https://www.lewrockwell.com/2025/09/lew-rockwell/why-the-right-to-keep-and-bear-arms-is-fundamental/

Why the Right to Keep and Bear Arms Is Fundamental

By Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.

As libertarians, we believe that people have the right of self-ownership and property. If we have these rights, it’s obvious that we have the right to defend these rights by using force against attempts to take them away from us. As the great Murray Rothbard says in The Ethics of Liberty: “If, as libertarians believe, every individual has the right to own his person and property, it then follows that he has the right to employ violence to defend himself against the violence of criminal aggressors.”

The Leftists who want to take away our guns claim that guns are dangerous: people often die in gun accidents, for example, and sometimes, people wrongly kill or seriously injure others because they are overcome by rage. The Second Amendment to the Constitution guarantees that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” but until the Supreme Court ruled in Heller and other cases that the amendment is an individual right, not just a right that is applicable only when people are serving in the militia, the Second Amendment wasn’t held to limit the right of states or localities to ban or to restrict gun usage by people. And Heller and the follow-up cases allow states considerable latitude to restrict guns, and Blue States have taken full advantage of this. Moreover, machine guns, and guns with silencers can still be banned, and the government can also forbid sales of guns to certain classes of people, e.g., those who have been convicted of a felony, Furthermore, victims are so hamstrung by provisions against “undue” force in self-defense that the criminal is automatically handed an enormous built-in advantage by the existing legal system.

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But, as Rothbard notes with characteristic insight, guns are not by nature aggressive; only what people do with guns can qualify as aggression: “It should be clear that no physical object is in itself aggressive; any object, whether it be a gun, a knife, or a stick, can be used for aggression, for defense, or for numerous other purposes unconnected with crime. It makes no more sense to outlaw or restrict the purchase and ownership of guns than it does to outlaw the possession of knives, clubs, hatpins, or stones. And how are all of these objects to be outlawed, and if outlawed, how is the prohibition to be enforced? Instead of pursuing innocent people carrying or possessing various objects, then, the law should be concerned with combatting and apprehending real criminals.” ......