Precisely where they are in the government (local, state, or federal), or where they are in the nation, it doesn’t seem to matter. Legislators have it in their heads that their job is to pass laws. Lots of laws. Laws that they don’t even read before passing. They seem to feel that the more laws they pass, then the better they are doing their jobs.

But passing laws isn’t their job. It never was.

At an elemental level, the job of the legislator is to protect the natural rights of the tribe.

A legislator’s “tribe” is his constituency, the body of people he or she is elected to represent.

The fundamental job of a legislator is to make sure that the natural, inalienable rights of these constituents are protected above all else. As our Republic was violently born out of a fight against tyranny, our Founder’s Declaration was that these inalienable rights were “endowed by our Creator.” Most philosophers and statesmen (and believe it or not, there was once a time where some men were legitimately both) that believe in these inalienable, natural rights include the right to life and liberty as their highest and most fundamental elements. If people are denied the right to effectively protect their lives, then there can be no liberty.

Period. Full stop. End of story.

And yet every day, in every city and state and at the national level, what do our legislators do?

They write bills and attempt to pass laws and regulations that constrain our natural rights for often the most banal of reasons, hidden by the hackneyed falsehood that these infringements are “for public safety” or for “the greater good.”

And while Bearing Arms is obviously focused on just one small  (but very important) and necessary part of our natural rights (the moral defense of our lives and liberty), all of our natural rights are under constant assault by legislators attempting to forge a new covenant based upon ethereal legal rights that are illusionary, transient, and easily destroyed with the arc of a pen’s strike.

Sadly, I suspect that legislators know precisely what they are doing as they attempt to replace natural rights entirely with legal rights. Legal rights are driven by the public’s fickle whims and can be guided, twisted, and turned by even the most plebian propaganda efforts, so that people lose sight of their natural rights, become morally uprooted, and be guided like so much dead wood upon the tides.

I am convinced that this anomie is intentional and institutionalized by those who understand the magic of bread and circuses, giving us a superficial culture and government that is never appeased nor fulfilled.

Or perhaps I’m giving them credit for far more intelligence and purpose than they likely possess. Maybe they are simple-minded and power-mad, and feel that they can force everyone to fit into well-defined and non-conflicting roles, if they simply pass enough laws and strip away enough rights so that we can be jailed and controlled for anything, then kept in cages for as long as the whim suits them.

They do not grasp the simple fact that the more they try to constrain liberty, the more they will push good and moral people who are aware of their natural rights to push back against them. They do not understand that when draconian laws stretch people to their breaking point, some will snap, and others will snap back.

We focus on the Second Amendment and related laws here at Bearing Arms and so we only discuss destruction of individual liberties in regards to one very narrow type of legislation, but the fact remains that a nation once viewed as one of the freest just several generations ago has now become a self-destructive legal and regulatory nightmare.

Government at every level seeks “legal” remedies to problems they created, usig problems they created to justify more infringement upon natural rights and liberties, stretching the United States to a breaking point that all of us feel, like a too-taunt rubber band.

On the recommendation of several readers, I finally got around to reading Unintended Consequences by John Ross last summer. The basic plot of that novel is that out of control government agents attempted to frame several people as terrorists as part of an institutionally-backed personal vendetta. As these agents attempt to frame one of these men, they end up in a gunfight where the agents are killed or captured and their plot is revealed. A leaderless war breaks out against the specific government agency first, and then spreads to the wider government as a result, before the sheer terror experienced by lawmakers forces them to restore the natural rights stolen over the course of a century.  The book is a warning about what may happen when a corrupt government pushes “legality” against citizens who then decide they don’t want to be pushed around any more, and who seize their natural rights back through force.

Do today’s legislators simply assume that they will be able to continue restraining the liberty of citizens without any pushback at all? The never-ending assault on natural rights in California and New York in particular are especially severe, and if there are spots in the nation ripe for a rebellion against the infringement of natural rights by legal absurdities, these states have to be at the top of the list of places to watch.

This is a nation increasingly run by levels of “legal” tyranny designed to crush natural rights. If lawmakers do not reverse course, they will find that their laws “for the public good” will lead to consequences few could have predicted, or can hope to control.