If ever there were a case-in-point to show the importance of the Second Amendment, it is found in watching Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Friday announcement of a ban on 1,500 different firearms.

Gone, just like that. Outlawed, with the swipe of a pen.

Moreover, in the lead-up to the ban, the Globe and Mail reported that the new prohibitions could be implemented without any legislation. Rather, all that was necessary was a cabinet decision called an “order-in-council.”

One day the guns are legal, the next they are prohibited and those who own them are tasked with handing them over to police or else.

Of course, the government, in its benevolence, gives the owners a two-year grace period for compliance. But other than that, 1,500 different firearms are banned by fiat.

NOTE—Canada does not have a Second Amendment. Canadians cannot rally and point to “Shall not be infringed” or “Necessary to the security of a free state” or “The right of the people to keep and bear arms.” In fact, the University of Sydney’s GunPolicy.org observes, “In Canada, the right to private gun ownership is not guaranteed by law.”

In other words, gun ownership in Canada is a privilege, not a right.

In the United States, private gun ownership is just the opposite–a right rather than a privilege. And as with all rights, it flows from God rather than government.

Never forget Thomas Jefferson’s words 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, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Jefferson did not say we are endowed by our senators or House members, or by our president or judicial system, and he most certainly did not say we are endowed by popular vote. Rather, he clearly noted that it was our “Creator” who endowed us “with certain unalienable Rights.”

The outworking of this is that our rights are fixed; they are without change just as their source, our Creator, is without change. The freedoms of religion, the press, and assembling are as relevant and real now as they were in 1776. And the same is true for the private property rights and rights to personal security protected by the Third and Fourth Amendments.

The right to self-defense, which includes defending ourselves from our own government, and the right to possess the means to that defense, are still as real and relevant now as they were when the Second Amendment was ratified on December 15, 1791.

We must treasure this aspect of our American heritage; we must treasure and defend it as well. For if we allow the Second Amendment to be mooted, whether by liberal brainwashing, judicial activism, and/or numerous, successive gun controls, we run the risk of opening the door to a paradigm clearly on display in Canada; a paradigm in which the right to keep and bear arms is reduced to the privilege of perhaps taking possession of one of the guns that the government approves for ownership at this time.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News 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 at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.