It’s been said that the Second Amendment is treated like a second-class right. Proponents of gun control argue that it’s not, they’re just looking for some “common sense” restrictions and that no right is absolute. Of course, we could talk about the acceptable restrictions on other rights until we’re blue in the face because none of them are remotely in the same category as the gun control laws already on the federal books, much less what anti-gun groups want to foist onto the American people.
However, there’s a lot more to that second-class nature of gun rights than the simple existence of federal gun control regulations.
That was driven home to me earlier when I came across this piece from America’s 1st Freedom:
This pistol permit in my pocket from the state of New York has the words “Type: Full Carry” next to my photo. This hard plastic card is the state’s approval of my use of a right that’s specifically protected from government infringement by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Bill of Rights. I focus on the words “full carry” every time I look at the thing. Though I used to find these two words superfluous, now that this is a “sensitive-place” state, I find them both sarcastic and frightening.
Around me, others who carry such permits have similar reactions to the surreal and disturbing situation in which the state has placed us.
…
I walk into my local New York gun shops—there are many, but they are mostly small and as eclectic as their owners—and ask, “Is this is a sensitive place now?”
The managers or owners laugh, but also shake their heads. They know me and are aware that I am being both sardonic and factual. I want to name them, and to tell you more about their shops, but I think it poor form to do so; the Biden administration’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has, after all, been searching their records for paperwork errors they can use as justification to yank these stores’ Federal Firearms Licenses.
I also don’t want to say if any of these shops have hung signs informing people that law-abiding citizens can carry on their premises—this is something the state’s Concealed Carry Improvement Act (CCIA) (passed as an anti-Second Amendment retort to Bruen) said private stores must do for people to be able to carry concealed in them. (This last mandate was, as this was going to print, temporarily stopped by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. But other mandated language for signs that must be hung inside such shops—in this case repeating gun-control group talking points—had not been stopped by a court.)
I understand why the author won’t mention these stores, but the fact that it makes sense is alarming.
Actions should have consequences, and people should be free to associate with whomever they want. So, if your friends abandon you because of your gun rights stance, they have the right to do it. It’s a schmuck move to do it over something like that, but they have that right.
But the government doesn’t have the authority to penalize you because you speak freely.
Essentially, though, that’s what they author fears would happen if he named the gun stores and someone with the ATF decided that they didn’t like that. They could roll in and nitpick every piece of paperwork ever filled out and look for even a minor error, then destroy their business over it.
In the author’s home state of New York, you’ve got so many rules in place that ordinary people simply can’t carry in any meaningful way. Businesses have to opt in for gun rights while they don’t have to post a sign granting you the right to believe as you wish, to speak freely, or literally anything else that revolves around our rights.
It’s only the Second Amendment that’s treated that way.
This is why we say it’s treated like a second-class right. We say it because there are restrictions on it that would never be tolerated for any other right. There are restrictions that the local media would lose their minds over if they were applied to, say, the freedom of the press.
Yet we’re not just supposed to accept these restrictions quietly, we’re supposed to gladly accept any additional restrictions because “no right is absolute.”
Screw you. “Shall not be infringed” has a meaning, and we’re tired of pretending it doesn’t.
Read the full article here
