The right to keep and bear arms is a human right. It's no different than the right to worship as one sees fit or to speak freely, though those particular rights are treated much differently in this country.

Yet there's a question. Do illegal immigrants have the right to keep and bear arms?

One might argue that there's nothing specifically prohibiting them from having it in the Second Amendment. Further, if it's a human right, wouldn't they possess it by virtue of being human?

Then there's the flip side, that the Bill of Rights protects the rights of Americans and those who are here lawfully, thus not applying to those who crossed the border illegally.

And a court figured the latter was the correct argument.

Illegal migrants do not have the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment, a federal appeals court in New Orleans has ruled, rejecting arguments by a Mexican man who was convicted of illegally possessing a handgun and argued that the ban was unconstitutional.

A three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday that federal prohibitions on illegal immigrants owning firearms was lawful, and Second Amendment rights do not apply to those who have entered the country illegally. 

The ruling came in an appeal by Jose Paz Medina-Cantu, who had been arrested by Border Patrol agents in Texas in 2022 and charged with illegally possessing a handgun and unlawfully re-entering the country after being previously deported.

Medina-Cantu pleaded guilty and was sentenced last year to 15 months in prison, but he preserved the right to argue on appeal that the gun charge violated his right to keep and bear arms under the Second Amendment.

His lawyers based their argument on the 2022 landmark New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen decision by the Supreme Court's 6-3 conservative majority that established a new standard to determine whether a law violates the Second Amendment.

The Bruen ruling required gun regulations to be "consistent with this nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation" and the three-judge panel said the Supreme Court's recent rulings on gun rights "did not unequivocally abrogate our precedent that the plain text of the Second Amendment does not encompass illegal aliens."

I'm very much on the side of gun rights being human rights, but we need to be realistic here as well. Illegal immigrants are already in violation of federal law. The firearm was obtained unlawfully. Those two facts alone make him a criminal and thus one of the kinds of people the courts have generally held can be prohibited from owning firearms.

There's also an argument that illegal immigrants aren't part of the political body of the United States and thus the preservation of rights enshrined in the Constitution doesn't apply to them, and that's an argument put forward by a lot of people better versed on the law than me, so I'm inclined to take the argument as valid.

Plus, Rahimi found that analogs don't have to be perfect, and there were laws prohibiting the carrying of guns by certain people deemed to be dangerous. It's not difficult to put an illegal immigrant who is already violating our laws in such a category.

I'm pretty sure this isn't the last we'll hear of this case, and it'll be interesting to see how other courts rule going up the judicial change, though I doubt we'll see anything much different going forward.