INTRODUCTION
As American as Guns
"You know why there's a second amendment?
In case the government doesn't obey the first one."
- Rush Limbaugh, August 17, 1993
Advocates of the right to keep and bear arms in the United States
usually base their arguments on the Second
Amendment: "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."
But what if the Second Amendment were repealed?
Would the people's right to keep and bear arms still exist?
If we do not have a basic understanding of the nature and source
of rights in general, as did the Framers of the Constitution,
then it is near-impossible to discuss whether the people's right
to keep and bear arms exists only as a collective right, or as
an individual right; and whether it would disappear if the "well-regulated
militia" mentioned in that amendment is ruled
to be under state jurisdiction rather than the adult civilian
population at large, as it was thought to be at the time of the
amendment's passage.
The answers to both questions must rest on prior examination of
what constitutes rights and individual liberty to begin with.
In its most fundamental aspect, the concept of liberty is that
of a society organized on the basis of universal individual rights
- rights which are equally held by every individual in that society.
What do we mean by a "right"? Here's a working definition:
a right is the moral authority to do something without needing
prior permission from another to do it.
In Biblical times, it was assumed that only God has rights, and
that He grants them only to a specific chosen few. He liberated
the nation of Israel from bondage to the Egyptians
by a series of plagues imposed upon the Egyptians. Was God violating
the Egyptians' rights? Not according to the Biblical writers,
who viewed the Egyptians as merely God's property, to do with
as He will.
Later, God ordered the Israelites, under the command of Joshua,
to evict everyone from Canaan, killing every man, woman, and child
among them and take the land for themselves, as His exclusively
authorized tenants.
The Biblical writers assumed that God had the rights of a landlord
to do so, and the Canaanites had no rights to live there: only
the nation of Israel, to whom God granted an exclusive,
long-term lease.
Still later in Biblical accounts, the nation of Israel
petitioned God to have a king, so they could be like other nations.
Reluctantly, God agreed, and thus was born the concept of the
divine right of kings. The king appointed by God had an exclusive
moral authority to take actions in that society, answerable only
to God Himself. Everyone else was under the King's authority and
had no rights of their own - no rights to their own lives, property,
or freedom of action. All these were owned by the king, who dispensed
them to his favored few.
There were historical variations, of course. Often kings found
that they needed to share power with military men in order to
keep their turf - thus the birth of aristocracy. The ancient Greeks
vested much authority in military leaders, and experimented with
popular government without much success. Ancient Rome experimented
with a republican form of government, in which certain classes
of people had greater rights than others, ranging from the patricians,
to the plebeians, to slaves - even women had certain rights. Later,
when Rome became an empire, we find one of the oddest reversals
of rights being that of the Roman Emperor's right not only to
rule on earth with absolute authority over all that he conquered,
but to create new gods as well.
In any event, as history progresses, there is a tendency to disperse
rights among larger and larger groups of people. There were a
number of forces at work to produce this. One of them was the
Reformation's transfer of biblical interpretation from the Church
to the individual. Another was the greater importance of trade
making even kings and emperors dependent on private merchants
to one extent or another. Still another was the necessity of kings
requiring wide dispersal of arms to as many of their subjects
as could handle them, to discourage other kings from invading.
Ideas began percolating in the English Leveller's movement in
the 1640's which by the 18th century, largely due to John Locke's
1690 "Two Treatises on Government," started gaining
popularity among many Englishmen, particularly those living in
America: that rights are not invested by God in a single King,
but exist in every single individual.
In Europe, however, the theory of rights took a different road
- based on extreme egalitarianism - particularly in the French
revolution. Instead of rights being seized from the king and given
to the individual, it was given to new collectives of revolutionaries.
Thus the idea of revolutionary communism and revolutionary socialism
was born. The moral authority to act without permission was shifted
from the king to the governing council or party. Because this
idea granted the people a moral sense that it was proper to kill
the old kings and aristocracies and grab their lands and property,
it became popular - popular until it became evident to everyone
that all that had happened was the transfer of power from an old
aristocracy to a new one called by a different name. The new aristocracy
was just as hard to overthrow as the old ones, and it is only
well into the 20th century that there has been any success at
it.
This history lesson has a point. No matter what the institutions
are of a given society, or what names they are called, the fundamental
question is whether rights in that society are universally held
by all the people, or whether they are reserved to those with
the political power to get their own way.
"Getting your own way" can take a number of forms.
One of them is institutional politics. This can take the form
of a political party, or a political lobby, or a class of people
who are well-organized enough to require those in power to take
their desires into account. It can be the ability to convince
politicians to grant favors - sometimes by cash payoffs, sometimes
merely by a promise that you will support their next campaign
for office. Sometimes it can be something as silly as being
a popular actor or TV personality whom people are willing
to pay attention to.
But underneath all this civilized horse-trading is the question
of, when push comes to shove, who has the raw force to win the
day?
Historically, the king's rights meant nothing if his soldiers
wouldn't act on his orders, or if others could overthrow him by
force of arms.
What is true for the rights of kings is just as true for the rights
of the people. Rights are only as secure as the ability to wield
sufficient force to defend them.
In a free society which recognizes the moral authority of individuals
to act for their own good - to make decisions about their lives,
lifestyles, and property without prior permission from a king,
political party, or even their neighbors - individuals are the
sovereign, the kings. Whatever compacts such sovereigns make with
one another to keep from violating each other's boundaries only
have the moral authority which is first held by the individuals
themselves.
America is a culture historically different from any other in
the history of the human race, and still largely different from
any other elsewhere on this world. What has distinguished American
civilization from all others is the doctrine of universal individual
sovereign rights. This unique difference made the American civilization
superior to any previous or foreign civilization in the known
universe.
I carefully said "made" in the previous sentence rather
than "makes." Reactionary forces for the last century
have been working hard at eliminating those qualities that made
the American civilization unique, and America is a long way on
the road back into the quicksand of European and Asian barbarism
from which it once freed itself.
In every previous civilization, the individual was finally
the servant of the polity, whether that polity was the tribe,
the religious order, or embodied in the person of a king or emperor.
Even in such decentralized polities as existed in ancient Ireland
or Iceland, an individual pledged fealty to a king above himself,
regardless of his ability to change his mind and switch kings.
The American civilization, which was born on July 4th, 1776, utterly
rejected this doctrine for the first time in human history,
in its founding document, the Declaration
of Independence:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the
pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments
are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed, - That whenever any Form of Government
becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People
to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying
its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in
such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety
and Happiness."
In an historical instant, all previous conception of the relationship
between the individual and the polity was reversed. From then
on, each individual held sovereignty as a birthright: not a king's
claim to rule others and sit in judgment on them, but a free man's
sovereignty to determine his own destiny, rule his own life, and
dispose of his own property as he saw fit. For the first
time in human history, a polity declared itself a nation - a single
people - by an act of will rather than by an accident of geography
or history or religion or language.
It is true that the structural implementation of this doctrine
of universal individual sovereignty was decidedly flawed.
At the outset, the implementation excluded women, Africans, and
native tribes, and favored landed property owners. In practice,
rights were held only by white Protestant male property owners.
These were hangovers from the Old World way of doing things. But
the rhetoric was universalist. The power of this rhetoric of universal
rights acted as a moral goad, in the United States, first
to rebellion against the King, then later to wider and wider dispersal
of rights, until chattel slavery of Africans was abolished and
full legal rights accorded to them; property qualifications
for franchise were eliminated; and full citizenship rights were
granted to women as well.
While the principles propelled the culture to progress toward
closer and closer approximations of extending universal rights,
reactionary forces were working to destroy the concept of sovereign
rights entirely. In the twentieth century we have seen the doctrine
of universalism triumph while the doctrine of individual powers
is nearly extinguished.
The Constitution of the United States in 1787
was the first attempt in human history to forge a government
of individual sovereigns, in which the exercise of individual
powers was considered an essential check on governmental power.
The Articles of Confederation before it was not: it was merely
a confederation of states with varying degrees of individual versus
state sovereignty. From the perspective allowed by 207 years of
observation, it is clearly an imperfect attempt in that it provided
no reliable institutional mechanism, short of revolution, to enforce
punishment upon magistrates, legislators, and executives who usurped
the people's rights and powers.
But it did preserve the option of revolution as a final means
of enforcement of the people's rights and powers, and it did that
in the Second Amendment to the Constitution's
Bill of Rights, the Preamble of which declared
the Bill of Rights' purpose: "The conventions
of a number of the States having at the time of their adopting
the Constitution, expressed a desire, in order
to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers, that further
declaratory and restrictive clauses should be added ..."
The "militia" referred to in the Second
Amendment - supported by debates at the time and enabling legislation
- was the people as a whole. It was the expectation of the Constitution's
Framers that the people would train to arms and be available both
for defense against foreign enemies and as
a posse comitatus (Latin for "power of the county")
against domestic enemies. The constitutional
debates now known as the Federalist Papers,
largely written by Madison and Hamilton,
clearly distinguished the militia from both a standing
army and "select" militias. The revolutionaries
had had experience with both, courtesy of the British, and wanted
the people armed and ready as a protection against
them.
Today, 203 years after the Second Amendment
was made part of the Constitution, the right
of the people to keep and bear arms is under attack as the final
barrier to the triumph of statism's conquest of
America, but two centuries of that right's existence has left
us a living legacy from its authors. In spite of an extreme hostility
toward civilian arms from every powerful organized
institution in this country, half the homes in this country still
maintain a private arsenal, and two-thirds of Americans have said
to Louis Harris pollsters that they have no intent
of surrendering their arms, even if they are both bribed and threatened
by the law.
Gun control, so-called, is a fraud perpetrated by those who are
fundamentally opposed to the doctrine of universal individual
sovereignty: individual liberty. Its proponents are either philosophical
pacifists or statists, or both. Its stated purpose of reducing
crime and violence has never succeeded in doing either, no matter
how thoroughly it has been tried; as good a case can be made that
it disarms only the innocent and increases violent crime overall.
While the purposes for which it is proposed are dubious, its function
is clearly to deinstitutionalize, once and for all, the doctrine
of universal individual sovereignty in this country by depriving
the people of their final means of resisting incursions upon
their lives, property, and liberty: armed force.
Arms are the power of the sovereign, whether that sovereign is
one man or a billion.
If the doctrine of universal individual rights is to triumph on
this planet, "the last, best hope of earth" - the United
States of America - must preserve the power of its people to defend
the rights of its people.