Anti-gunners want people to believe that we don’t need the Second Amendment to the Constitution. And, in a way, they are right, but not for the reason that they think.

You see the Second Amendment explicitly states that the Federal government doesn’t have a right to prevent you and me from owning and responsibly using firearms, but there are two other Amendments to the Constitution that cover the Second Amendment and more. They are the Ninth and the Tenth Amendment. Mike Maharrey explains,

As I explained in my Constitution 101 article on the Second Amendment, the Constitution only delegates specific powers to the federal government. The enumeration of certain powers logically excludes all powers not listed. Designato unius est exclusio alterius is a legal maxim meaning, “the designation of one is the exclusion of the other.” You will find no authority to regulate firearms or ban certain types of weapons in the Constitution. The supporters of the Constitution consistently argued that the federal government would not possess the authority to exercise any power not explicitly given.

As a condition of ratification many states insisted on a Bill of Rights, including amendments to make this rule of construction explicit. The result was the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.

So, even if the Second Amendment was never ratified, or if we accept the very narrow application preferred by progressives, the federal government still cannot infringe on the individual right to self-defense.

The Ninth Amendment was ratified to ensure that listing certain rights in the Bill of Rights would not be construed as all-inclusive.

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.^”

Madison’s proposal for what became the Ninth Amendment makes clear the intent was to amplify the limits of federal power – specifically to ensure the enumeration of certain rights was not taken to imply the federal government could violate rights that were not mentioned.

Maharrey continues,

That brings us to the Tenth Amendment. It works together with the Ninth Amendment to explicitly define the limits of federal power.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Because the Constitution does not delegate gun control to the federal government, and because the Ninth Amendment makes it clear that the federal government cannot infringe on individual liberties – even those not listed in the Bill of Rights – any regulation or laws regarding guns remains the province of state governments, as dictated and limited by their constitutions.

Simply put, no matter how you care to interpret the Second Amendment, based on a constitutional reading guided by Amendment IX and X, the federal government possesses zero authority to enforce any type of gun laws, or infringe on the right to self-defense in any way whatsoever.

So, to put it in layman’s terms, the Constitution specifically says that, if the Constitution doesn’t plainly and directly grant a power to the Federal government, then the Federal government does not have that power, and, because the Constitution does not explicitly say that the Federal government has the right to prevent people from owning and using firearms, then the Federal government cannot take that right away from us.

This is something that you’ll probably never hear from an anti-gunner propagandist, and, to be fair, they’ve probably never heard it either (as evidenced by their illiteracy about the Constitution on gun issues), but, if they want to get silly with their notion of what a “well regulated militia” is, then just point them to these two Amendments. If they have a shred of honesty in them, they’ll simply admit that they don’t have any kind of legal standing for their gun control nonsense.