Page:State v. Buzzard.pdf/4

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when and where he chose, acknowledged no restraint until surrendered upon the institution of government, when it became subject to such regulations as might he found necessary to prevent its exercise from operating prejudicially upon the private right's of others, or to the general interests of the community. These rights are believed to be as essential to the enjoyment of well regulated liberty, and as fully guarded against infringement by the government, as the right to keep and bear arms. Their use, if subject to no legal regulation or limitation whatever, would tend to unhinge society, and most probably soon cause it either to fall back to its natural state, or seek refuge and security from the disorders and suffering incident to such licensed invasion of the rights of others, in some arbitrary or despotic form of government; while their unrestrained exercise, so far from promoting, would surely defeat every object for which the government was formed. And if the right to keep and bear arms be subject to no legal control or regulation whatever, it might, and in time to come doubtless will, be so exercised as to produce in the community disorder and anarchy.

Suppose the constitutional existence of such immunity in favor of the right to keep and bear arms as is urged by the appellee be admitted. By what legal right can a person accused of crime be disarmed? Does the simple accusation, while the law regards the accused as innocent, operate as a forfeiture of the right? If so, what law attaches to it this consequence? Persons accused of crime, upon their arrest, have constantly been divested of their arms, without the legality of the act having ever been questioned. Yet, upon the hypothesis assumed in the argument for the appellee, the act of disarming them must have been illegal, and those concerned in it trespassers, the constitution not limiting the right to such only as are free from such accusation. Nor could the argument of necessity or expediency justify one person in depriving another of the full enjoyment of a right reserved. and secured to him by the constitution. Again, the term "arms," in its most comprehensive signification, probably includes every description of weapon or thing which may be used offensively or defensively, and in the most restricted sense, includes guns or firearms of every description, as well as powder, lead, and flints, and such other, things as are necessarily used in loading and discharging them,