> But no law needs to be followed, because the Constitution is not binding on any of us. Yeah, but most people need the artifice to justify the ideal. The truth is the constitution is all men who live free in practice. You tell them something is "legal" or "illegal" and they obey with little thought beyond "who do I appeal to in order to change it?" And the answer so often is "the law specifies who." When the reality is, these are abstractions. A man will use a constitution, any constitution, or law, on parchment or paper, and hold it up like a shield or holy writ to defend his reasoning. But then there are also those who *are* the constitution, who carry it with them in their practice and principle. So that, if you are even so much as near them, and unjustly assaulted, they will come to your aid, with force, like the law manifest. The first is the letter of the law, the other is the embodiment of the spirit. Good and bad law come from good and bad men, respectively. No good law may prevail where so few good men are prepared to do evil to protect those who abide in the law. And that is why the law does not bind. Consent can be added or withdrawn not by force of will, but by force alone, at will, and only just. Thats the small (l)aw. It binds those who don't enforce it (are subject to it). And as the law makes all citizens the final arbiter of the law ('we hold these truths to be self evident' being, not the letter, but the spirit thereof), then all citizens who act to enforce it, contravene the stipulations of bad law. tl;dr The declaration if independance and second amendment are, along with the others are nothing more than escape hatch. Every amendment being a negative liberty that binds the government, affirms, in the final sense, that 'when push comes to shove' consent or non-consent of the people trumps decree **in its entirety**. Which is why the document is binding on oath of office. Negative liberties ,or restrictions on what government can do, not on what citizens can. The writers of it properly understood that when it came time to follow the same spirit of the law, like the declaration of independance, the citizens would know--because no other political process would be sufficient. At that point the same government established would have violated its own social contract beyond repair, and whether the 'law' protected any citizen (in principle) or not, would be irrelevant. In the degenerate case of tyranny, the constitution reduces down to a statement of ideals. In short, if they were alive today, Thomas J and Washington would probably say: *While it doesn't mean the english won't hang you, you're still as free as you want to be if you seriously mean to be free*.