Almost. The constitution enumerates certain rights that are specifically off limits to the government to give them extra emphasis - the Bill of Rights , which a

Almost. The constitution enumerates certain rights that are specifically off limits to the government to give them extra emphasis - the Bill of Rights , which are the first 10 amendments to the constitution. The 2nd, of course is the right to bear arms. An interesting side note is that there was a debate as to whether or not to even include the bill of rights lest future leaders attempt to nitpick their language and twist them into restrictions of the people. Or still worse, that they would be perceived as the only rights protected by the constitution. Never were they intended to be justification for restriction of the people. But back to the 2nd Amendment. The purpose of the Amendment is steeped in American and Anglo culture and history. This is the best summary I know of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_... The purpose of the amendment is quite certainly military in nature, and comes from a distrust of centralized government and a dangerous world in general. The authors wanted to make it totally crystal clear that the government could not subvert the people's obvious right to arm themselves and form military units, aka "militias". The nature of the threat to which those militias could respond was pretty much anything - the security of the state. The federalist papers offer context here. So yes, there is a constitutional basis for all this. But more than that it is a deeply ingrained part of American history and culture. People like to throw around the power of lobbyists, but that's not really it. The American people largely believe at a fundamental level that access to weapons is a strong and necessary counter to the existence of armed units within the government and elsewhere. The power of the gun lobby flows from that, not the other way around.