It should be of some great interest to many American patriots that the U.S. Supreme Court will be hearing arguments concerning semiautomatic rifle bans put into “law” by Illinois and Connecticut on December 2nd 2026. Notoriously slow to act, we may not see their ruling until next summer, but hopefully they will in fact prove me wrong and act sooner.

One never can tell about Chief Justice John Roberts, since he has a bit of a Leftist streak in him, regarding several social issues, but, unless he’s grown more liberal over the past sixteen years, he should most certainly come down on the side of American patriots, constitutionalists and the Second Amendment, since he came down on the right side of it in D.C. v Heller in 2008 to overturn D.C.’s ban on carrying handguns in public. The Court essentially affirmed that the Second Amendment was an individual right at that time.

I for one know exactly how I would react if Tennessee tried to ban my rifles, much less confiscate them. Maybe other men are less certain or sure of themselves, which is the reason I note in the essay at certain points, I’m essentially speaking for myself.

This actually is a question all Americans must answer for themselves. Just how far are they willing to go when it comes to standing by quietly as one government institution or entity after another violates one or more of our Inalienable God-Given Rights – several of which are enumerated and described in the Bill of Rights.

States and Courts Have No Right to Ban American’s Firearms

Folks, I don’t mind stating clearly as a harbor master’s bell ringing out through the crisp fall air and out across the harbor, that no state, no federal entity, no court, not the first man jack amongst us has any legitimate right to tell anyone under any particular set of circumstances that he cannot keep and bear arms of any kind, in the righteous defense of himself, his family and his community and country. Y’All can give up your right to own and use semiautomatic AR15 and AR10 rifles and other firearms, if you’re of a mind to do so – but as for me, they’ll have to pry them from my cold, dead hands, no matter what the Supreme Court rules regarding our Inalienable God-Given Right to keep and bear arms this December.

Yes, I live in a state that recognizes “Constitutional Carry”, but many states do not, and many have incredibly severe restrictions on American’s Second Amendment Right. And so, you may say I’m “lawless” or perhaps even reckless, but no matter what so-called “law” any state has passed, so long as I am traveling the nation meaning no harm and doing no wrong, I will always carry a firearm with me for the righteous, legal purpose of self-defense; because you can bet your sweet ass the criminals everywhere are carrying theirs.

If more gun laws worked, Mexico wouldn’t have had 340,000 people murdered by criminals with firearms over the past fifteen years. Mexico has the most restrictive gun laws one might imagine, and it has only one gun store that sits in the middle of a military base and has soldiers doubling as clerks. Restrictions on the good and decent citizens, whether in Mexico or America, only favor the criminals.

There comes a time in the affairs of a free people when they must decide whether the rights they profess to cherish are truly rights, or merely temporary permissions granted by those who hold political power.

It is easy enough to praise liberty when the courts defend it, when elected officials respect it, and when government leaves the ordinary citizen to live his life without interference. The real test comes when those institutions turn against the very principles they were established to preserve, when the people have exhausted the ordinary avenues of appeal and are left confronting a government that insists its authority is greater than the rights of those it governs.

That is the question now hanging over the United States Supreme Court as it prepares to consider Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins, two cases challenging restrictions on semiautomatic rifles in Illinois and Connecticut. The Court has granted review in both cases, and its December 2nd 2026, argument calendar lists them together. These are not merely disputes about the classification of a particular firearm. They strike at the heart of a fundamental American question: Does the government possess the authority to prohibit ordinary citizens from possessing arms that the Constitution protects, or does the Constitution exist precisely to prevent government from exercising such authority?

America currently has a Star Chamber system that seems to move to force all Americans to accept its decisions as final, when its only real duty isn’t making “law” but only determining the constitutional nature of any existing or newly proposed law. Over on One First Street in Washington, D.C., America has fashioned for Herself a coven of judicial High Priests in black robes, and every term, a supposedly free people gather upon the temple steps to learn which portion of their birthright might disappear or they might be allowed to retain.

This December the Court will hear Viramontes v. Cook County and Grant v. Higgins, which are challenges to state prohibitions against owning some of the most common rifles in the Republic, e.g. AR15s, AK47s, AR10s and other semiautomatic firearms. Tens of millions of Americans wait to be told whether or not the plain words “shall not be infringed” still mean what our Founders clearly understood and meant in 1791.

They absolutely do. No gathering of black robes were consulted when these words were written, and none is required in the here and now.

My fine, patriotic friend, former Tennessee National Guardsman, Captain Richard A. Hamblen was closer to the Founding Fathers’ intent than the Supreme Court ruling in the United States v Miller-1939, which provided most of the rationale for all gun control laws since then. As Hamblen answered charges of possessing nine unregistered machine guns in 2009 (6th Circuit Court of Appeals), he stated:

“There are no qualifiers on the Second Amendment. There are qualifiers on the Fourth and Fifth Amendments, so if the Founders had intended to restrict the right to keep and bear arms, they knew how to do it.”

Unfortunately, he was found guilty and sentenced to 15 months in prison, of which he served 13 months before being released. But despite the Court’s and the system’s attempt to ruin the good name of a Free Born American, many in Tennessee still remember him and hold him in the highest regard as a man who fought for freedom and individual liberty.

As far as I have long been concerned, way before Tennessee repealed its extremely restrictive firearm “laws”, under the Second Amendment each and every single one of us are well within our rights if we decide to carry Mr. Ronnie Barrett’s world renown .50 caliber automatic rifle down Broad Street in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

The men who framed the Constitution never surrendered their own final judgement on matters of individual liberty to a judicial oligarchy. Alexander Hamilton, who favored an extremely energetic government more than most of America’s Founders, nevertheless described the judiciary to the people of New York as the least dangerous branch, because it possesses no sword or purse, but one sure as hell wouldn’t believe that today as it arrogantly and regularly intrudes and interferes in all matters of American life, giving new immoral meaning to the sanctity of “marriage” and even interceding in policy matters of the Executive Branch acting as though its power supersedes that of the other branches of government.

The Court was only supposed to offer mere judgements, supposedly not having the force or the will to do so. But the dynamics of the modern Court soon relieves us all of that notion as we find ourselves too often living under judicial tyranny. Merely judgement – not supremacy, not revelation, not the power to rewrite the charter of a free people.

Thomas Jefferson saw farther and more clearly. In the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, he declared that the general government was not made exclusive or final judge of the extent of the powers delegated to itself, for that would have made its discretion, and not the Constitution, the measure of its powers. The states, as parties to the compact, retained the right to judge for themselves when the compact was violated. Two decades later, Jefferson put the danger still more bluntly: to make judges the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions is a very dangerous doctrine indeed, one that would place us all under the despotism of an oligarch and ultimately judicial tyranny.

I can only speak for myself, but from the time I could barely walk and talk, my parents taught me that our rights were inalienable and came from God and were readily observed in Nature, not something granted us by government. In other words, our Inalienable God Given Rights, including the right to self-defense, existed long before America was even a gleam in the Founders’ eyes or the Constitution and the Second Amendment ever came into being. These rights are ours to hold, defend and fight to keep, with or without a piece of paper of a “law” suggesting it.

Americans failed to pay heed to the Founders’ warnings. Today, a right seems to only exist whenever five Supreme Court Justices say it exists and vanishes when five say otherwise. Legislators who swore their own oaths to the Constitution shrug and wait for the head of the Star Chamber to make their pronouncement and declarations. Governors wait. Most, not all, Sheriffs wait. Citizens wait. That is not a republic. That represents a people’s petitioning class kneeling before the very oligarchy Jefferson named.

Mark this well. The Court opens its term with public confidence at historic lows. Americans sense that something is rotten. They have simply not yet been brought to the realization and understanding that the disease is their unfathomable habit of constantly asking the Court questions already answered within the Constitution in plain English.

Every officer of the Union swears an oath to the Constitution [although many these days flatly lie in doing so], and that oath is not supposed to be to the latest opinion interpreting it. State legislators may refuse to lend the mechanisms of government to federal usurpations, or usurpations coming from within their respective states. Sheriffs may refuse to confiscate what the Second Amendment protects. Free citizens may read Article I, the Tenth Amendment, and the Bill of Rights for themselves in a single afternoon, no law degree required. The Framers wrote the Constitution in the language of free men so that free men would never need a coven of black robed High Priests or a Star Chamber to translate it.

Americans look out over the abyss at the dark clouds of tyranny rapidly approaching each and every day. We may linger on the Star Chamber steps awaiting the next pronouncement, or we may remember that the people of the respective states made this government, numbered its powers, and never surrendered the right to judge or halt dead in its tracks when those powers were abused and exceeded. The Supreme Court does not hold our liberty in its hands. We do. Act like it.

Joseph Story, one of the earliest Chief Justices called our right to keep and bear arms the palladium of liberties of the Republic, offering a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers. Tench Coxe, writing in the Federal Gazette in 1789, was equally clear: as civil rulers may attempt to tyrannize, the people are confirmed by the Second Amendment in their right to keep amd bear their private arms. Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist #29, insisted that the unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments but, where he trusted in God it would ever remain, in the hands of the people. Swords and every other terrible implement of the soldier are the birthright of an American.

The Second Amendment therefore cannot be understood merely as a permission slip for activities government already approves. It belongs to a broader constitutional structure designed to preserve a free people. The citizen is not a subject whose independence begins and ends at the pleasure of officials. Nor does the citizen surrender every fundamental claim of conscience simply because a public institution announces a contrary interpretation. If the right to arms is to remain a genuine constitutional right, the people must insist that its boundaries be determined by the Constitution itself, rather than by the changing preferences of those who hold office.

My own understanding of this principle was not formed in a law school seminar. I began learning firearms safety at eight years of age under my father’s instruction. In the summer of 1969, at Columbia Military Academy in Columbia, Tennessee, I practiced with a .22-caliber semiautomatic rifle. Later, I received further instruction in the United States Army. Those experiences taught me that firearms demand respect, discipline, and an understanding of the responsibility that accompanies their possession. They also taught me that a firearm is an instrument, and that the moral character of the person using it matters enormously. Millions of responsible Americans have similar experiences. They keep their firearms, learn to handle them properly, and understand that the freedom to possess them carries obligations as well as rights.

No clause of the Constitution can be tortured into granting Congress, the President, the states, or the District of Columbia the power to disarm the people or to control arms to the degree now demanded by those who fear a free citizenry. The flagitious attempt to abrogate this God-given right proceeds in plain sight through incremental statutes, executive orders, and judicial improvisation, all under the pretense of safety. Banning the most popular rifles in America because they resembles military weapons, or limiting the capacity of magazines, will not eliminate evil from the human heart. In 1927 Andrew Kehoe, treasurer of a school board in Bath Township, Michigan, detonated an ammonium-nitrate bomb beneath the Bath Consolidated School, killing thirty-eight children and seven adults. No rifle was required. Criminals and the deranged will always find instruments of violence; the only question is whether the decent and the law-abiding will be left defenseless against them.

Recent decades have seen presidents of both parties claim powers the Constitution never conferred. An executive order by President Trump regulating bump stocks, a White House commission proposing new controls, threats of unilateral action should Congress refuse to act under President Obama — none of these finds warrant in the text of the Constitution. The President possesses no authority to countermand or modify any amendment. Attempts to regulate firearms through administrative agencies, bypassing the legislative branch, compound the usurpation. Such measures treat the Second Amendment as a suggestion rather than a command, and treat the people as subjects rather than sovereigns.

The Supreme Court itself has at times acknowledged the individual character of the right. District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago recognized that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense of the same technological advancement and sophistication as military rifles, and that this right is incorporated against the states. Yet those decisions stopped short of restoring the original understanding that free citizens may carry the common arms of the day without prior permission from the state. Most jurisdictions still exact fees and licenses before a citizen may exercise a right the Constitution declares shall not be infringed. A state cannot impose a tax or license upon a constitutionally protected right; that principle was settled long ago. The only license a free American needs to keep and bear arms is the Constitution itself.

Those who demand new restrictions after every tragedy insist that red-flag laws, expanded background checks, and bans on semi-automatic rifles will make the public safer. They are mistaken. Such measures penalize the honest while leaving the criminal and the insane largely untouched. Restrictions upon the law-abiding favor only the lawless. Good men with firearms stop bad men with firearms. That truth is older than the Republic and more durable than any statute.

Every law-abiding citizen is well within his rights to refuse obedience to any state or federal enactment that impedes or infringes the right to keep and bear arms, regardless of what the Court may announce this December. The Constitution is the supreme law; judicial opinions are not. When five justices claim the power to redefine the meaning of “shall not be infringed,” they claim a power the people never granted. Jefferson warned of precisely this danger. The people of the states retain the authority to judge for themselves when the compact has been violated, and to interpose their authority against usurpation. Sheriffs, legislators, and citizens who take their oaths seriously are not obliged to enforce or obey measures that contradict the clear text of the Second Amendment.

The right to keep and bear arms is the right that secures all others. Without it, the rest of the Bill of Rights becomes parchment. The Founders understood that a free people must remain armed if they are to remain free. They watered the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants and recorded their determination in the second article of the Bill of Rights so that no future generation would be left in doubt. Responsible, sane owners of arms have prevented far more crime and death than have been caused by the criminal and the unhinged. The occasional atrocity committed by the deranged does not justify the disarmament of the decent. To surrender the means of self-defense and of resistance to tyranny because a small fraction of the population misuses those means is to abandon the very purpose for which the Republic was established.

One does not cease to be American in order to solve American problems. The institutions of liberty that distinguish this nation from every other were purchased at great price and are secured by the right the Second Amendment protects. When that right is treated as negotiable, all the others become negotiable as well. Americans who value ordered liberty and the rule of law must therefore oppose every new proposal that would further erode the God-given right of self-defense and of resistance to arbitrary power. No state law forbidding the common rifles of the day is constitutional; no federal law of the same character would be either. The legal philosophy that would strip law-abiding citizens of their arms because of the crimes of others is illegitimate at its root.

Take My Rifle Through a Hail of Bullets

The people may, if they choose, surrender their semi-automatic arms. As for those who still remember that they are free men and not subjects, the arms will have to be taken from our cold, dead hands. The High Priests of the Court may speak this December. Their words will not alter the text of the Constitution, nor the natural right that text was written to secure, nor the duty of every liberty-minded American to judge for himself when government has overstepped the bounds the people themselves established. Our Inalienable God-Given Rights still await the verdict.

Deny and defy the truth within them, only if you are prepared to destroy the empire of liberty that is your inheritance. Better to turn back from the Star Chamber steps, recover the plain meaning of the charter, and act as free men who know that the final judgment of their rights belongs not to nine lawyers in black robes, but to the sovereign people themselves.

The founding generation did not establish the United States so that Americans might exchange one master for another. They built a constitutional republic founded upon the proposition that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed and must remain within the limits of its delegated authority. That proposition is not a relic to be admired on Independence Day and forgotten when it becomes inconvenient. It is a continuing obligation. It requires citizens to understand that liberty survives through vigilance, that rights must be defended in public life, and that constitutional language means little if the people abandon the principles it was written to secure.

Y’all can give up your semiautomatic weapons if you’re of a mind to do so. As for me, I will never concede that government has the rightful authority to erase a constitutional liberty by decree, nor will I stop insisting that the Constitution means what it says. And should the time ever arrive, I stand prepared to defend this right with my rifle in hand and as many bullets as it takes.

October 21, 2026

~ the Author ~
Justin O. Smith Has Lived in Tennessee Off and on Most of His Adult Life, and Graduated From Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, With a B.S. And a Double Major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – Minors in Military Science and English, for What Its Worth. His Real Education Started From That Point on. Smith Is a Frequent Contributor to the Family of Kettle Moraine Publications.