Somewhere a village is missing its idiot…and it’s not me

A Facebook poster once told me I was an idiot because I advocated for stricter gun control. He pointed out that he had “an inalienable (sic) right endowed by god to carry a gun” and that it was stated in the Constitution.

And he said I was the idiot.

For anyone out there who may be confused – like him – please allow this idiot to explain the difference between the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

The Declaration of Independence came first on July 4, 1776, in Philadelphia. Most of it is a list of grievances against the King of England which, its authors said, justified the independence of the United States and asserted certain natural and legal rights, including a right of revolution.

It includes this well-known sentence:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

The Declaration of Independence DOES NOT mention the right to carry a gun among those unalienable rights, and it most certainly was not written by god.

The U.S. Constitution became effective next on March 4, 1789. It begins as follows:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union..."

It delineates the framework of our national government, including the separation of powers; the rights and responsibilities of state governments and of the states in relationship to the federal government; and the procedure subsequently used by the states to ratify it.

It doesn’t guarantee unalienable anything, per se.

After it was adopted, the framers discovered they had left a few things out, so in 1791, James Madison wrote the first 10 amendments to the Constitution called the Bill of Rights that list specific prohibitions on governmental power. The second of those amendments states: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

OK, so the Second Amendment gives us certain rights regarding the ownership of guns but DOES NOT claim any of these rights to be “unalienable,” and, again, the amendment was not written by god. It was written by a bunch of old white men who had something in mind when they wrote it, but the debate over what they really meant is still going on today.

Some people think it applies to everybody and that unregistered gun ownership is absolute, while others believe it applies only to regulated "militia" like, say, the active military or the National Guard.

Of course, people with high school degrees who post messages on Facebook are probably in the best position to interpret the founders, don’t you think?  Me? I’m only an idiot, so what do I really know?