The Second Amendment
"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."
(American Constitution Second Amendment)
American liberals have a problem. They wish to remove the
constitutional right to bear arms from the American people.
Their problem is the Second Amendment. To honestly achieve
their aim they would have to amend the Constitution. But
such amendments are difficult going on impossible.
To initiate amendments, either two thirds of both houses of
Congress must vote for them or two thirds of the State
legislatures must call for a convention for proposing
amendments. That is just the proposal process. This is
followed by acceptance by the individual States. In the
former case, three quarters of the States must ratify the
amendment individually: in the latter three quarters of the
convention must vote for the amendment.
Those are stringent terms to meet in any political system,
but particularly so in a state as vast and diverse as the USA
and with such a strong tradition of regional government. Add
to those structural difficulties the existence of widespread
gun ownership and powerful lobbies such as the National
Rifle Association and the mountain becomes practically
insurmountable by honest means. So what does the liberal do?
What he always does when he wants to ban something which is
permitted by the Constitution: he pretends that the
Constitution does not mean what it manifestly says.
In the case of the Second Amendment the attack takes the form
of pretending that the Amendment was merely meant to provide
for a militia rather than affirming and protecting the right
of people to arm themselves individually. Happily, there is
plenty of ammunition with which to shoot down this claim: in
the Constitution itself, in the historical circumstances in
which the Constitution and Amendment were drafted, in the
very logic of a militia.
The claim that the amendment is simply to safeguard the right
of America's military forces to keep and bear arms is
self-evidently absurd. If true all the amendment would mean
is that the federal government could not disarm the militia
soldiers who represented the majority of its armed forces. It
would be practically a redundant clause.
The fact that the Amendment states that the right is not
merely to bear but to keep arms might be thought by most
honest folk to be a pretty clear indication that the private
ownership of weapons was what the framers of the Amendment
had in mind. Moreover, what would be the point of the
Amendment if it was not to confer such a right to the
individual? Any other permission to keep and bear arms must
of necessity be dependent upon permission from those with
political power and authority. It would thus again be a
futile and redundant clause. It is noteworthy that nowhere
in the Constitution, amended or otherwise, is any instruction
on the exercise of such state power given or hinted at.
When judging the intent of the framers of the Constitution
and the Bill of Rights (which contains the Second Amendment)
it is necessary to know the general social and intellectual
backcloth against which they worked. They were heir to the
English tradition of liberty and government by consent
rather than pure tyranny. The Americans who rose against the
England of King George 111 did so because they considered
themselves part of the tradition of English liberty. In
seeking independence, they were not repudiating that
tradition but in their own minds returning to what they
imagined was the true path of English liberty which had
become corrupted in England. It is against this ancient
English tradition that the Constitution and the Bill of
Rights must be set.
What does the unamended Constitution of 1787 say about the
protection of the newly formed United States? Section 8 of
Article 1 grants to Congress the right:
To raise and support Armies, but no appropriation
of Money for that Use shall be for a longer term
than two years.
"To provide and maintain a Navy.
"To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of
the land and naval Forces.
"To provide for calling forth the Militia to
execute the laws of the Union, suppress
Insurrections and repel Invasions.
"To provide for organising, arming and disciplining
the Militia, and for governing such part of them as
may be employed in the Service of the United
States, reserving to the States respectively, the
Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of
training the Militia according to the discipline
prescribed by Congress.
The first point to note is that the Army and the militias are
clearly distinguished as separate entities. The second is the
time limit on the power to raise money for armies. This is
highly significant. There was a very long tradition in
England of professional standing armies being heartily
mistrusted as the tool of despots. It was the attempt to
institute a standing army of thirty thousand men which was
one of the main reasons why King James 11 was overthrown in
1688. Armies were raised for wars, but in peacetime militias
were the order of the day. Indeed, until the first world war
England never had a great standing army. (The English
tradition is also echoed in the absence of any time
restriction placed on the funding of a navy by the Founding
Fathers. The English never feared a strong navy as such
because it could not be used against them).
With this English mistrust of standing armies and reliance on
militias went a tradition of not merely allowing weapons to
be generally held, but of such a practice being positively
encouraged to ensure the defence of the country. Feudal
military obligation was in fact built on the private
provision not merely of men but of arms and equipment. In
late medieval times statutes were enacted to encourage long
bow practice. The Spanish Armada which attempted to invade
England in 1588 was repulsed by a mixed English fleet of
private and Royal ships.
Perhaps the strongest single circumstantial reason for
dismissing the liberal's interpretation of the Second
Amendment are the well attested motives for those promoting
the Bill of Rights. Those who pushed for the first ten
Amendments did so because they believed that the rights and
liberties of the individual were not guarded explicitly
enough by the original Constitution. Thus ,if we are to
believe the liberal, we must accept the truly fantastic
explanation that in the case of the Second Amendment the
protection of individual liberty was utterly cast aside
without reason, public acknowledgement or, most
compellingly, any contemporary comment, adverse or otherwise.
There is also a question of simple practicality. When the
Amendment was passed (December 1791), the infant federal
government simply did not have the means to finance the
arming of militias. Thus, they can only have envisaged
private arms being put to the service of the state, a
tradition which as previously mentioned had a long history in
both England and the Thirteen Colonies. Moreover, subsequent
history bore this out, for the greater number of troops
employed by the American Union in its wars against Britain
and Mexico in the first half of the 19th century came from
militias. In an age of minimal government, the Second
Amendment underpinned the whole scheme of national defence.
Does the Second Amendment allow for any government
abridgement of the right to keep and bear arms? It might just
be possible to sustain an argument that a register of guns
would not breach the Second Amendment provided there was no
restriction on the right to own and bear weapons, that is no
person could be denied the right either to appear on the
register or bear arms. But even here it could be argued with
some force that the registration of weapons - particularly if
it required complicated bureaucratic procedures - was an
interference with the general right to bear arms. Moreover,
if a right is general and absolute, it is by no means clear
how any procedure initiated by and insisted upon by the
state could be legitimate because by definition there can be
no legitimate restriction of the right.
Americans produce a multitude of reasons for retaining their
guns. They argue on the grounds of personal liberty. They
argue on the grounds of deterring crime. They argue on the
grounds of personal protection. They argue on a dozen and one
grounds. This to my mind is a mistake. Good causes do not
need to be bolstered by a battery of arguments. Good causes
need but one argument. The only necessary argument for
private gun ownership is in the Second Amendment: "A well
regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free
state, the right of the people to bear arms shall not be
infringed." The key words here are "a free state". That
phrase cannot mean solely to maintain the state in its
independence from other states, because that could as well
apply to a dictatorship as well as a democracy. In the
context of the reasons for the American War of Independence
"a free state" must also mean the maintenance of the
freedom of the citizens from the oppressive power of the
state. That after all was what the whole breach with England
was about. Moreover, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights
are written in a manner which actively extols the individual
over the state, viz: "We the people of the United States in
Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure
domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence,
promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of
Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and
establish this Constitution for the United States of
America." (preamble to the Constitution).
The general motivation for demanding gun control is not the
saving of lives. (Its only effect in England has been to
leave guns predominately in the hands of criminals and the
state). Liberals wish to remove the general right of gun
ownership in America for the same reason that they wish to
interfere with peoples' lives generally: they are natural
authoritarians. They know that their philosophy (such as it
is) conflicts utterly with human nature and are thus driven
to suppress any resistance or dissent through the
intimidation of political correctness and the practical
control of public life. The disarming of the American people
is part of this oppressive strategy.
The desire to restrict the holding of arms has always come
from those who wished to not only monopolise power but to do
so on their own terms. When the crossbow was invented, the
medieval nobility attempted to ban it because it reduced the
effectiveness of the armoured and mounted knight. Failing in
that, they attempted to restrict, with some success, its
ownership to people they could control. The Samurai in Japan
enforced ruthlessly their rule that only Samurai should carry
swords. When the demobbed conscripts of British Army returned
to Britain after the First World War, the British government
passed the first serious laws regulating gun ownership not
because they feared that the British would begin to murder
one another in great numbers but because they feared Red
revolution.
If Americans wish to retain what is left of their freedom,
they will do well to keep the Second Amendment intact. This
means not merely retaining the status quo, but the mounting
of legal challenges to every restriction on the holding and
bearing of arms in the United States. The plain and hideously
inescapable fact is that every attempt to restrict both gun
ownership (or indeed any other weapon) and the bearing of
arms made since the inauguration of the United States has
been illegal. That applies whether or not the interference
with the Constitutional right was undertaken at the federal
or the state level. I suggest that legal action should
consist not merely of Constitutional challenges, but civil
actions for damages against the federal and appropriate state
governments by those actively and personally denied the right
to bear arms.
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