Drop by Drop Freedom is Lost

Today, President Biden, by executive order, has expanded the restrictions on the Constitutional rights of the people.   This was not a law passed by Legislative procedures.   There was no legislative consideration by the people’s representatives in Congress.  This was executive fiat. 

For the record, I am not a fan of guns, but I am a fan of the Constitution. 

Regardless of my personal feelings about guns, the Second Amendment protects the right of American citizens to keep and bear arms.  That Second Amendment is part of the Constitution, and importantly is part of the Bill of Rights – the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution.

The Bill of Rights lists specific prohibitions on governmental power, its intent being to provide for greater constitutional protection for individual liberties.  The First Amendment includes protections for the rights of freedom of religion (both exercise and establishment), freedom speech, of the press; of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.  The Second provides the right to keep and bear arms.  The Fourth protects the people from unreasonable search and seizure and the Fifth provides that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.  The Amendments provide for a variety of rights to criminal defendants.  And Amendment Ten provides that powers not specifically delegated to the government are reserved to the people.

These are important Amendments.  Yes, reasonable and necessary restrictions can be placed upon these rights, but the standard for such restrictions is both narrow and requires significant showing of extraordinary necessity. 

The 2^nd Amendment is part of these protected rights.  Regardless of what you think of the right to keep and bear arms, it holds equal place with such rights as freedom to worship, to speak, to be protected from unreasonable searches, and the many other individual rights protected for the people by the Constitution.  No one right is more important than another; people cannot pick and choose which is or is not to be defended.   

If the President thinks he can, and does, restrict these rights simply by signing an executive order, then all of the people’s rights are in peril.  What is to stop an executive order from restricting your right to worship?  To write a controversial op-ed?  To demand a search warrant before your home is searched?  

The President takes an oath to support and protect the Constitution.   How does a unilateral decision to diminish certain rights simply because he does not like them square with that oath?  Answer:  it doesn’t. 

Today’s executive order may seem harmless enough – tighten restrictions on “ghost guns” (untraceable individually constructed firearms) – but to stop with that thought misses the more important point.  This is the Constitution, the document that protects to the people the rights that are fundamental in making America the country that it is.  The document that protects the many freedoms that Americans take for granted. 

Yet, what the President has shown us today is that he believes that he, with the mere stroke of a pen, has a right to cancel and restrict whichever of those rights he chooses.  That is not America.  And while this one order will not end America as we know it, it does put us on the road toward that end.  What hastens our pace on that road is the acceptance of the right of those in power to unilaterally remove the rights belonging to the people.

Those who have lived through the rise of a dictatorship will tell you that it happens in a way that you don’t notice until it is too late.  Little by little your freedoms are taken away.  Drop by drop until the bucket of freedoms is empty and you have no freedom at all.  This executive order is just one of those drops.  But it is important to notice what it means.