As various leftists talk of repealing the Second Amendment it must be noted that removing that amendment would neither remove the right to self-defense nor the guns Americans possess for that purpose.

Those who have read documents such as the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution or books like John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, Richard M Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences, and Thomas Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed, understand that the educational system run by leftists has left America with generations of citizens who do not understand the philosophies and natural rights integral to our nation’s founding.

Moreover, generations of Americas are unaware that the rights our Founders fought to defend do not come to us from government but from God. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

Note that Jefferson sourced our rights in our Creator. His mind, exercised by reading John Locke and Oxford law professor William Blackstone, understood that rights came to us by God through nature, thus the moniker of natural rights. Such rights predate not only the United States, but also our Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights. Such rights are part and parcel to our humanity.

Because of this, a denial of such rights is inhumane.

The Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution to explicitly protect certain of these rights from government interference. By adding it, our Founders showed that the government, which lacks the authority or ability to grant rights, likewise exists without the authority to infringe upon them.

To be clear, our Founders also warned that other rights, not explicitly listed in the Bill of Rights, belong to Americans as well. These rights are also to be held inviolate. (The Ninth Amendment says, “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”)

The rights protected by the Second Amendment are among those explicitly shielded from government interference. The last four words of the amendment leave no question: “Shall not be infringed.”

Those four words affirm a simple message, really. Or perhaps we should say they serve as an enduring reminder of a message so simple yet often overlooked. Namely, that the rights protected by the Second Amendment are outside of government’s purview because they existed long before the Declaration, Constitution, or Bill of Rights were even written; before the Articles of Confederation were put in place and even before the early colonists set up shop in Plymouth or Jamestown. Yes, the rights originate at the very start of mankind and ours, as Jefferson wrote, because we were endowed with them by our Creator.

In summary, repealing the Second Amendment would not repeal the rights it protects anymore than repealing the First Amendment would repeal man’s natural, God-given inclination to worship and self-expression.

The left may take the Second Amendment, but they cannot take our right to self-defense or the guns we possess for that purpose.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.