What makes the United States a free society? Is it because we have a right to vote, to spend our money as we please (December 23rd, 1913 to the present notwithstanding), or that we have a wonderful Constitution that tells us we are permitted to exercise certain rights? NO. We are free because we live in a society where ordinary people – rich and poor, black and white, straight and gay, young and old, religious and atheistic - who obey the law are able to keep and bear arms. The men who founded this great nation of ours knew first-hand the benefit of having an armed citizenry, instead of restricting the use of arms to a particular class, race, or religion. English common law, as expounded upon by superb thinkers such as Sir William Blackstone and A.V. Dicey, was very clear in defining that ordinary law-abiding citizens were not only allowed to keep and bear their own personal arms, but that keeping and bearing said arms was a good and noble thing to do! Our own Constitution has a very solid basis in English common law, so there is little room for questions as to the place that the Founding Fathers saw for arms in their fledgling nation. Advocates of gun control measures appear to have only a distorted view of the Constitution alone, ignoring all the other writings from its Framers on the subject of arms and their place in a free society.
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