An on-going controversy on the American scene deals with the right of the citizenry to own and use firearms. What an honest investigation reveals is that the individual's right to own and use arms was inserted into the Bill of Rights as the Second Amendment for a very specific and serious reason, a reason which has little to do with most of the current arguments on the subject. Indeed, when the Second Amendment is mentioned, for the most part the parties to the controversy either sanction or condemn the amendment for what it essentially is not.
On one side the argument is stated in terms dealing with home or private security and the right simply to possess a gun of any sort for any private reason, from hunting to collecting. Having a gun is defined simply as a freedom, an inalienable right, as it were. But that is not exactly what the authors of our Constitution, our founding fathers, had in mind during the debates that produced the Second Amendment as an element of the Bill of Rights. For them the right to own and use arms had a more serious purpose.
On the other side, the issue is taken up in terms of collective rights of the social order for safety, the need to prevent the anti-social use of guns to kill or maim the innocent, the accidental availability of guns in the hands of children, and the often tragic results thereof. For them, the right to have a gun is equivalent to a right to kill, and they deny that men have that right. Indeed, an aspect of true freedom is held to be freedom of society from the threat of the gun. But that is a short-sighted and narrow view of the actual freedom our founders sought to attain and preserve through our Constitution and its Bill of Rights.
History of those times and of those people involved in our Revolution and search for freedom is no longer taught. Indeed, it is a rare history book in the hands of a child or college student that makes even a cursory examination of the motives and issues that produced either the Constitution or the Bill of Rights in the form that they came to have, rather than in some other form with much different content. Like so much else that current political correctness would expunge from our cultural recollections, the experience of our founders has become virtually a lost chapter of American life.
So what is the Second Amendment and how did it come to be what it is, and say what it says?
The Second Amendment, passed September 25, 1789:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Notably in that statement, the right to own and use arms is firmly connected to the idea of a militia, and the purpose of that militia. That guns have other uses and purposes is beside the point of the amendment. Here, guns in the hands of "the people" as a "right" is seen as absolutely "necessary to the security of a free State." This is why I say that the Second Amendment stemmed from much more serious reasons than one might expect based on today's arguments.
Why? Because in the experience of these men it was the militia, each man bearing his own arms, from the Minutemen on Lexington Green to the files of troops that trapped Cornwallis at Yorktown, that formed the bulk of the army that George Washington led, cajoled and inspired to achieve our independence from Great Britain.
Let our founders speak for themselves.
Patrick Henry is best known for his "Give me liberty or give me death!" oration. Once he had it he warned, "Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined. The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able may have a gun." And he spoke clearly of the militia when he said, "Three million people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us." And so it turned out to be.
Today we are more than 250 million. By far most of us possess or have access to a gun. But we no longer face a hostile sovereign in a foreign land. So what good is a militia today? For that you hear it said that the Second Amendment is outmoded, archaic, of no further value but as a shield for the National Rifle Association and prospective felons of all types to hide behind. For that the Second Amendment should be deleted from our Constitution as the source of more harm than good to the society in which we now live.
The founders had sage advice in that regard. While they may have expelled our British overlords more than two hundred years ago, the founders in their wisdom gained from the experience, looked forward with a warning.
John Adams advised, "Arms in the hands of the citizens may be used at individual discretion for the defense of the country, the overthrow of tyranny or private self-defense." What was that he said? Used for the overthrow of tyranny? But that's what they got rid of by the revolution. Now what could he be talking about that might concern us now?
Thomas Jefferson answered: "The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."
But not from our government, surely!
James Madison, in "The Influence of the State and Federal Governments Compared," 46 Federalist New York Packet, January 29, 1788, recalled the past, described his present, and peered into the future in that regard.
He wrote, "Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate (state) governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain that with this aid alone they would not be able to shake off their yokes. But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, that could collect the national will and direct the national force, and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it."
But alas! Our federal government has usurped much of the power once relegated to the states and people, despite the Tenth Amendment. We are now cut from the same centralized government cloth as the age-old tyrannies of Europe. Our militias, made over (but not truly replaced) by the National Guard, lately have become nothing less but a federal reserve force, and thus has effectively been regulated out of existence as originally conceived. And yet, as the so-called "private militias" make clear, the seminal idea of the militia and its role as protector of the people against tyranny is not dead.
Richard Henry Lee, in his Additional Letters from the Federal Farmer, written in 1788, explains: "Militias, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves and include all men capable of bearing arms. To preserve liberty it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them."
A similar sentiment was expressed by "the Pennsylvanian" in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette in 1788. There he wrote, "The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? ...Congress has no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American. The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people."
And that, friends, is what the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is all about.
Bill Bonville