“1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms!” Alex Jones barked. The lumbering Texan with a penchant for conspiracy theories hurled insults and threats of revolution at Piers Morgan, the British expat television presenter who, less than three years into his new show on CNN, was now unable to get a single word in edgewise.

“Are you done?” asked Morgan.

“Yes,” replied Jones before commencing another tirade regarding the tyranny of gun control legislation.

Countless viewers watched the spectacle with mouths agape. Morgan has never been a particularly skillful interviewer — many find him priggish and disingenuous. But this guy, this shock jock from Austin, was something else. Was this the face of the gun rights crowd? Were they actually motivated by the idea that a New World Order — rife with so-called “suicide-mass-murder-pills” and led by a Kenyan-born president — is waiting to take over and enslave all Americans? If so, those gun nuts really are crazy.

And if they are that crazy, how have their concerns spread through a sizeable proportion of the US population? Well, beyond the gun nuts — and US television hasn’t unmasked them all — there are a number of Americans who fight against gun control with principled and earnest conviction based on the philosophy of constitutional originality. Their thinking follows a progression from first principles and leads them incontrovertibly to their position. What follows is a small attempt to discover the logic behind their beliefs.

In May of 2010, PFC Bradley Manning was arrested on suspicion of leaking classified U.S. government documents to the website Wikileaks. To begin understanding the thinking of gun rights supporters with this event may seem odd, but, as an analogy, it helps to shed light on the overarching ideology of constitutional originality.

In the wake of his arrest, Manning was detained for months without trial, and he accused his captors of holding him in inhumane conditions. Julian Assange, the founder and public face of Wikileaks, was demonized in the US Congress by many major figures in both parties who called for his arrest, trial, imprisonment, and, in some cases, his execution.

Assange — according to everyone from liberal firebrand senator Dianne Feinstein, to the architect of the Republican revolution of the 1990s, Newt Gingrich — was a criminal guilty of sedition for leaking classified government documents to the public.

However, there was something these individuals were sidestepping when talking about Assange: the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. The First Amendment states that “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” A constitutional originalist would argue, therefore, that Assange is not a criminal. Case closed.

Others may argue that freedom of speech must have its limitations — to curtail such things as hate speech and libel. They would ask Assange, and other journalists such as Daniel Ellsberg, who released classified government documents revealing outright lies by the US government regarding its involvement in the Vietnam War, to justify their actions, to explain why they needed to release classified documents. Not so the constitutional originalist.

And constitutional originalists approach the Second Amendment in similar fashion because they believe the power of the government is limited to what is stated explicitly in the Constitution. Accordingly, the Second Amendment does not say the government may regulate the ownership of arms; it states that “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Just as they do not ask journalists “Why…” they do not ask the gun owner “Why do you need to own an assault rifle?”

This does not mean that the government can never enact gun laws. It means that in order to do so, according to a constitutional originalist, it must first amend the Constitution. Until that is accomplished, the government must follow the Constitution to the letter. It cannot act outside the confines of its own laws.

Practically, the First Amendment has been limited to disallow libel, hate speech, copyright infringement, and other acts. These precedents may pave the way for the passing of gun legislation in the US However, there will remain that segment of the population — the constitutional originalists — who will fight such laws based on their belief in the supremacy of the U.S. Constitution.

David Woolley is a political science and history student at Victoria College.

Check out Kelvin Chen’s piece arguing the other side of the story: A civilian arms race puts everyone in the line of fire