I launched into a long discussion of the natural law and natural rights that quickly got out of control. Heh. I cut it and saved it. Maybe I'll try to finish it tonight and post it.

But, quickly, the idea is that there is a fundamental and crucially important distinction between "the law and morality", as its sometimes put these days. Laws, man-made laws, do not determine what is morally right or wrong, good or bad. That's my view at least, and it's the prevailing view in the Western liberal tradition.

(Fucking communists completely reject this view. So do some cynical shitheads who think they're smart. But if this distinction does not hold, then there is no such thing as morality as we understand it. The only thing logically remaining is a worthless imposter.)

The moral order and the legal order are two different things.

The US Constitution writers, nearly all of them, so far as I know, importantly believed in this distinction. But they'd describe the distinction differently. They'd say there's a distinction between the "positive law" and the "natural law". The positive law is just man-made law, and the natural law is, well, . . . that's what I was writing an essay about. Suffice it to say, I hope, the natural law is a kind of moral law.

At a general level, the distinction between the positive law and the natural is roughly the same as the distinction as that between the "law and morality".

Rights are conceptually tied to laws in complicated ways. So, where there are positive laws and natural laws, there are positive rights and natural rights. Or, there are both legal rights and moral rights, as I and others would put the point today.

The right to self-defense was regarded as a fundamental natural right in the 18th century. Well, it was regarded as a fundamental natural right going back to the ancient world. Since arms were viewed as required to fully secure this right, the right to keep and bear arms was also regarded as a natural right, although they might have viewed it as a derivative right.

They would have regarded the right to keep and bear arms as a natural right whether the 2nd Amendment was written in the Constitution or not. Consider that the Constitution provided for an amendment process. If they had turned around and decided to repeal the 2nd Amendment, the natural right to keep and bear arms would have remained in tact, on this view, but the legal right to keep and bear arms would have been lost.

I.e., the legal right to keep and bear arms that is given to us by the 2nd Amendment is just what would be lost if the 2nd Amendment were repealed. That's what I meant by saying the Constitution provides legal rights.

I'm not familiar with that Supreme Court decision, and so I can't say exactly what's going on there. I suspect that when the writer uses the phrase, "right to bear arms", he's specifically referring to the natural or moral right to bear arms. So, I'm reading the quote as him saying that the natural right to keep and bear arms is not granted by the Constitution. Correct. That seems especially so, when he says that the right to bear arms is not "dependent upon that instrument for its existence". That's what we would expect him to think if he's referring to a natural right.

O.K. But the legal right established by the 2A is certainly dependent on the existence of the Constitution, as it's currently written. I'd be surprised if this judge denied that anywhere in this court opinion.

I'd also be surprised if this judge did not recognize both legal and moral rights, but it is possible. There is no universal conceptual scheme that authoritatively defines all these concepts and specifies their relationships. Maybe his view is that all rights are moral or natural rights, and what I'm referring to as a "legal right" is not the same sort of thing. It's something that is so different that it shouldn't be called a right at all.