The Intent of the Framers of the Constitution in Regards to the Right to Keep and Bear Arms – the Second Amendment.

By Jeff Crook

Much is made these days of the intention of the framers of the Constitution in regards to the Second Amendment. There are some who hold that the Founding Fathers only made provisions for the right of the individual to keep and bear arms in order to maintain a well-regulated militia, because, well, frankly, that’s what it says. And there are many who argue at length about what constitutes a militia in the modern context. Obviously, in the late 18^th century, the militia was made up of individual citizens who were called to arms in order to defend the community – not unlike the modern National Guard. In those days, the individual members of the militia were required to provide and maintain their own firearms. Thus the provision in the Second Amendment.

The only problem with this argument is that you don’t need an amendment to require people to maintain a militia. The intent of the Bill of Rights, as a whole, is to limit the power of the federal government. "Congress shall make no law…" Remember that phrase? This is the problem with many of the later amendments and proposed amendments, such as the flag burning amendment so recently in vogue among red-blooded patriots. If anything, there ought to be an amendment that says Congress shall make no law preventing the right of the individual to burn the flag of the United States. That’s what the Bill of Rights was for – to prevent Congress from passing laws that infringe on those rights which the framers of the Constitution believed were vital to the success of their fledgling democracy.

I have also read arguments that the framers of the Constitution never conceived of the deadly capabilities of the modern firearm, that they were mostly concerned with muskets and pistols. This is simply not true. These were men of the world, many of them inventors and scientists (Franklin, Jefferson) and seasoned warriors (George Washington). They had seen in their own lifetimes the rapid pace of weapons development, and they knew without a doubt that weapons would continue to evolve and become ever more deadly. Yet, they didn’t word the amendment ‘the right to keep and bear muskets.’ We should not assume that they were idiots. The belief that everything that could be invented had already been invented didn’t come into fashion until the end of the following century.

Gun control advocates also maintain that this is a different world than the one the framers of the Constitution knew. Yet these men knew that the world would not stop evolving. They lived in momentous times and they knew that things would continue to ‘progress.’ That’s why, when they wrote the Constitution, they drew upon all their wisdom to create a living document, one that would speak for the ages to come, one filled with universal truths that would never change – freedom, liberty, and tyranny. They saw it as their job to create a government that could never become a tyranny. That is why they fought the War of Independence, so that they could make just such a government (see the Declaration of Independence). The entire Constitution, with all its provisions for checks and balances of power, was written to limit the ability of any one section of government from holding tyrannical power over another section of government, or over the citizens it was meant to govern.

Gun advocates most often cite their need to protect themselves from criminals when arguing against gun control. But the one argument that even law-abiding gun advocates are sometimes reluctant to argue is the very one that the framers of the Constitution intended. That’s because it is also a pet argument of radical white-supremacist militia groups – that the right to keep and bear arms is granted so that we may defend ourselves from our own government. Well, even an idiot and a fool can be right some of the time. Because that is exactly what the Founding Fathers intended. We see this in their own words:

So we see that these men provided for the right to keep and bear arms both to guarantee the ability of the individual to defend himself from criminals, and to maintain the ability of the private citizen to hold his government in check, as a last resort. These men were revolutionaries – they had just completed a successful armed revolt against an imperial power. They knew that, without the individual’s access to modern (for that day) firearms, their revolt could never have survived its first days. And they also knew that it is human nature for even the most noble government to eventually decline into tyranny if not kept in careful check. All one needs is to look at Zimbabwe and other modern nations who have shaken off imperial powers to see that this is true. Without the basic freedoms guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, the people cannot make sure that their government will not take advantage of them. The cornerstone of these rights is the firearm, for without it, the government has nothing to fear from the citizens it governs. And when government is not afraid is when tyranny appears. This country is the world’s oldest democracy, not because our elected officials have an innate sense of fair play and moral obligation to do what is right. There have been many, many politicians who, if they could have abolished the electoral system and remained in power forever, even in defiance of the people, they would have, without a second thought. What gives them second thought is that the people are armed.

When we are no longer armed, we will no longer be free. All it will take is one national crisis for a president or Congress to invoke emergency powers, and you will see that those powers will never be revoked. For if the government doesn’t conduct elections, how will you vote someone out of office? And if you cannot rise up in arms, you won’t be able to restore free and fair elections.

And that, my fellow Americans, as they say, will be that.

I encourage you to join the National Rifle Association. This is the one group actively working to protect your Second Amendment rights. I recently joined and look forward to a long and healthy dialogue with this organization. This website is my first attempt at such a dialogue.

Because the NRA, though they fight for your Second Amendment rights, also supports policies and politicians that are not overly concerned with other forms of liberty. The radical right wing of the Republican party is nearly as suffocating and destructive of individual rights and the most basic tenets of the Constitution as the radical left wing of the Democratic party. Both would gladly limit your speech and what you can read or write, dominate the airwaves with their own propaganda, and establish a government based on one religious faith to the exclusion of all others (secular humanism for the left, fundamental Protestant Christianity on the right). The NRA is seen as a lunatic asylum by many intelligent people because of its overall stance and support of far-right ideology.

The right to keep and bear arms is not a principle belonging exclusively to the far right. It is my intention and goal to reintroduce common sense into the discussion of the Second Amendment, and the best way to do this is to work from the inside. At its core, the NRA is right. It is the loonies in the NRA whose antics force intelligent people to lump we who favor reasonable gun ownership rights in with the Klan members. That’s why television shows like ER and Law and Order always portray gun owners as nut cases.

It’s time for reasonable people to take over the discussion and the ways in which the NRA voices our concerns in Washington. It is time we stopped supporting dangerous politicians like Tom Delay and Bob Barr and George W. Bush simply because they support our stance on the Second Amendment. With friends like these guys, who needs enemas? Why should I have to trade separation of church and state for the right to keep and bear arms? As a citizen of this country, I am entitled to both, because that is what the Constitution guarantees. We can’t only take from the Constitution the parts we like and discard the parts that make our lives difficult. The Constitution allows one person to burn the flag so that another person will be able to print an article questioning the motives of certain left-wing politicians. It prevents a school from leading children in prayer in order to prevent that school from forcing children to pray. The slope into tyranny is very slippery, and without the checks we currently enjoy, government will always, without fail, slide down that slope. There has never been one government in human history that hasn’t. That’s what the framers of the Constitution knew, and that’s why they included the Bill of Rights – to prevent tyranny.

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