The Origins of the Second Amendment

Ponder the meaning and origin of these words: “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.” Though it has been criticized for poor syntax, this straightforward statement has generated millions of words in defense of, ridicule of, and opposition to the premise that people of a free State have the right to own firearms. We shall examine this statement closely.

But First: Answer these three questions:

(1) Does the New Hampshire Constitution have a similar provision?

(2) What percentage of college graduates responding to a 2019 survey believed that “Judge Judy” of the eponymous television show was serving on the U.S. Supreme Court?

(3) What percentage of college graduates responding to the 2019 survey knew that the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution are called the Bill of Rights?

Many readers of the Bill of Rights believe that it was the Constitution of the United States that established the Rights enumerated there. Not true! The second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence states emphatically that there are “self-evident Truths”, “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…” The far-sighted patriots who envisioned our government of participative democracy merely enumerated the “unalienable rights” or “natural rights” accruing to mankind. The ancient and classical civilizations of Greece and Rome recognized the philosophical concept that the People have a Right, Collectively as a Nation and Individually as Persons to bear Arms in their Defense and to counter Oppression. This concept was not found only in the Mediterranean civilizations, it was echoed in ancient China. (“When people lived in peace, these weapons were to be prepared against emergencies and to kill wild animals. If there were military affairs, then these weapons were used to set up defenses and form battle arrays.” Emperor Han, 124 BCE, responding to a petition to disarm Chinese citizens.)

The philosopher-historian, Marcus Tullius Cicero, living and writing in the final decades of the Roman Republic, expressed “Natural Rights” best:

There exists a law, not written down anywhere, but inborn in our hearts, a law which comes to us not be training or custom or reading but by derivation and absorption and adoption from nature itself; a law which has come to us not from theory but from practice, not from instruction but by natural intuition. I refer to the law which lays it down that, if our lives are endangered by plots or violence or armed robbers or enemies, any and every method of protecting ourselves is morally right.

Underlying the Second Amendment’s enumeration of the basic natural right of free People are the twin goals of collective and individual defense from violence and aggression. The Second Amendment is not about deer hunting and target shooting. The Second Amendment was not an afterthought of the men who meticulously crafted our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution and its Bill of Rights. Concepts were weighed and judged word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase, sentence-by-sentence, Article-by-Article—every word, even every punctuation mark, was debated and thoroughly examined before being incorporated into the documents that form the heart of our Republican form of Government. These twin goals given voice in the Second Amendment are the keystone, the guarantor, of all other collective and individual rights which free people enjoy as their heritage of free peoples.

We all know decent, well-meaning people who abhor the thought of the private ownership of firearms. To these people firearms are symbols of conflicting cultural values and are of little relevance in our socially fragmented and politically disintegrated mass culture, They think that whatever utility individually owned firearms may have had two hundred years ago, count for nothing in an age of nuclear weapons.

These same decent people are personally opposed to the display of pornography but recognize that attempting to prohibit it would run afoul of fundamental individual and constitutionally guaranteed rights. If a person commits a crime but the police neglected to advise the criminal of his “Miranda Rights” to remain silent before the criminal blurts out a confession, these same decent people reluctantly accept that the criminal may go free—that adherence to Constitutional Values is something that must be done if Americans are to remain a free people.

Yet, these decent, well-meaning people refuse to recognize that the rights of free people to the private ownership of firearms is even more important that the other Rights they cherish—because the maintenance of these Constitutional Rights is Guaranteed by the Second Amendment.. We have these Rights because we are a free people. The Second Amendment does not applyto the maintenance of an effective state militia. Many people wish that this were indeed the case, and innumerable law texts dismiss the Second Amendment as meaning that the right to keep and bear arms applies only to the preservation of a “well regulated militia”.

At the time our Founding Fathers composed the Bill of Rights, “militia” referred to all the People—the People we see in the First, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments. A Virginian, George Mason, refused to sign the original Constitution because it did not contain a Bill of Rights, and defined “Militia” thus: “Who are the Militia? They consist now of the whole people.”

We must never forget that we are a free people because an armed citizenry secured our Freedoms and Liberties in a struggle beginning in 1775, and lasting to the present day—and extending into the foreseeable future. No one can take away from us the Natural Rights enumerated and guaranteed in our Constitution—but by our inaction and inattention we can surely lose them. All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good citizens stand by passively—but do nothing when our Natural Rights are threatened—either by external or internal forces.

Answer (1): Yes: Article 2-a: All persons have the right to keep and bear arms in defense of themselves, their families, their property and the state. (Article 2 recognizes All men have certain natural, essential, and inherent rights…

Answer (2): Ten Percent.

Answer (3): Barely half—53 Percent.