Your right to defend your own life is so fundamental that it supersedes all law and all social conventions. It is synonymous with your right to your own life. They’re inseparable.

The threats to human life range from bacteria and viruses at the micro level, to carnivores, storms, and a host of other dangers at the macro level.

Unfortunately, one of the most severe threats to humans are other humans. We attack each other because of religious, political, and cultural differences. We attack each other out of greed, hatred, xenophobia, and a host of other psychological afflictions. Usually, we attack others who aren’t “us.”

Sometimes we’re attacked by the authorities who are supposed to protect us. This is because the progressive Elites in a society often become shameless bullies. They become consumed with a desire to control the lives of everyone else. To ensure their ability to do so, they invent reasons to come looking for our guns, because they know if we’re armed, we have the ability to resist them. Bullies prefer defenseless victims. When citizens are disarmed, atrocity and genocide follow with alarming frequency, as the citizens of Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, and National Socialist Germany learned.

Such oppression is the very reason that we must be armed. Disarming innocent people is like ripping the shells from armadillos or stripping the quills from porcupines. The naked creatures are left to cower helplessly, waiting for inevitable harm, captivity, or death.

Even though we delegate the use of defensive force to the police and military, we must never cede the right to our own self-defense. We can never have absolute assurance that the police or military will perform their duties or arrive in time. If we rely solely on them to protect us, we will be defenseless if they become monsters, as they sometimes do.

The right to bear arms is ours by our very nature as humans who require constant defense to survive. This right precedes governments and can never be rightfully abrogated by them, though they’ve all tried and will forever try. We have a right to protect ourselves from bullies who torment us. As the Jewish sage Hillel asked, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” Six million European Jews learned the brutal answer to his question in German concentration camps.

The weapons necessary to enforce this inalienable right are the only antidotes to a world teeming with tyrants. The U.S. Constitution is toothless without its Second Amendment. As George Orwell put it, “That rifle on the wall of the laborer’s cottage or working-class flat is the symbol of democracy.”

(Excerpted from James Keena’s new novel “2084: American Apocalypse”, available on Amazon).