In Part 5 of his What We Believe series on the Tea Party and its direction, Declaration Entertainment’s Bill Whittle gives us a comprehensive argument in defense of gun ownership rights — and questions why anyone would want to have a state that forcibly disarms its citizenry. Bill addresses the plague of gun-related homicides found in the US by pointing out that the epicenters of such plagues rarely coincide with higher densities of legal gun ownership, which means guns are a secondary issue and not the primary cause.  It’s impossible to encapsulate Bill’s argument in anything less than the efficient manner in which he does so in this video:

Last week, with the election news coming fast and furious, I never did get to Part 4 of the series, Natural Law.  This concept formed the basis of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution itself.  It was the first time in history that a government was founded on the notion that a Creator gave each person natural rights; before this, most nations were founded and run on the idea that a Creator gave the nobility a direct mandate to rule over others by divine right, to either moderate extent (Great Britain at the time) or absolutely (France, among others).  Even other republics such as the Netherlands operated in part under a vestigial nobility (a stadtholder in that country), as do some European countries to this day.  The United States founded itself in direct opposition to such notions, and Bill explains what that means for self-government:

I’d add that there is at least one similarity between ancient systems of divine-right feudalism and today’s version of elitist autocracy: a basic contempt of the people they propose to rule. The only way to acquiesce to or demand such systems is to have a basic belief that people cannot act in their own best interest, and have to have their choices constricted or altogether dictated to them. “People are too stupid to choose” is not so different from “God appointed me to rule over my kingdom”; the only difference is that the former are self-appointed.