Yes, Gun Ownership is a God-Given Right

The fastest way to trend on Twitter, and not in a good way, is to say that the right to bear arms is a God-given right.

Texas state Rep. Matt Schaefer established this beyond a doubt in a Twitter thread in the aftermath of the West Texas shooting spree. He said that he wouldn't use "the evil acts of a handful of people to diminish the God-given rights of my fellow Texans."

Progressives were aghast, and when actress Alyssa Milano objected, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz jumped in to support Schaefer's argument (in less bombastic terms).

The basic proposition isn't hard to defend, and indeed it is written into our fundamental documents. This doesn't mean that God wants you to own an AR-15, or that every jot and tittle of our current gun regime is divinely mandated. Far from it. Yet there is a natural right to self-defense, and gun ownership is inherently connected to that right in a modern society.

This is glossed over even by Democrats who have a connection to America's culture of gun ownership. Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar said the other week, "I look at [gun legislation] and I always say, 'Does this hurt Uncle Dick in his deer stand?'" That's not the question, though. The Second Amendment isn't fundamentally about Uncle Dick bagging deer, but about his ability to defend himself and his family.

The notion of God-given rights shouldn't be controversial. It is a bedrock of the American creed, written into the Declaration of Independence. Its preamble says, of course, that all men "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."

The Bill of Rights numbers "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms" among those unalienable rights. Why? Because the founders believed that everyone has an inherent right to self-defense.

As David Harsanyi notes in his history of the gun in America, "First Freedom," John Adams said in his defense of one of the British soldiers charged in the Boston Massacre in 1770 that self-defense was "the primary canon in the law of nature."

Owning a gun is an extension of this law of nature and has been recognized as such for a long time in Anglo-America. The right to bear arms had deep roots in England, and predated the Constitution on these shores.

There was no doubt at the time about the importance of the right to bear arms. Harsanyi writes that "not a single soul in the provisional government or at the Second Continental Congress or any delegate at the Constitutional Convention -- or, for that matter, any new American -- ever argued against the idea of individuals owning a firearm."

None of this is necessarily a trump card in the gun control debate -- the most commonly proposed gun control restrictions wouldn't substantially lessen gun ownership. It does mean, though, that there is a limit to how far gun control can go in America and that proponents of new restrictions should be fully aware that they are tampering with a constitutionally protected individual right.

If Uncle Dick likes to hunt, good for him. But his right to own a firearm doesn't begin or end there.

(Rich Lowry is editor of the National Review.)