The issue of gun control is an age-old question that was first brought to the front by the founders of this nation in The Second Amendment. The Second Amendment was meant to accomplish two distinct goals, each perceived as crucial to the maintenance of liberty: First, it was meant to guarantee the individual's right to have arms for self-defense and self-preservation. Such an individual right was a legacy of the English Bill of Rights. In keeping with colonial precedent, the American article broadened the English protection. English restrictions had limited the right to have arms to Protestants and made the type and quantity of such weapons dependent upon what was deemed "suitable" to a person's "condition." The English also included the provision that the right to have arms was to be "as allowed by law". Americans swept aside these limitations and forbade any "infringement" upon the right of the people to keep and bear arms.

The second and related objective concerned the militia, and it is the coupling of these two objectives that has caused the most confusion. The customary Americ

This is easily concluded by the analysis of an amendment with a similar structure as that of The Second Amendment.

Our Bill of Rights does not grant rights, it preserves and guarantees pre-existing individual rights. How do we know this? The Ninth Amendment states:

It was the Founders' desire "that every man be armed" such that from the "whole body of the people" a sufficient number would serve in the well-regulated militia.

This type of legislation is in no way acceptable under the Second Amendment. Firearms regulations should be subject to the heightened scrutiny that courts reserve for impositions on other fundamental rights, which means that serious and skeptical consideration will be given to the claim that regulation is necessary. But a public policy of simply discouraging people from owning or using firearms is not, in and of itself, a constitutionally permissible objective, any more than discouraging people from religious observance would be permissible to some future, oh-so-progressive government that considered religion as hopelessly declass progressives nowadays consider the right to keep and bear arms. Any statute or regulation that burdens the right to keep and bear arms on the ground that guns are a public health hazard should enjoy the same frosty reception in court that would be given to a statute or regulation that burdened the free exercise of religion as a mental health hazard.

The biggest objection gun rights advocates have to any gun control measures is the "slippery slope". A slippery slope is the belief that if they allow one event to occur, other harmful events will follow. It is not a logical fallacy, it is not a delusion, it exists. As a result, until the Second Amendment is treated as normal constitutional

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