Story highlights Cedric L. Alexander: After Orlando, we need better enforcement of Second Amendment responsibilities

Along with right to bear arms, we have constitutional obligation to serve our communities, he says

Cedric L. Alexander is a CNN law enforcement analyst and director of public safety at the DeKalb County Police Department in Georgia. He is a former national president of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives. The views expressed are his own.

(CNN) Both as a citizen and as a public safety leader, I have been reflecting, following the carnage in Orlando, on the presence and significance of guns in American society. In both roles, citizen and law enforcement, I am bound by the Constitution and its amendments, including the Second Amendment: "... the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed."

And to tell you the truth, even if I were not bound by my constitutional oath, I would never argue with a person's right to defend self and home and family and others from imminent threat to life. That is a basic human right.

Cedric L. Alexander

The right to keep and bear arms is one of many rights the Constitution enumerates and guarantees. Nobody can take those rights away from us -- not without due process of law. But what we don't talk about nearly as much as the rights are the responsibilities the Constitution also enumerates and implies. But those responsibilities are ours nonetheless.

The Second Amendment imposes such a responsibility on all of us -- one we need to more fully embrace and enforce. Of the single sentence that makes up that amendment, most people rarely quote its introductory clause: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State..." After a comma comes: "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed."

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As I wrote after the 2015 on-air shooting of TV reporter Alison Parker (age 24), her cameraman Adam Ward (age 27), and Vicki Gardner (the subject of the interview, who survived her wounds), gun control advocates had long argued that the first clause limits the second. It meant, they said, that we have the right to bear arms not as individuals but only as members of a "militia."

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