David French explores for National Review Online readers the Second Amendment’s impact for individuals.

Progressives like to insist that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects a collective, rather than an individual, right to “keep and bear arms.” Or, put another way, they say that the only right Americans have to the ownership of lethal weaponry exists within the context of state-sanctioned military service. As a result, progressives conclude that there is nothing in place to stop the federal government from prohibiting the private ownership of firearms and allowing access to weapons only to those who belong to the National Guard — the modern descendant of early-American state and local militia forces.

In 2008, the Supreme Court decided the landmark case of District of Columbia v. Heller, ruling — by a bare 5­–4 majority — that this relatively recent view is incorrect. The Second Amendment, the majority concluded, protects the rights of the individual. …

… Not all colonists owned guns. But it is well established that guns were widely owned and widely used in colonial America. Frankly, the assertion that there was no right to own a weapon would have utterly mystified the American colonist, who would have rightly seen such a notion as dangerous to his independence and to his life. As free men have argued since the days of Justinian, every individual enjoys an inalienable right to self-defense. To strip him of access to arms is, effectively, to strip him of the capacity to exercise that right. For an example of this, one needs only look at the Reconstruction-era South, in which whites were helped along in their domination of freed blacks by laws that deprived former slaves of their guns. …

… This right is so fundamental that it’s difficult to find even leftist writers who would deny a citizen the right to protect her own life. Yet at the same time, many would deny Americans the right of effective self-defense by leaving their ability to own and carry a weapon to the good graces of the government. Alas, fists are notoriously ineffective against armed criminals, and they are wholly useless against a tyrannical state.