Right to Bear and Use Arms in Self-Defense

Monrovians - Unite!  Know your Constitutional rights and the duties they impose on you.

"Arms in the hands of individual citizens may be used at individual discretion...in private self-defense."
John Adams. Second President of the United States, A Defense of the Constitutions, volume III, paragraph  (1787-88).

"The Constitution shall never be construed to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms."
Samuel Adams, during Massachusetts' U.S. Constitution Ratification Convention (1788). 

According to Reading Revolutions, A cooperative project of the University of Maine at Farmington and the Remnant Trust:

John Adams was in London serving as a diplomat for his young country in 1787.  He wrote and published A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America in three volumes.  The American edition was published the same year in New York and Philadelphia. 

Earlier, in 1776, John Adams had been on the committee to draft the Declaration of Independence and was an early proponent of separation from England.  He describes the Declaration and his work with Jefferson in a letter to Thomas Pickering in 1888.  He gives Jefferson full credit for the draft of the Declaration and notes that the original draft contained language to abolish slavery.  Adams supported that language and regretted that Congress as a whole struck it from the document.

His strong belief in the individual rights of man was also displayed by his support for the inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the Constitution.  He had helped write the constitution for the State of Massachusetts and authored much of the Declaration of Rights for Massachusetts.  It included provisions against unreasonable search and seizure, guaranteeing freedom of religion and the press, and providing for trial by jury.  The Declaration of Rights for Massachusetts comes before the body of the Constitution of Massachusetts.  During 1787 he not only published Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America but also corresponded extensively with those who were writing the Constitution.  It must have been frustrating for him to be in England during that period.  Nonetheless, the power of his writing and the wealth of ideas explored in the “Defence” influenced the development of the Constitution. 

His letters and writings show that he thought the Bill of Rights for the United States should have preceded the Constitution, and that the principles of the Constitution should have been based on them.  After he returned from England, he made extensive contributions to what we call our "Bill of Rights", the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution.