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If we’re to take the “collective right” explanation on its face, then the Second Amendment created a right that the states are powerless to execute, that the Federal government has no duty to provide, and that would be useless and oxymoronic if the latter did so anyway. If one spends five minutes thinking about the “collective right” theory, it quickly becomes apparent that the individual right is the only one that can possibly function appropriately, and is thus the only right that the amendment was ever intended to protect. To put it bluntly, the “collective right” approach makes no sense.
There is one big truth that used to hold from sea to shining sea and is now most keenly apprehended here: an argument against the individual right to bear arms is an argument that the average American is incompetent to contend with the most fundamental moral questions of life, death, and justice. It is an argument that assumes ordinary people cannot be entrusted with democracy.
– Joshua Treviño, “Founding Firearms,” Texas Monthly, April 2013