Perhaps not, and I don’t want to rehash the debate about personal ownership of bombs (which most posters on that thread seemed to favor) . . . What struck me was Major Kong’s assumption, apparently shared by many posters, that “to protect [the people’s] freedom from the tyranny of government” is what the Second Amendment is for.
The phrase, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,” is distressingly ambiguous. Is the militia supposed to be necessary to defend the country from foreign enemies? Or to be a tool of the state governments to resist the federal government? Or to be a tool of the people at large to resist both the federal and state governments? That last, known as the “insurrectionary theory” of the Second Amendment, is the one Major Kong assumes is the correct interpretation – and in my experience, a lot of other pro-gun people make the same assumption. Especially those in non-state “militias.” I’m skeptical – “The Constitution is not a suicide pact” and I do not think any constitution would really make any provision for facilitating armed resistance or rebellion against the state. But I’m willing to entertain arguments to the contrary. Do any of you know a lot about the Second Amendment’s history, and the public debate on its adoption? Did any of the people who proposed or endorsed it suggest it was meant for insurrectionary purposes?
Consider the times in which the authors lived: a very large proportion of the population lived on farms or in frontier areas. In those circumstances, having a gun in the house would be almost a necessity. I have no cite available but I’d be surprised to find that less than the vast majority of US households held one or more firearms as of 1780-ish.
That being the case, why would they even consider the question of citizen’s right to keep arms. In their time, the right – the need even – to keep arms should have been self-evident. And yet they felt it was important enough to put it second in the bill of rights. To my mind, that says they had been faced at some point in the past with a government’s desire to limit that right and didn’t like it one bit.
Given that, in spite of the vague wording about “a well-regulated militia”, it sounds clear to me like the threat of armed rebellion was the intent.
To take the opposite tack for just a second. Why would a group of people, themselves the ruling class the document in question would be establishing, specifically write in an ammendment with an intent to foster the ability of the populace to violently overthrow the ruling class? IOW, I’m the king. I make a decree that all citizens are allowed to carry guns in case they someday may want to shoot the king. Does this seem likely?
I realize this is an imperfect scenario as the US government is not a monarchy, but the fact remains that those very lawmakers would have been on the receiving end of the bullets from the guns if people ever used them in the manner some are claiming the founders intended them to be kept and borne for.
Sure, but they were establishing a democracy, not a monarchy. There was already a method of removing them from power if they started getting power-hungry. Vote them out. Impeach a president, etc, etc. Why write in something intended to foster a violent uprising instead of fostering peaceful ones?
I’d imagine it was because even the best of governments can go bad. Get enough corrupt people high up in a newly-formed democracy, and violence might be the only way to fix things.
Still playing the high-minded idealist, albeit unconvincingly Sure, but a democracy is self-correcting. What are the odds of reaching a critical mass of corrupt people without an intervening election or the armed forces(which didn’t exist at the time) refusing to support them, rendering them as helpless as their opponents?
If it is a defense against tyranny, it sure seems pretty laughable today. The technological advantage that nations have over citizens with guns is like the difference between spears vs. gatling guns in Africa. And the U.S. is even further down this road than most. Our armed forces can incinerate square miles with fuel-air bombs, detect all major troop movements from space, and they’re even develop amazing new non-lethal mass pacification weapons like supersonic suns, foam, and EMP.
If there is rebelion in the U.S., the ONLY thing that makes any difference at all is which side the bulk of the armed forces/arms suppliers choose to support. A couple of militiamen with rifles won’t make any difference. It sure didn’t make any difference in Iraq that the populace was so heavily armed: tyranny often rises up with the people’s support and THEN turns on them.
Well, the actual prospects for an armed revolt in the United States under modern conditions were discussed in another recent thread, “US Army v. A bunch of gun-toting rednecks,” started by SenorBeef (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=198939[/url).
But that’s not what I’m asking about. Does anybody know about the discussions that preceded the adoption of the Second Amendment? What was in the public mind at that time? Did the people, or any of their leaders, think the amendment was necessary to keep the people in a position to revolt against the state or federal governments?
Posted by aramis:
Maybe so (although even the extent to which colonial Americans were armed is controversial – see Michael Bellesiles’ book Arming America and the many heated rebuttals it engendered from NRA supporters). However, even if the common people of that time were armed, they were armed so they could shoot animals and Indians, not so they could shoot tax collectors and police officers.
If the intent was to allow armed rebellions to occur, prior government action doesn’t seem to support that interpretation: Shay’s Rebellion (1787), though on the other hand it was in reference to this rebellion that Jefferson said “a little rebellion now and then is a good thing”. The ability of a “well regulated militia” to provide for some of the defense of the nation from foreign aggression was very useful at the time, though – with the emphasis on well regulated.
Major Kong’s claim to the contrary aside, I think the “Should bombs be legal” thread was started as a joke. Major Kong was the name of Slim Picken’s character in Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb who rides a 30 megaton bomb down on the Russkies at the end of the movie.
And yet a handful of men with boxcutters were able to launch an attack on America that has only been equaled by the Japanese Imperial Navy. Little Asian men in black pajamas with nothing but AK-47s, RPGs and home-made bombs fought the most technologically advanced army in the world to a standstill.
What’s laughable is that people still view war as two armies squaring off like football teams and going at it. Uh…ok…you bring your tanks, Apache helicopters and jets and I’ll bring my AK47s and we’ll rumble at noon. I don’t think so.
What’s also laughable is this idea of a well-armed populous being necessary to ensure its freedom. I can speak for what the Founding Fathers had in mind, but it strikes me odd that the most repressive and backward regions on the planet also happened to be ones with the most guns - Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
It occurred to me that the Whiskey Rebellion is probably as pertinent if not more so than Shays’ Rebellion, as it occurred in 1794, after the adoption of the Bill of Rights. George Washington’s Proclamation (Link) includes the following, bolding mine as it deals specifically with militia siding with rebellion:
We are discussing the United States Constitution here, Fear. We must bear in mind that the Declaration is not the Constitution and bears absolutely no relevance to its interpretation – that is, in court, you cannot cite the Declaration as an authority on any point of constitutional law. And Jefferson’s opinions are relevant only if he had a hand in drafting or campaigning for the Second Amendment. Did he? I don’t know.
The Declaration and the Constitution are different documents with very different purposes. In 1776, the Continental Congress was embarking on a radical course: rebellion against a generally recognized and duly constituted authority, the British Crown. They could justify this only by appealing to a “higher law” of “Nature and Nature’s God.” But in 1787, the delegates of the Constitutional Convention (not identical with the earlier Continental Congress although some men were members of both) were drafting a body of positive law to create a completely new government. And the Bill of Rights was not added until 1791, and was likewise a body of positive law whose relationship to any conception of “natural law” or “natural rights” is highly debatable. The point is, what seemed like good revolutionary thinking in 1776 might not have seemed like good constitutional legislation in 1791.
Posted by Razorsharp:
Yes, I know. I only ever read the first chapter or so of Arming America, and I have not researched the ensuing controversy enough even to form an opinion on whether Bellesiles’ research was in fact fraudulent – or, more importantly, whether his conclusion (that personal ownership of firearms in colonial America was much less widespread than popular culture and Hollywood have represented) is substantially true or untrue. I reserve judgment on that point; if you have information to add that could advance this debate on the purpose of the Second Amendment, it would of course be appreciated. I merely thought it appropriate to point out that we should not simply assume, for purposes of this debate, that most colonial or post-Independence white male Americans owned firearms, because the question has been controversial – and, I am sure, remains controversial.
Posted by Dissonance:
Once again, Washington’s opinion on the matter does not settle the question of the intention of the Second Amendment. I don’t even know whether Washington approved of the Second Amendment. I’m sure he didn’t write it. The Federalist Papers (I forget which one) argues against the very idea of adding a bill of rights to the Constitution, on the grounds that a complete enumeration of a person’s ethical rights would be impossible, and a definitive enumeration of constitutional rights would imply that the government has the legitimate authority to infringe on any rights not so enumerated. Washington, although he made a point of holding himself above “faction,” appears in retrospect to have been more a Federalist than anything else. The Bill of Rights, on the other hand, was (I think) proposed by the same suspicious faction that later evolved into Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans. As I noted above, that does not mean that Jefferson’s opinion should be taken as definitive either. We need to focus on the actual climate of debate that surrounded the proposal and adoption of the Bill of Rights, and the Second Amendment in particular.