As America emerges from its 250th anniversary, it is worth recalling what made the American experiment exceptional in the first place. The formula was never especially complicated: Our rights come from God, not government; all people possess those rights equally; government is legitimate only by the consent of the governed; and each generation bears a duty to preserve that inheritance for the next. That is the promise of the Declaration of Independence, and it does not grow stale with age.
That is why the Second Amendment cannot be treated as some temporary indulgence that may be revoked whenever political winds shift. If the right to keep and bear arms is nothing more than a favor extended by those in power, then the central claim of the Declaration has already been abandoned. When a right survives only as long as the current majority allows it, it stops being a right and turns into a privilege.
Too many people in public life speak as though constitutional rights somehow expire when technology advances. Yet nobody argues that the freedoms of speech or religion ceased to apply once the country entered the digital age, or that they became obsolete because Americans now communicate online.
Americans have always had access to the arms of their own time — arms that were useful, effective, and commonly possessed for lawful purposes. Modern firearms are not outside the American tradition. If the right to speak and worship still applies in the age of the internet and artificial intelligence, the right to keep and bear arms still applies in the age of modern firearms. The question is whether law-abiding Americans still retain the same fundamental right of self-defense the Founders recognized. They do.
That truth has been underscored by two major developments in just the last several days. In Virginia, a circuit court granted a statewide preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of the Commonwealth’s new “assault firearm” and magazine bans after finding a strong likelihood that the law violates Article I, Section 13 of the Virginia Constitution. The court recognized what supporters of the Second Amendment have said all along: Richmond didn’t write this for criminals or gang members — it wrote it to kneecap the rifles and magazines that ordinary Virginians use every day.
Then came an even bigger development. On July 1, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear challenges to so-called “assault weapon” bans out of Connecticut and Cook County, Illinois. That means the justices will now confront one of the most important Second Amendment questions in the country: whether states and localities may outlaw some of the most popular rifles in America by attaching to them a political label designed to frighten the public. However, the gun-control lobby chooses to market these bans, the underlying reality is simple. The government is attempting to prohibit arms that millions of peaceable Americans own for lawful purposes.
America has enjoyed 250 years of freedom, not despite the Second Amendment, but in part because of it. A free people that retains the means of self-defense is harder to intimidate and harder to rule by raw force. The Second Amendment protects the ability to defend life and family and preserves a deeper principle: In a free country, the state does not hold a monopoly on power over a dependent citizenry.
That idea unsettles people who prefer to think of government as permanently wise and permanently restrained. History gives no one that luxury. The need to defend oneself has not disappeared. The need to defend one’s family has not disappeared. And the danger of concentrated power has certainly not disappeared. Times change. Human nature does not.
SUPREME COURT FINALLY TAKES ON THE RIFLE BANS
So as the nation continues to mark 250 years since the Declaration, Americans should ask themselves whether they still believe what that document actually says. If rights are unalienable, they do not vanish when they become politically inconvenient. If government exists by consent, then public officials are bound by limits they did not create and may not erase. And if one generation owes the next the full inheritance of freedom, then this generation has no right to reduce the Second Amendment to a loophole, a relic, or a slogan.
It is part of the American formula. It helped secure the first 250 years of American liberty. It will be just as necessary for the next 250.
Doug Hamlin is CEO of the National Rifle Association.