Solid article.For example, on August 6, 2013, Breitbart News quoted (US Senator) Murphy saying, “The Second Amendment is not an absolute right, not a God-given right. It has always had conditions upon it like the First Amendment has.”
Murphy is wrong in at least three places: 1. Second Amendment rights are God-given. 2. They are “absolute” because they were given by Him who is absolute. 3. First Amendment rights are absolute as well (as they, like all unalienable rights, have their origin in God, not government).
As for the “absolute” nature of these rights, William Blackstone explained:Note: “absolute rights” have limits but they are not limits put in place by government, rather, they are limits inherently present in “the law of nature” and evident in the order of nature. For example, my right to keep and bear arms is “absolute” but natural protections on it end if I use my guns–or try to use my guns–to take innocent life. Moreover, my right to life–one of the most fundamental of natural rights–ends if I use my Second Amendment rights to take the life of an innocent or am in the act of the trying to take that life.The absolute rights of man, considered as a free agent, endowed with discernment to know good from evil, and with power of choosing those measures which appear to him to be most desirable, are usually summed up in one general appellation, and denominated the natural liberty of mankind. This natural liberty consists properly in a power of acting as one thinks fit, without any restraint or control, unless by the law of nature: being a right inherent in us by birth, and one of the gifts of God to man at his creation, when he endued him with the faculty of free-will.
Do you believe it?