Author: admin

After Andrew Cumo, governor of New York, recently used a rant scarily reminiscent of demagogues from past days, to ram a bill through his legislature, a bill so carefully thought out that it served to disarm most of the police in his state; now Colorado is considering seven anti-gun bills. Most of the discussion is not about what happened at Newtown, and how we might prevent its recurrence; not about the daily slaughter in Chicago, a city with among the most restrictive gun laws in the country, but about what is the best way to infringe the right of the people to keep and bear arms, and how much we can get away with if we use the emotion of the moment to drown out reason. Is there a better example of the meaning of the word “demagogue”?

The Second Amendment is part of our national Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, presented as a whole and meant to clarify important aspects of the original document. Knowing the care with which the authors crafted the Bill of Rights, we should study and can draw conclusions from exactly what they wrote. They did not wait for a bill to be passed before they read it. It is well to note that the founding documents are the foundation of this nation. More than anything else they are what define us and what bring us together. The oaths of office of public officials throughout the nation require such officials to preserve, protect, and defend our Constitution. It is not something to be taken lightly, particularly by those who have sworn a sacred oath to uphold it.

Amendment one starts out “Congress shall make no law . . .” meaning that, at the time, the prohibition was on Congress to stay completely out of matters of religion, and free speech. The various phrases work together to explain that, no, free speech cannot be limited by, for example, blasphemy laws, no matter how much believers yearn for such restrictions. And freedom of speech means in public, and with the right to spend money on high technology to spread our individual thoughts and the right to band together so to do.

Amendment two says that the right to bear Arms “shall not be infringed”. It does not limit the prohibition to Congress. The word “infringed” is about as sweeping as I can imagine. I have to assume that limits on this right will have to be very, very well justified.

Much has been made of the preamble to the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State . . .”, most notably to try to say that it limited that right to a right to join the army or perhaps the National Guard. That idea, rejected by the Supreme Court, is obviously erroneous because, while the phrase “the people” can mean many things, including, for example, the prosecution in a criminal case, or the government in official documents, in the Bill of Rights, we have only to glance at the Tenth Amendment to see that the authors of this document drew a sharp distinction between the United States, the several States and “the people”. It is the people individually who have the right to bear arms, and to keep them. And it is the people individually who make up the militia.

So the Militia referred to is not the army nor the National Guard. It is the people, and therein we find what is at stake here. Remember that at the time, there was no police force, as we now know it. As a rule people not only took care of themselves, they banded together to protect each other and the community. You can see the idea in the modern neighborhood watch, but it is much more profound. A recent court decision holds, so I have read in the New York Times (28 June 2005), that the police have no duty to protect you. Certainly in the recent desperate man hunt in California, the police made it clear that they placed a higher priority on defending each other than on defending the general population. On 9-11, when the government failed to protect the people, Todd Beamer and the passengers of Flight 94 took charge; although unarmed, they were the only American response on that day and it is likely that they saved the White House or the Capitol. We can speculate that if the accepted safety policy at the time had not been to disarm (morally) passengers on airlines, telling them to submit to hijackers with the idea that resistance would only cause needless injury, perhaps one or more of the other flights might have been stopped. In the months following, trying to take over an American air liner was vigorously discouraged by the passengers. I present these musings, not as a well-thought-out policy, but merely as rebuttal to the prevalent assumption that a disarmed population is a safer population. That question has not been settled.

I contend that the Militia referred to in the Second Amendment is the people acting as the first line of defense of their country. In that case the issue under discussion is not the number of bullets in a magazine, nor as the Vice President seemed recently to indicate what is the proper gun with which to murder a six-year-old girl, but to quote Lincoln accurately: “that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth” The current President misquoted that phrase in his Second Inaugural Address when he said “government of, by, and for the people. . .” I do not believe that this is an inconsequential error. In Lincoln’s speech, “government of the people” meant the people are governed by themselves and for themselves. Pretending that he spoke of a remote government that could be said to emanate somehow from the people, distorts Lincoln’s powerful statement that the American Revolution (not the War of Independence, but the challenge to the very order of things that this country has always represented) was the idea that the people should not be governed by their betters, or any other distinct, distant, group, but essentially by themselves.

People who love to quote Lincoln while holding that there is nothing particularly admirable, nothing exceptional about America, should note carefully that he feared that if, in 1863, the experiment failed here, it would thus vanish from the earth.

As the American revolutionaries had learned, the world was not ready for anarchy, and agreements and institutions were necessary, but they intended that as much as possible the people should be their own government, and when they needed state institutions, those institutions should be answerable to the people and not vice versa. This idea was, and remains, truly revolutionary; I would say that it is the only real political revolution of lasting value to the people of the world.

An armed populace is not necessarily a violent population. The value of respecting the right to bear arms is manifest long before we reach armed confrontation. In the first place, accepting the people’s right to bear arms, recognizes their status as sovereign, and accords them due respect. In the second place, governments are wont to treat an armed populace with more deference than one that they have successfully disarmed. In the third place, the people are the only ones who can be counted on to be present when bad things happen.

We do not honor or memorialize the dead children of Newtown or Chicago by throwing out our birthright; and stripping their brothers and sisters of the American dream. We do not make others more safe by passing laws that everyone knows would not have stopped those tragedies. If we want to honor those children, we should thoughtfully, and without prejudice, examine how we might make such occurrences less likely in the future. If, perish the thought, another troubled person should invade an elementary school, and we know that no measure of gun control, not even total confiscation, will make that impossible, we know that the President, the Vice President and the Governor will not be there. It is very likely that the police will not be there and will take some time to arrive. If we want to help those children on some unhappy future day, we can think about how we could discourage such a person from choosing a school, or even choosing such a course, and we can think about what the people who are present when it comes to pass can do to stop it. Americans should always understand that they are each first responders and the last line of defense.

In case it is not clear, there is much to consider in the wake of recent tragedies, but we should not carelessly, and without discussion, abandon what made this country unique in history and what Lincoln thought was the justification of the carnage of the Civil War.

There is a lot of noise recently about guns. It would be inaccurate to call that noise a debate for many reasons. An important reason is that the language used in the noise, and the language we have available to use, is degraded to the point that it is hard to determine what is being said. It is sad to note that, very often, speakers want to confuse rather than elucidate their listeners. I hope to clarify some of the issues at stake; it is not my intent to argue for an answer, and my reason for avoiding a personal opinion should become clear eventually.

The echoes of gunfire in Newtown, Connecticut, had not stopped reverberating, and as we can all remember; the stories being reported were still wildly inaccurate, when politicians jumped on the opportunity to grab the spotlight and further their agendas. Since they acted before anyone knew what had happened, there is little reason to suspect that they were responding to the events. Some may have thought they were, taking the well-known tack: “I know it will not help, but we must do something.” Certainly, in such a case, there is no great probability that what we do will help others, so it must be done to help ourselves. Emotion is a better tool for a demagogue than reason.

The Second Amendment is invoked to in such expostulations. But an important aspect of this lack of communication is the failure to ask, let alone answer, the question: “What does the Second Amendment mean? What right does it protect?”

That is called “begging the question”. This phrase has become popular recently with people who want to appear more erudite than they really are, and throw it around, usually in situations where it seems they mean “raise the question”, but that is precisely what it does not mean. This is more than mere whining by a grammarian. Symbolic language is what set us apart from other animals, and it is the tool we use to survive and improve our common lot in life. A dull tool is less useful than one that is well maintained, and a perverse disdain for proper language and the learning of good language and the improvement of our language will disarm us in our daily struggles to help ourselves and each other. This theme will reappear in this blog.

To beg the question means to avoid discussing the question at issue, and proceed to argue as though the point were settled in your favor. If you have not been taught this technique, you will more easily fall for the gambit.

First, the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting or “legitimate sporting purposes”. Go read it. Read the whole Constitution. Read the copious documents that were written to support and oppose it. Nothing there. Nevertheless, Americans have a right to hunt, and a right to use firearms for sport; it is just not in the Second Amendment. For that reason saying that you do not intend to infringe the right to hunt, in no way indicates that you do not intend to infringe the right to bear arms a set forth in the Second Amendment; as things stand, it rather raises the suspicion that you do.

Some people have recently begun to voice the obvious fact that the Second Amendment refers to guns that could be used to oppose a usurpative government. That is perfectly true, and remember that the people who wrote it were not thinking, any more, about King George, but rather about the very government they had just established according to the best principles they could hammer out together. It is true, but not the whole story, and for people today, some of whom cannot conceive a world outside their own comfortable existence, not the best argument. It should be noted on this score, that since the Second Amendment clearly refers to a militia, the assault rifle is probably just exactly what the delegates meant. Not that that means that we have to allow people to own fully automatic weapons, but rather that we have to argue and agree democratically why they should not. We cannot just pretend that such a thing is ridiculous.

The larger meaning of the Second Amendment may be found in its environment, both in the words around it and the culture from which it grew. It may come as a surprise to many people that the Constitution was not the result of a manufactured crisis, hatched in secret, and adopted with no time to read it, let alone debate it. Every word was discussed, every phrase scrutinized, by people who had been developing their ideas of self-government in their various colonial governments for scores of years. The Bill of Rights came about because enough people thought the Constitution lacked explicit protection of certain rights that they deemed essential to the survival of a free people to persuade the majority to correct the oversight. Hunting and sport do not rise to that level; there is something very basic at stake here and it is important to think seriously about it before throwing it away in a fit of manufactured emotion.

 

Next:  what are we overlooking by failing to understand the Bill of Rights as a whole, as more than the sum of its parts?