During her joint appearance with Joe Biden to promote the administration’s latest executive actions on “gun violence”, Kamala Harris declared that the “right to be safe” is a civil right, adding that we have the right to “live, work, worship and learn without fear of violence — including gun violence.”
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So where exactly is that right found in the Constitution or in common law, and just how far does that supposed right to safety extend? Is it only a right to be safe from “gun violence”? What about knife crime, or violence inflicted with fists or feet? Does Harris’s right to safety include the right to be safe from drunk drivers? Do we have a right to be safe from environmental hazards or natural disasters?
Is this a right reserved only for Americans, or for every human being across the globe? What are our obligations to ensure that this right is realized, and what happens when the policy goals aimed at guaranteeing the “right to safety” conflict with the enumerated rights found in our Constitution?
These aren’t hypothetical questions. If Harris is going to invent a civil right out of thin air, shouldn’t she at least be able to outline the contours of that right?
We all have the desire to be safe from harm, but that doesn’t mean that we have an inalienable right to be safe. The world is a dangerous place, and while our Constitution charges the federal government with providing for the common defense and to provide for the general welfare, no government on earth can guarantee that we’ll be able to live our lives in complete safety.
While Harris didn’t elaborate or try to define the scope of her right to safety, based on her other comments on Thursday it sure seems that she believes it trumps our Second Amendment rights. Of course, given that Harris has previously argued that the Second Amendment doesn’t protect an individual right to keep and bear arms, that shouldn’t come as a surprise.
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But if Harris believes that the right to be safe overrides our right to possess a modern sporting rifle (or perhaps even a handgun), then is there any limiting principle to that right? Harris seems to believe that the only way to protect her supposed right to safety is to limit access to things that can be dangerous if misused or abused. Why wouldn’t a ban on alcohol sales and consumption be okay, so long as its purpose was to protect Americans from harm? After all, alcohol kills nearly 200,000 Americans each year, according to the CDC. That’s about ten times the number of all homicides, and more than four times the number of all gun-involved deaths, including accidents and suicides.
How about social media? We know that criminals use platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok to facilitate trafficking of drugs, guns, and humans. Wouldn’t we all be safer if those platforms were prohibited by the federal government?
Harris’s “right to safety” could be used and abused to restrict any number of our individual freedoms. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to James Madison in 1787:
Societies exist under three forms sufficiently distinguishable.
1. Without government, as among our Indians.
2. Under governments wherein the will of every one has a just influence, as is the case in England in a slight degree, and in our states in a great one.
3. Under governments of force: as is the case in all other monarchies and in most of the other republics.
To have an idea of the curse of existence under these last, they must be seen. It is a government of wolves over sheep. It is a problem, not clear in my mind, that the 1st. condition is not the best. But I believe it to be inconsistent with any great degree of population. The second state has a great deal of good in it. The mass of mankind under that enjoys a precious degree of liberty and happiness. It has it’s evils too: the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject. But weigh this against the oppressions of monarchy, and it becomes nothing. Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem. Even this evil is productive of good. It prevents the degeneracy of government, and nourishes a general attention to the public affairs. I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.
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That Latin phrase can be translated as “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery” or “I prefer the tumult of liberty to the quiet of servitude.”
Harris’s “right to safety” promises to replace the tumult of liberty with that quiet servitude that Jefferson warned about, but only at the expense of our personal freedoms and individual liberties.
The good news is that, despite what Harris and Biden have stated, we can, in fact, address violent crime and public safety without targeting the inalienable right to keep and bear arms. We start with a focus on the small number of our fellow Americans intent on committing violent acts and ensure that they face legitimate consequences for their actions. We offer a pathway to a life on the right side of the law for those at risk of becoming a prolific and violent offender. We fix our broken juvenile justice system. And we build a culture of responsible gun ownership in places where a criminal culture has been allowed to flourish; not just protecting the right of the people to defend themselves, their loved ones, and their communities, but restoring that right where it has been lost.
Wlll that guarantee the safety of every individual American? No, but neither will Kamala Harris’s siren call of safety at the expense of your rights. But using proven strategies that focus on criminals instead of trying to criminalize lawful gun owners is a more pragmantic, constitutionally sound, and effective way of combatting violence than the restrictions, regulations, and prohibitions that Harris has embraced throughout her long career in politics.
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