Dear Editor, American Handgunner

Contrary to Alan Korwin, [American Handgunner, July/August 2020] Thomas Jefferson got it right. When I taught government, I explained to students the Declaration represented the accumulated political and religious wisdom and philosophy relevant to the American cause. It was a religious, not secular Libertarian document. For centuries, monarchs and emperors had employed Romans 13: 1-2 as justification for the notion of an unquestioned Divine Right to rule. Through the Declaration, the Founding Fathers established the principle rights are G-d-given, rather than privileges dependent on royal prerogatives. Rights are inalienable due to their divine origin and not dependent on one’s title or the force he commands. No people before had established their own government instead of the other way around. It should be common sense the Founders knew rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were not extant. Inalienable rights are those which government cannot separate from people. As long as one person still draws breath, these rights exist. By declaring rights inalienable, Jefferson established the ultimate goal for which nations should strive. In naming those rights, he established a template by which Americans specifically, and nations as a whole, could judge their progress toward that goal. Jefferson knew future generations would hold the Declaration up to determine their progress on that journey. Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “got it” when, in 1963, he declared at the Lincoln Memorial, people of color had come to collect on the Declaration’s promissory note of inalienable rights. It is too bad Alan Korwin doesn’t get it.

Yitzhak Goldstein