’ll regret it

Predictably, the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting has triggered some talk on the left – and in the mainstream media, but I repeat myself – of repealing the Second Amendment.

I am therefore resharing a blog post I wrote some time back on why repealing 2A would not abolish the right to bear arms, only open the way to the U.S. government massively violating that right. Rights are not granted by the Constitution, they are recognized by it. This is black-letter law.

Thus, repeal of any right enumerated in the Constitution is not possible without abrogating the Constitutional covenant – destroying the legal and moral foundations of our system. The ten in the Bill of Rights are especially tripwires on an explosive that would bring the whole thing down. And of all these, the First and Second are especially sensitive. Approach them at your peril.

I will now add a very sober and practical warning: If the Constitution is abrogated by a “repeal” of 2A, it will be revolution time – millions of armed Americans will regard it as their moral duty to rise up and kill those who threw it in the trash. I will be one of them.

Left-liberals, you do not want this. I’m a tolerant libertarian, but many of the revolutionaries I’d be fighting alongside would be simpler and harder men, full of faith and hatred. If that revolution comes, you will lose and the political aftermath is likely to be dominated by people so right-wing that I myself would fear for the outcome.

You should fear it much more than I. Back away from those tripwires; you are risking doom. Ethnic cleansing? Theocracy? Anti-LGBT pogroms? Systematic extermination of cultural Marxists? In a peaceful, Constitutional America these horrors will not be. If you blow up the Constitution, they might.