Tennesseans Must Defend Their Right to Self-Defense

The right of the citizen to his own self defense is fundamental to the American system and the Tennessean way of life. It is so fundamental, so accepted as part of the conservative credo, that it may come as a surprise to citizens that the Tennessee state Constitution fails to maintain this right in two fundamental ways. It should also come as an encouragement- and a call to action- that HJR0053’s proposed amendment to the Tennessee Constitution excels even the sterling example of the federal 2^nd Amendment.

The current Tennessee Constitution reads as follows: “[The] citizens of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defense; but the Legislature shall have power, by law, to regulate the wearing of arms with a view to prevent crime.” The second half is the more obviously problematic (and the segment which this amendment’s sponsors have argued in session), as it grants the government the right to ‘regulate’ our freedom of self-defense.

Regulating guns seems, to some, an innocuous and even necessary power for government to have. After all, the prescribed goal, the prevention of crime, seems entirely benign. Who doesn’t want less crime? Those conversant with gun control advocates will have other thoughts, though. Preventing gun crime is the premier pretext for gun grabs across the United States and the world. Australia’s NFA gun control cites “the overriding need to ensure public safety” to justify its restriction on gun types, requirement to obtain governmental permission to arm oneself, and gun registration- urging that  “public safety is improved by the safe and responsible possession, carriage, use, registration, storage and transfer of firearms,” in the text of the law.¹

Do conservatives in Tennessee agree with this? Do we believe that the government has the right to do whatever it wants with our gun rights- provided it can convince enough legislators (who are often shaky on this sort of topic) that crime will go down a little? The arguments are not hard to imagine. If I plead that mandatory, police-enforced buy backs of all rifles will dramatically reduce rifle-based crime across the state, odds are the data will back me up, particularly since I, the hypothetical gun control advocate, will have left out the corresponding rise in pistol, knife, drug, and bare-handed violence that filled the gap. Still, because it reduced ‘crime’, in some sense, it can be upheld (by biased liberal judges in the state capital, for instance) as being in accord with the state constitution.

The first half of the current state constitution’s ‘keep and bear arms’ clause is a little more innocent, at first glance. What’s wrong with, “.. for their common defense”? For this, we need to remember another common argument of modern gun control advocates- the argument that the ‘well-regulated militia’ implies the purpose of the Second Amendment was merely as a national security measure, that the government had control over our right of self-defense built in to the Bill of Rights from the start.

Here’s where HJR0053’s proposed language really surpasses the national 2^nd Amendment. HJR0053’s replacement for the section of the constitution I quoted above reads as follows:

“That the citizens of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms.”

Consider: what is the purpose of our right to bear arms? Is it not the right of self-defense? The Declaration of Independence codified three general rights: life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness (the last being, to the writers, equivalent to the right of property). The right of self-defense is my right to preserve my life against those who would take it, my liberty against those who would tyrannize over me, and my property against him who would steal it. It is the right, too, of defending my family and my community, of defending, in extremity, the political body which I have entrusted authority to.

The right to keep and bear arms is not merely the right to keep the government in power in case of foreign invasion, internal dissension, or criminal violence. It is not merely the right to pursue “the common defense,” as our current constitution would have it. It is the right to those tools which enable me to preserve God’s gift to me, the life and liberty and property He has given me to steward.

HJR0053, sponsored by Jay Reedy (much to his credit), works to preserve that right. It does not base that right on the government or the government’s rights, as the current constitutional language can be read to do, and it does not provide an easy path for tyrants to compromise that right in the name of ‘public safety’ and ‘preventing crime,’ excuses that governments have been all too happy to have in the past. As conservatives, as Tennesseans, as children of “the Lord, mighty in battle” (Ps. 24:8 ESV), this measure deserves our commendation, our prayers, and our aid.

Heed the warning given by George Mason: “Forty years ago, when the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man… to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually, by totally disusing and neglecting the militia”.² To leave tyrants an easier path to tyranny gives us no true security- tyranny of the government being as evil as tyranny of the criminal- and robs us eventually of liberty. So we must be vigilant.