I mean, that's an overstatement, but isn't that, it's just bizarre that gun rights would be like, okay, yeah, you, you know, we don't even know if you're carrying and that's fine.

Yeah, no, I think that's right.

You know, our friend Tim Sandefur wrote a book called The Permission Society, which articulates the exact thesis that you just suggested.

And, you know, I think two things are true.

First of all, I don't know how many gun owners there might be in the audience.

Don't feel like you have to identify yourself.

But it is a complete myth that there are like no restrictions on guns.

How did Clark Neely become a small L libertarian or an advocate of smaller government and greater individual autonomy?

He rejected the idea that a state's dignity exempted it from a lawsuit, arguing that, as Clark said,

Well, you know, Justice Wilson makes it a point that the word sovereign never appears in the Constitution, and that's not by accident that he considers that to be a significant omission.

What he means by that is the word sovereign has no place in the Constitution, because we have constituted on American soil a new conception of government, one in which the government exists for a limited set of reasons.

It is legitimate only insofar as it facilitates certain ends, which is, in effect, the protection of the unalienable rights to which the Declaration of Independence refers and that it is only legitimate insofar it has the consent of the government.

Now, of course, we know that there are challenges with actual consent because babies are born into a polity and they can't sort of decide.

But let's just step back from that and say that in this context, consent in large measure means that the residual of power is with ordinary citizens, with individuals, and not with some vaunted government official or government institution.

It's hard to underscore how new that is, right? I mean, that is a really, really new thing, a new way of thinking about government.

So here, this was a lawsuit by a citizen of a state against his own state.