Understanding the 2nd Amendment

“On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.”
— Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Johnson, June 12, 1823

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Every time the debate about gun control rages, there is invariably a myth that is dusted off, shined up and placed on display to be referred to by every misinformed advocate. The text of the 2nd Amendment is invoked to argue that the Founders only intended “the militia” (implied to mean an organized militia, as in something akin to the National Guard) to keep and bear arms. In actuality, this very wording proves precisely the opposite. 

But this is only evident to those who understand that words are merely tools, used to convey meaning. This is a simple concept that can be seen easily with differing languages. The word “gift” has a meaning in English, but the same word means “poison” in German. The language in which a word, its context, affects meaning. Context is determined by time as well as culture. In the U.S. in the 1950s, the word “gay” had a drastically different meaning than it does today. Without knowing this, someone watching a movie from that decade in which one character referred to another as gay would be gravely confused. Sadly, this same situation occurs when one tries to interpret the text of the 2nd Amendment with no understanding of history or its context. What emerges in this interpretation is a sort of halfway position between adhering to the text (emphasizing one portion and ignoring another) and imposing a different (more modern) interpretation on it, rendering it contrary to its actual intent and how it was understood at the time it was ratified. To understand what the Amendment really means several complimentary approaches can be used.

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 1. Common Sense. The system of government set up by the Founders was based on the political philosophy of individualism, that individual rights are sacred and the basis for society (hence our Bill of Rights, hence limits on the power of the government and limits on the power of the majority). So averse were the Founders to collectivist government that the word democracy does not appear in the Constitution once, but a variation of republic (a form of government based on individualism, with guaranteed protections of rights) does, twice. Franklin, when exiting the convention and asked what government was created, famously replied, “A Republic, if you can keep it.” Why would these men, after creating a whole structure based on a political philosophy of individual rights suddenly and for only only one critical right, shift into a collective mode of thought? The right to free speech is certainly not a collective right (groups benefit from it, but it is not limited to them). 

 The purpose of the right can further be deduced by looking at another of founding document, penned by Thomas Jefferson:

 “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness … But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Why would men have proclaimed the right and duty of a people to overthrow a tyrannical government, but at the same time deny them the means to do so. Critics of this view ask why the Constitution gave the power to “suppress insurrection” to the federal government, if it wanted the people to be able to overthrow a government. This simplistic view assumes that there cannot be both legitimate causes of revolt and illegitimate ones. It was expected that unlawful movements that did not represent the will of the whole people, like Shay’s Rebellion, would be able to put down by the government, but it was assumed that when a government crossed into tyranny, then the armed populace rising against it would consist of a much greater part of the population. The ability to suppress rebellions was added to protect the republic from domestic insurrection, but the making the government vulnerable to the people by arming them was another means of protecting the republic.

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 2. The text. “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.”

The Framers were incredibly specific and very detail-oriented in creating the Constitution. They haggled over every sentence, every word, every piece of punctuation in Constitution. In fact, the deliberate change of a comma to a semicolon in one version of the draft was an attempt at expanding the central governments power and almost changed the meaning of the document, until it was caught and corrected. With this in mind, why would the Framers grant “the people” the right to bear arms and not “the milita” if that was their intention? This point is made very forcefully in this video.

 Understanding the real meaning of the text requires a knowledge of history. At the time of the Founders, the distinction between the individual and the militia did not exist. The militia was a compulsory and universal system, not something separate from the individual. There was no distinction between the militia and the people and the concept of the militia as an actual separate entity did not exist until after the war of 1812.

This idea can be witnessed in several examples from the time:

- The first draft of the Amendment was actually worded after Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, and it began, “A well regulated militia, composed of the whole body of the people…” 

- During the debates George Mason, made this point explicitly: “Mr. Chairman, a worthy member has asked who are the militia, if they be not the people of this country, and if we are not to be protected from the fate of the Germans, Prussians, &c., by our representation? I ask, Who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except for a few public officers.”

Congress actually rejected the wording that stated “to keep and bear arms for the common defense” to ensure that the right was seen as an individual right, not simply as part of national defense.
Interestingly, this same debate was had regarding the English Bill of Rights of 1689, but in that case as well, the individual right wording won out. 

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3. Historical Context. At the time of the founding there was a tradition of individual rights to weapons. The Framers based their philosophy on a long history of English law (among many other philosophies) and in this area the right to keep and bear arms has been very present for a long period of time.

- English common law always allowed a right to keep and bear arms, and in fact doing so was REQUIRED for most of English history. 

- This right was protected in an un-named charter by Henry II in 1154. 

- The 1215 Magna Carta ensured the right of individuals to revolt against the government if their rights were not protected — this right not only implies but necessitates a right to keep and bear arms (so also with the Declaration of Independence). 

Disarming of English citizens and raising of a large standing army and tyrannical treatment of citizens by King Charles II and King James II resulted in the English Bill of Rights of 1689 which guaranteed no royal interference in the freedom of the people to have arms for their own defense. This would later be a major influence on the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and US Bill of Rights. 

This is an outstanding article highlighting this long tradition.

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 4. In Their Own Words. If the Founders intent for the right to bear arms to be an individual right for the purpose of defense against tyranny is not obvious enough at this point, statements that they and others of the time made make this clear.
* It must be noted most of the statements are in the context of a debate between a standing army and the militia, but as already discussed, the militia was viewed as the people and the argument for a militia to be armed to protect against a standing army only further demonstrates the intent was that the people be armed as protection against the government: 

 “And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.”
 — Thomas Jefferson in a letter to William S. Smith in 1787

 “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 government, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people.”
— Tench Coxe, Pennsylvania Gazette, Feb. 20, 1788 

 “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 inevitably ruined.”
— Patrick Henry, Debates 

 “…to disarm the people — that was the best and most effectual way to enslave them.”
— George Mason, Debates 

“The great object is that every man be armed…everyone who is able may have a gun.”
— Patrick Henry, Debates.

“As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.” 

— Tench Coxe, `Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to the Federal Constitution,’ Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789

 “Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate 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…”
— James Madison, Federalist Papers #46

 “The right of the people to keep and bear…arms shall not be infringed. A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the best and most natural defense of a free country…”
— James Madison, I Annals of Congress 434 [June 8, 1789]

“A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves…and include all men capable of bearing arms.”
— Richard Henry Lee, Additional Letters from the Federal Farmer (1788) 

 “The right of the people to keep and bear arms has been recognized by the General Government; but the best security of that right after all is, the military spirit, that taste for martial exercises, which has always distinguished the free citizens of these States….Such men form the best barrier to the liberties of America”
— Gazette of the United States, October 14, 1789

“The whole of the Bill (of Rights) is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals…. It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of.”
- Albert Gallatin of the New York Historical Society, October 7, 1789 

“No Free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.”
— Thomas Jefferson, Proposal Virginia Constitution

 “No kingdom can be secured otherwise than by arming the people. The possession of arms is the distinction between a freeman and a slave. He, who has nothing, and who himself belongs to another, must be defended by him, whose property he is, and needs no arms. But he, who thinks he is his own master, and has what he can call his own, ought to have arms to defend himself, and what he possesses; else he lives precariously, and at discretion.”
— James Burgh, Political Disquisitions: Or, an Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses [London, 1774-1775]

 “The people are not to be disarmed of their weapons. They are left in full possession of them.”
— Zachariah Johnson, Debates

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One may say what they will about whether citizens should or should not be allowed to possess firearms, but one thing that cannot honestly be said is that that the Framers did not intend for it and that the Constitution does not allow for it. 

 (Coincidentally the courts have consistently upheld this view as well, but that is a matter for another post)

What American Foreign Policy Was Meant To Be

“America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.  She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights.  She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own.  She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart … Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.  But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.  She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.  She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.  She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.  The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force … She might become the dictatress of the world; she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit....”

- John Quincy Adams, address to US House of Representatives, July 4th, 1821

Why The Founders Matter

"It is fashionable in these days to regard [George] Washington- and America's other Founders - as irrelevant, as dead white men, as antiquated, and as morally abhorrent because some of them owned black slaves. This attitude is a mistake for any American to take.
The Founders remain vitally relevant to the conduct of American domestic politics and foreign policy, not because they could see the impact of such future developments as transcontinental railroads, the cell phone, ballistic missiles, Social Security, and nuclear weapons. They clearly could not, and so have little value to us as soothsayers.

The Founders eternal relevance for Americans is based on their study and knowledge of human beings, of how human beings act and interact, and of the manifest imperfectibility of human beings. When the Founders met in 1787 in Philadelphia to write the American Constitution, as the brilliant professor Daniel Robinson has said, they drew on the totality of the "political life of early America [which itself] is an extended treatise on the nature of human nature..." The Founders' wisdom must remain in the forefront of American thinking not because they were demigods but because they were, by their own admission, flawed human beings who used that knowledge about themselves and others to shape a nation capable of an ongoing effort to build an equitable society, preventing the growth of tyrannical power at home, and savvy enough to survive in a world of competitive nation-states and frequent wars.

- Michael Scheuer, Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq

"Americans, even when they are proud of them, do not like their legions."

"Americans, denying from moral grounds that war can ever be a part of politics, inevitably tend to think in terms of holy war – against militarism, against fascism, against bolshevism. In the postwar age, uneasy, disliking and fearing the unholiness of Communism, they have prepared for jihad. If their leaders blow the trumpet, or if their homeland is attacked, their millions are agreed to be better dead than Red. Any kind of war short of jihad was, is, and will be unpopular with the people. Because such wars are fought with legions, and Americans, even when they are proud of them, do not like their legions. They do not like to serve in them, nor even to allow them to be what they must.

For legions have no ideological or spiritual home in the liberal society. The liberal society has no use or need for legions – as its prophets have long proclaimed.

Except that in this world are tigers.

Before 1939 the United States Army was small, but it was professional. Its tiny officers corps was parochial, but true. Its members devoted their time to the study of war, caring little what went on in the larger society around them. They were centurions, and the society around them not their concern.

When so ordered, they went to war. Spreading themselves thinner still, they commanded and trained civilians who heeded the trumpet's call. The civilians did the fighting, of course – but they did it the Army's way.

The volunteers came and went, and the Army changed not at all.

In 1861, and 1917, the Army acted upon the civilian, changing him. But in 1945 something new happened.  Suddenly, without precedent, perhaps because of changes in the emerging managerial society, professional soldiers of high rank had become genuinely popular with the public. In 1861, and in 1917, the public gave the generals small credit, talked instead of the gallant militia. Suddenly, at the end of World War II, society embraced the generals. And here it ruined them.

They had lived their lives in semi-bitter alienation from their own culture ('What's the matter, Colonel; can't you make it on the outside?') but now they were sought after, offered jobs in business, government, on college campuses.

Humanly, the generals liked the acclaim. Humanly, they wanted it to continue. And when, as usual after all our wars, there came a great civilian clamor to change all the things in the Army the civilians hadn't liked, humanly, the generals could not find it in their hearts to tell the public to go to hell.

It was perfectly understandable that large numbers of men who served didn't like the service. There was no reason why they should. They served only because there had been a dirty job that had to be done. Admittedly, the service was not perfect; no human institution having power over men can ever be. But many of the abuses the civilians complained about had come not from true professionals but from men with quickie diplomas, whose brass was much more apt to go to their heads than to those of men who had waited twenty years for leaves and eagles. In 1945, somehow confusing the plumbers with the men who pulled the chain, the public demanded that the Army be changed to conform with decent, liberal society.

The generals could have told them to go to hell and made it stick. A few heads would have rolled, a few stars would have been lost. But without acquiescence Congress could no more emasculate the Army than it could alter the nature of the State Department. It could have abolished it, or weakened it even more than it did – but it could not have changed its nature.

But the generals could not have retained their new popularity by antagonizing the public, and suddenly popularity was very important to them. Men such as Doolittle, Eisenhower, and Marshall rationalized, America, with postwar duties around the world, would need a bigger peacetime Army than ever before. Therefore, it needed to be popular with the people. And it should be made pleasant, so that more men would enlist.

In a truly liberal society, centurions have no place. For centurions, when they put on the soldier, do not retain the citizen. They are never citizens to begin with.

There was and is no danger of military domination of the nation. The Constitution gave Congress the power of life or death over the military, and they have always accepted the fact. The danger has been the other way around – the liberal society, in its heart, wants not only domination of the military, but acquiescence of the military toward the liberal view of life.

Domination and control society should have. The record of military rule, from the burnished and lazy Praetorians to the juntas of Latin America, to the attempted fiasco of the Legion Etrangere, are pages of history singularly foul in odor.

But acquiescence society may not have, if it wants an army worth a damn. By the very nature of its mission, the military must maintain a hard and illiberal view of life and the world. Society's purpose is to live; the military's is to stand ready, if need be, to die.

Soldiers are rarely fit to rule – but they must be fit to fight.

The values composing civilization and the values required to protect it are normally at war. Civilization values sophistication, but in an armed force sophistication is a millstone.

Without its tough spearmen, Hellenic culture would have had nothing to give the world. It would not have lasted long enough. When Greek culture became so sophisticated that its common men would no longer fight to the death, as at Thermopylae, but became devious and clever, a horde of Roman farm boys overran them.

The time came when the descendants of Macedonians who had slaughtered Asians till they could no longer lift their arms went pale and sick at the sight of the havoc wrought by the Roman gladius Hispanicus as it carved its way toward Hellas.

The Doolittle Board of 1945-1946 met, listened to less than half a hundred complaints, and made its recommendations.

The new legions carried the old names, displayed the old, proud colors, with their gallant battle streamers. The regimental mottoes still said things like "Can Do." In their neat, fitted uniforms and new shiny boots – there was money for these – the troops looked good. Their appearance made the generals smile.

What they lacked couldn't be seen, not until the guns sounded.

There is much to military training that seems childish, stultifying, and even brutal. But one essential part of breaking men into military life is the removal of misfits – and in the service a man is a misfit who cannot obey orders, any orders, and who cannot stand immense and searing mental and physical pressure.

For his own sake and for that of those around him, a man must be prepared for the awful, shrieking moment of truth when he realizes he is all alone on a hill ten thousand miles from home, and that he may be killed in the next second.

It was not until the summer of 1950, when the legions went forth, that the generals realized what they had agreed to, and what they had wrought.

The Old Army, outcast and alien and remote from the warm bosom of society, officer and man alike, ordered into Korea, would have gone without questioning. It would have died without counting. As on Bataan, it would not have listened for the angel's trumpet or the clarion call. It would have heard the hard sound of its own bugles, and hard-bitten, cynical, wise in bitter ways, it would have kept its eyes on its sergeants.

It would have died. It would have retreated, or surrendered, only in the last extremity. In the enemy prison camps, exhausted, sick, it would have spat upon its captors, despising them to the last. It would have died, but it might have held.

The recommendations of the so-called Doolittle Board of 1945-1946, which destroyed so much of the will – if not the actual power – of the military traditionalists, and left them bitter, and confused as to how to act, was based on experience in World War II. In that war, as in all others, millions of civilians were fitted arbitrarily into a military pattern already centuries old.

What the Doolittle Board tried to do, in small measure, was to bring the professional Army back into the new society. What it could not do, in 1946, was to gauge the future.

The military have the preponderance of fact with them as far as Korea was concerned. Korea was the kind of war that since the dawn of history was fought by professionals, by legions. It was fought by men who soon knew they had small support or sympathy at home, who could read in the papers statements by prominent men that they should be withdrawn. It was fought by men whom the Army – at its own peril – had given neither training nor indoctrination, nor the hardness and bitter pride men must have to fight a war in which they do not in their hearts believe.

The Army needed legions, but society didn't want them. It wanted citizen-soldiers.

But the sociologists are right – absolutely right – in demanding that the centurion view of life not be imposed upon America. In a holy, patriotic war – like that fought by the French in 1793, or as a general war against Communism will be – America can get a lot more mileage out of citizen-soldiers than it can from legions.

No one has suggested that perhaps there should be two sets of rules, one for the professional Army, which may have to fight in far places, without the declaration of war, and without intrinsic belief in the value of its dying, for reasons of policy, chessmen on the checkerboard of diplomacy; and one for the high-minded, enthusiastic, and idealistic young men who come aboard only when the ship is sinking.

The other answer is to give up Korea-type wars, and to surrender great-power status, and a resultant hope of order – our own decent order – in the world. But America is rich and fat and very, very noticeable in this world. It is a forlorn hope that we should be left alone.

In the first six months America suffered a near debacle because her Regular Army fighting men were the stuff of legions, but they had not been made into legionaries.

America was not more soft or more decadent than it had been twenty years earlier. It was confused, badly, on its attitudes toward war. It was still bringing up its youth to think there were no tigers, and it was still reluctant to forge them guns to shoot tigers.

Many of America's youth, in the Army, faced horror badly because they had never been told they would have to face horror, or that horror is very normal in our un-sane world. It had not been ground into them that they would have to obey their officers, even if the orders got them killed.

It has been a long, long time since American citizens have been able to take down the musket from the mantelpiece and go tiger hunting. But they still cling to the belief that they can do so, and do it well, without training.

The problem is not that Americans are soft but that they simply will not face what war is all about until they have had their teeth kicked in. They will not face the fact that the military professionals, while some have ideas about society in general that are distorted and must be watched, still know better than anyone else how a war is won. Free society cannot be oriented toward the battlefield – Sparta knew that trap – but some adjustments must be made, as the squabbling Athenians learned to their sorrow.

The sociologists and psychologists of Vienna had no answer to the Nazi bayonets, when they crashed against their doors. The soldiers of the democratic world did."


- Every line of this was cut out of T.R. Fehrenbach's 1963 book This Kind of War, and specifically from Chapter 25, entitled Proud Legions.
This is my more concise, but obviously less rich edit, with some minor rearrangements to emphasize a point.