Actor Vince Vaughn–Old School, Wedding Crashers, True Detective–told British GQ magazine that Americans ultimately have the right to bear arms in order to resist “the supreme power of a corrupt and abusive government.”
In the same sitting he explained that the right to bear arms is an individual right and that banning guns from schools is like “banning forks in an attempt to stop making people fat.”
According to British GQ, Vaughn addressed “the American right to own a gun” by saying he supports Americans having guns “in public,” not just in their homes.
Vaughn added:
We have the right to bear arms to resist the supreme power of a corrupt and abusive government. It’s not about duck hunting; it’s about the ability of the individual. It’s the same reason we have freedom of speech. It’s well known that the greatest defense against an intruder is the sound of a gun hammer being pulled back.
He then addressed gun free zones, especially gun free school zones:
All these gun shootings that have gone down in America since 1950, only one or maybe two have happened in non-gun-free zones. Take mass shootings. They’ve only happened in places that don’t allow guns. These people are sick in the head and are going to kill innocent people. They are looking to slaughter defenceless human beings. They do not want confrontation. In all of our schools it is illegal to have guns on campus, so again and again these guys go and shoot up these f***ing schools because they know there are no guns there. They are monsters killing six-year-olds.
British GQ asked Vaughn on whether he agreed with the push to arm people on school campuses in the US. Vaughn responded:
Of course. You think the politicians that run my country and your country don’t have guns in the schools their kids go to? They do. And we should be allowed the same rights. Banning guns is like banning forks in an attempt to stop making people fat.
It is important to note Vaughn’s focus on the individual nature of the right to keep and bear arms. It comes at a time when gun control groups are appealing to jurists and Democrat-controlled legislatures–in states like California–to put more constraints on carrying guns outside of the home for self-defense. They do this by arguing that the right to keep and bear arms is “collective” rather than “individual.”
Yet they are wrong and Vaughn is correct. The right to keep and bear arms and the right to free speech are of a cloth, and–like all other rights protected in the Bill of Rights–are individual in nature. To view one as collective is to view them all as collective. Which means a ban on the carrying of guns outside the home for self-defense is no different, philosophically, than a ban on free speech outside the home or a ban on the right to be “secure in [your] persons” (4th Amendment) outside the home or a ban on the right to be free from “cruel and unusual punishments” (8th Amendment) outside the home.
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.