Amending the Constitution to explicitly guarantee rights is done to draw the boundaries of political debate — that is, to limit the power and scope of government.

And yet the Left debates our constitutional rights the same way they talk about taxes, the same way they talk about almost everything: as privileges of a beneficent government. This is why they are always asking why someone “needs” a weapon, or why someone should be “allowed” to have a weapon. It is, at best, a simple category mistake of treating a right as though it were not a right, or, at worst, an exercise in question-begging.