If these thoughtful men were around today, would they still be keeping slaves?
If these intelligent men were still around, would they still restrict women from owning property and voting?
If these educated men were around today, would they still constrain all real power to white male land owners?
Those intelligent, educated, thoughtful men were for the most part dead wrong on some pretty basic things. At best, they were not very enlightened. I mean, what would they have thought of same sex marriage? It didn’t even come up back in the day for good reasons.
We can all agree that these intelligent, educated, thoughtful men got a bunch of things wrong. It has been asked by many people, including myself, to Christian apologetics: How can we trust the Bible as an authority on ethics, morality and social justice when it got the easiest question of them all - slavery - completely wrong?
The same question could be asked of our founding fathers.
But guns weren’t a moral issue then. Owning a firearm in the 1770s meant owning a very different weapon used under very different circumstances and in very different communities.
That said, it’s not at all unfair to say that today, it is a moral and ethical issue.
And all of this does beg the question: If these intelligent, educated, thoughtful men were around today, and they saw the power of modern weaponry, the modern landscape where overthrowing the government is a concern only to the lunatic fringe of Montana militiamen or would-be assassins, and most importantly, how families and whole communities were being torn apart by gun violence in epidemic proportions, would they rethink the second amendment?
It’s not a shock that many of the intelligent, educated, thoughtful men of today think that maybe they would.