No Second Amendment, No First: God, Guns, and the Government

Today’s Left endlessly preaches the evils of “gun violence." It is a message increasingly echoed from the nation’s pulpits, presented as common-sense decency and virtue. Calls for “radical non-violence” are routinely endowed with the imprimatur of religious doctrine.  

But what if such teachings were misguided, even damaging? What if the potential of a citizenry to exercise force against violent criminals and tyrannical governments is not just compatible with church teaching, but flows from the very heart of Biblical faith and reason? What if the freedoms we treasure are intimately tied to the power to resist violent coercion? 

This is the long-overdue case John Zmirak makes with stunning clarity and conviction in No Second Amendment, No First. A Yale-educated journalist and former college professor, Zmirak shows how the right of self-defense against authoritarian government was affirmed in both the Old and New Testaments, is implied in Natural Law, and has been part of Church tradition over the centuries.  

Zmirak further shows how today’s mounting threats to the gun rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment are inexorably linked to the increasingly brazen attacks by secularists on human dignity as the “image of God.” Indeed, the more than 200 million civilians murdered by governments in the 20th century have in common two attributes: From Lenin’s Russia to Hitler’s Germany, from Mao’s China to Castro’s Cuba those murders were at the hands of rabidly anti-religious regimes; and the victims had first been disarmed in the name of “public safety.” The story is unchanging: always, the first move of authoritarians is to deny citizens the ability to defend themselves against the tyrannical state. 

America’s Founders, themselves products of a vital Christian tradition where churches served as the nexus for organizing citizens militias for self-defense, were keenly aware of this. It is why they enshrined the Second Amendment as the last backstop against tyranny. They understood, as the Supreme Court has recently reaffirmed, that far from a “second class” privilege, gun rights are the guarantor of all the others – and never more so than in a time when free speech and the free exercise of religion are under threat. 

No Second Amendment, No First is nothing less an urgent call for moral clarity, and a full-throated reminder of what is at stake in the war for our nation’s soul.

John Zmirak is a graduate of Yale, and earned his Ph.D. in English Literature from Louisiana State University. He taught college for six years, and has worked at Investor's Business Daily, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and The Vulnerable People Project. His many books include The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Bad Catholic's Guide to the Seven Deadly Sins. He is Senior Editor at Stream.org.