Go even further back, if this is all about the re-unification of Jerusalem in 1967 or the state of Israel in 1948, then why the Hevron massacre of 1929? The Haganah showed up in Hevron and told the residents they had knowledge that there would be an attack. Amin al-Husseini, the Mufti of Jerusalem, and good buddy of Hitler was inciting the riots. The citizens of Hevron turned down the protection protesting that they had lived in peace with their Arab neighbors for centuries. True, they had. However, that had been without incitement. They were afraid if the Haganah showed up it would “inflame” the situation and make it worse. Well, we know how that turned out. The British, who had control neither intervened to stop it, and in some cases, assisted the arabs in the slaughter.
Some things don’t change. Or over time, they change and begin to look like they have in the past. Some of that could have been written today. Left wing mayors saying they won’t take help from the federal government to stop peaceful rioters from destroying businesses, hopes, dreams and lives of taxpaying citizens. But they do want the federal dollars. As it’s been said many times, we are our own first responders. I believe that one to be more true than “You don’t need a gun, you can just call the police” which has also been said many times. Mostly by the people trying to disarm U.S. and also defund the police.
As we watch our country being ripped by Marxists products of the massive amount of liberals in the public education system and lack of actual teachers some things are becoming painfully apparent. You can’t always call the police. In some of my other columns recently I linked stories of a terrified driver with her child who was being stopped by peaceful rioters and called 9-1-1 only to be told it was a city sanctioned event and the police wouldn’t respond and she could complain to the city council. Another woman drove through the peaceful rioters who were outraged. They felt entitled to take over the streets and disrupt the lives and traffic patterns of law abiding citizens.
What is also becoming clear is that the law-enforcement that was meant to be the main institution of maintaining order and keeping a civil society civil is becoming unable to do so. They are under attack, often physically, from the peaceful rioters and leftist politicians who, more often than not, side with the peaceful rioters rather than the law-abiding citizens who pay the taxes, own the businesses and are just trying to go about their lives. They often leave their own officers out to dry as well. Those that support the police may well be abandoned by the very police they are trying to help. Recently Michelle Malkin and others at a Back The Blue rally were attacked by the peaceful rioters from antifa and black lives matter in Denver. And I mean physically attacked. The police were present, and they immediately did…..nothing. They were under a stand down order from Police Chief Pazen. Just like in 2016 when conservatives were often attacked physically during rallies and prayer meetings and the leftist police chiefs told officers to stand down and let it happen. And being “Good Germans” they allowed law-abiding citizens to be attacked and beaten by mobs.
Kelly also spoke about the current New York policy requiring officers to stand down as a de-escalation measure, a policy with which he disagrees. He noted that the anti-crime units which the city once had were effective in reducing crime. Now, he says, more people are willing to challenge the police, which puts the most vulnerable faith group, the Jewish community, at high risk.
But as Yuri talked about in his video the left does eat their own useful idiots. And some of these people are seeing that happen. The McCloskey case in St. Louis is an example, the peaceful rioters who broke into their neighborhood and threatened them and their dog were attempting to find Demoncratic Mayor Lyda Krewson’s home so they could threaten her into resigning. Seattle Police Chief Carmen Best has been in the unenviable position of being Seattle’s Police Chief. And they have a liberal mayor and city council who have decided social justice is more important to them than law abiding tax payers. Chief Best sent this letter to residents.
Please also know that the City Council Ordinance 119805 Crowd Control Tool goes into effect this weekend on Sunday, July 26, 2020. This ordinance bans Seattle Police officers the use of less lethal tools, including pepper spray that is commonly used to disperse crowds that have turned violent. Simply put, the legislation gives officers NO ability to safely intercede to preserve property in the midst of a large, violent crowd.
It is important to bring to your attention that yesterday, I sent the City Council a letter ensuring them that as the Chief of Police, I have done my due diligence of informing them numerous times of the foreseeable impact of this ordinance on upcoming events. The letter is attached for your reference.
For these reasons, Seattle Police will have an adjusted deployment in response to any demonstrations this weekend – as I will never ask our officers to risk their personal safety to protect property without the tools to do so in a safe way.
It is becoming quite clear that there is a developing void and law-abiding citizens are being left out to dry.
And so citizens have been stepping into that void. It was armed citizens, her neighbors, that stopped antifa and blm from showing up at Chief Best’s house. This seems to be their newest tactic. Show up at politician and now officer’s homes.
Protestors on their way to harass the Seattle police chief @carmenbest at her home, encountered locals who were not in the mood to host protests in their neighborhood.
Protestor: “We are peaceful! You pointed a gun at my face!”
I thought the plaintive “ We are looking for a friend” was a bit over the top. Sure, a group of thugs goes hunting for the Police Chief’s house. I’m sure they are all besties.
I’d debate the “potential” as they had already defaced the Alamo Cenotaph.
One thing that kind of stands out is in many of these type of stories the media breathlessly (it seems to me) chronicles that the people that don’t want their town destroyed are white and they describe their clothing as if they are longing to be fashion reporters. Fashion reporters that have never been around military much and don’t really think too much of them.
So why do they need to be armed you ask? Portland: Women Defending Police Precinct Attacked by Antifa Terrorists Because two frail little old ladies, one of them on a walker attempted to stop the peaceful rioters from defacing the police precinct and one attempted to put out a fire that the rioters had started next to the building. They were both attacked and threatened. That’s what it looks like in a society where the weaker have no one to protect them, and the rule of law.
“The American people, Lee wrote Samuel Adams, had not fought the British only to be ‘brought under despotic rule under the notion of strong government, or in the form of elective despotism; Chains still being chains, whether made of gold or iron’. The “Corrupting nature of power’ made it essential for public safety that ‘power not requisite should not be given’ to government and ‘that necessary powers should be carefully guarded”.1
Richard Henry Lee
“America is a system of taxation to which a government is attached.”2
Part 1 covered an article by conservative journalist Daniel McCarthy wherein he rebutted liberal solutions to Public Mass Shootings (PMS). He hit the right chords at first but then notes turned sour. McCarthy tied private ownership of firearms to membership in a militia under strict State control. He contends the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776) “inspired” the Second Amendment. He adds a reason to keep arms is to maintain a well-regulated militia “under strict subordination to, and governed by the civil power” dismissing as “right-wing folklore” claims the Amendment’s authors in any way intended it to support citizen uprisings against a tyrannical government i.e. Shay’s Rebellion.3 Stephen King writes in Danse Macabre that Bram Stoker’s Dracula inspired his novel Salem’s Lot, an homage to Stoker. However, King’s novel is wholly his own and the narrative quite different.4 McCarthy’s problems are more serious than errant extrapolation.
Article III of the Virginia Declaration of Rights written by George Mason reads, “That a well regulated militia, composed of the Body of the People, trained to Arms, is the proper, natural, and safe Defence of a free State; that standing Armies, in Time of Peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty” [emphasis and spelling in the original].5 Regardless of inspiration, Virginia’s Declaration of Rights is not the Second Amendment. In addition, local autonomous militias pre-existed declarations and constitutions.
Colonial survival, especially in outlying villages and settlements, required individuals possess and be skilled with arms long before the Revolution. For the most part, Americans did not acquire skill at arms serving in militias or in standing armies.5 No army or police force existed to protect colonists from criminals or against attacks by the French and their Indian allies. When British Royal Governors began seizing the firearms and ammunition of colonials, Virginians George Washington, and George Mason formed the Fairfax County Militia Association. It was a ground up not top down unit. Enlistment was voluntary. Each member had to supply his own weapons and ammunition and they chose officers through election.6
Mason shed light in 1775 on the meaning of militia noting a “well regulated militia” was comprised of “Gentleman, Freeholders, and other Freeman”. Its purpose was to “protect ‘our ancient Laws & Liberty’ from a standing army” [emphasis and spelling in the original].7 For Mason and many of his contemporaries, a standing army, whether British or American, national or state, was a threat to liberty. Mason wrote, “All men are by nature born equally free and independent”. The greatest threat to liberty was government in all its forms. He defined a “well-regulated” militia as the whole of the people, possessed of arms, who formed and organized themselves into “independent companies” prepared to “resist the standing army of a despotic state”.8 Founding Father Richard Henry Lee observed a militia could only consist of the people as a whole. If it was organized and maintained in continual service, it would constitute a “select militia” no different from a standing army in peacetime a practice that the Founders, for the most part, abhorred.9
Americans and political leaders universally viewed the individual right to keep and bear arms, and the right of States to call up a militia, as two separate issues neither dependent on the other. Beyond the Founder’s hope that Americans would maintain their precision with arms, the right to keep and bear arms had/has nothing to do with membership in a militia. If states called on the people to form a militia, prior experience with arms would lessen the time to train them.10 Had the Founders known future Americans would manufacture confusion concerning the Second Amendment’s meaning, they might have bifurcated it into two separate amendments. Why didn’t they? At the time State delegates ratified and then amended the Constitution, there was no confusion with respect to the right to keep and bear arms. It was an individual G-d given right. Some delegates opposed adding a Bill of Rights to the Constitution as superfluous. States delegated specific authorities to the federal government enumerating them in Article I, Section 8. Government cannot regulate activities or rights over which it has no authority. The States delegated to the federal government no authority to regulate the right to keep and bear arms. For it to do so is unconstitutional. Various state delegates argued to declare that people have an individual right to keep and bear arms was akin to declaring people breath air.11
Part 2 explained the so-called “Shay’s Rebellion” in Western Massachusetts was used by proponents of a strong national government, who wanted to jettison the Articles of Confederation, as a boogeyman to whip up fear among Americans that the nation was falling apart. Like public schools today, merchants of mendacious propaganda told Americans then that landless rabble, thieves, bandits, and poor hardscrabble farmers deeply in debt had formed a violent mob and marched on Boston to overthrow the state government. If successful, the rebels would have freed men in debtor’s prisons, erased public and private debts, and seized the land of the rich to divide among themselves. This story is problematic to say the least.
Shay’s was actually several rebellions led for the most part by leading men in their communities. They were patriots, Revolutionary War veterans, political and religious leaders, landowners, and men of means.12 They called themselves “Regulators” organized into militias to halt depredations committed against them by the corrupt government in Boston controlled by a coastal banking and commercial aristocracy.13 Only three years prior (1783), Americans had concluded a war against Great Britain based on similar offenses. It is incongruous that leading Founding Fathers then and textbook authors today, fail to see the parallels and similarities.
Daniel McCarthy is a credentialed well-established journalist writing for conservative and Libertarian publications. It is unfortunate he dismisses as “right-wing folklore” the notion the Founders intended the Second Amendment support a Shay’s-like rebellion. They certainly did. If the federal and or State governments commit crimes against the people’s rights, they have but two choices, submit or resist. The Left employs the labels “right-wing” and “far-right” equally to the former Nazi Party, Ku Klux Klan, and their modern iterations. They also apply it to patriots from Ronald Reagan to Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives, the antithesis of such groups. Although their motive should be obvious, regrettably such a malicious and deceitful practice works in post-literate America. How disappointing a learned man like McCarthy would follow suit. Was Shays’ Rebellion emblematic of anarchy, lawlessness, and chaos verging on destroying America or, were their actions an embodiment of the spirit that sparked and guided the Revolution of 1776? Is it possible to find support for the rebellion in the Founder’s writings?
The Federalist Papers are not part of the Constitution nor do they necessarily reflect majority opinion among America’s Founders. They are a collection of polemics in support of ratification of the proposed Constitution (1787). Its author’s opinions represent a spectrum spanning desires for a strong national government with states as appendages, Hamilton and to a lesser extent, Madison, to true Federalists like John Jay.14 Nevertheless, with respect to resisting government tyranny, they represent commonly held views among Americans.
Hamilton and his allies adopted the name Federalists but they were actually nationalists. They sought to extinguish state autonomy and sovereignty in favor of a central unitary government much like that in England. Hamilton believed the English system was the best of all. Others, like James Wilson of Pennsylvania, were Federalists but recognized Hamilton’s plan to destroy state sovereignty would also destroy the Constitution hence supported creation of a federal system of government. The central government would have authority over international relations, trade, war, and functions only a central government could execute. States would retain all other functions and authorities, sovereign in their own sphere. Both nationalists and true Federalists supported the right of the people to overthrow their own government should it become oppressive, tyrannical, and destructive to their liberties.
In Federalist 28, Hamilton writes there exist circumstances in which the “national” (sic) government may “resort to force”. They would include “seditions and insurrections” that are “maladies as inseparable from the body politic as tumors and eruptions from the natural body…” He also refers to uprisings in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.15 However, Hamilton addresses circumstances in which the people have a legitimate right to rise up against their rulers. He observes, “If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government…” Hamilton adds that self-defense (armed resistance) against a “national” (sic) government offered greater “prospects” for success than against an “individual state”.16 Whether resistance to a federal or state government would likely be more successful, Hamilton affirms the right of the people to rise up against a tyrannical government. Only an armed people could execute such an undertaking.
Hamilton condemns those who betray the people’s liberties as “usurpers”. Although people might organize for armed resistance, “usurpers, clothed with the forms of legal authority, can too often crush the opposition in embryo”. Hamilton argues states should be in charge of organizing and executing the resistance not local militias raised by the people. This is because the states would have more arms and larger forces to resist a federal army.17 However, suppose States, not the federal government, commit usurpation against the people’s liberties. Did Hamilton forget that the people of their respective states raised their own local militias to oppose the State Militias controlled by Royal Governors? He explains the methods by which states can organize in cooperation with each other to resist “invasions of the public liberty” by the central government. Even if a federal army quelled resistance in one state, others states would respond “with fresh forces”.18 Strategies and methods aside, Hamilton establishes that States have the right to raise an army to resist usurpation of their powers by the federal government. The people possess the same right against their respective states. Is Shays’ Rebellion a great departure from this principle? Hamilton, nor anyone else, argues people have a right to arm and rise up against government over pet peeves or perceived injustices. The standard justifying resistance is gross violations of the Bill of Rights and suppression of the people’s liberties by government with no possibility of redress.
Critics of the proposed Constitution warned the federal government might turn its power to call up, organize, and equip state militias against the states turning militias into a federal army. Hamilton addressed this possibility in Federalist 28.19 He conceded in times of extreme emergency (invasion by a foreign power, insurrection) the federal government would need to call up and train state militias because such training allows them to act in concert. However, it would not be the same as raising, organizing, equipping, and disciplining a federal standing army. To do so would be futile requiring too much time in the face of an immediate threat. It was not feasible to take the “yeomanry” far from their towns and farms long enough to transform them into professional soldiers. If the federal government called up State militias, the latter would be responsible for arming, equipping, and choosing their officers. The federal government would train and subject them to military discipline. The point is militias come from the people. If harnessed for a national purpose in times of extreme emergency, their loyalty remains to their respective states. Once the crisis had passed, the federal government returns militias to their states. This would create a trained body of armed people large enough to oppose a standing federal army should one attempt to suppress the states. Hamilton wrote that militias were the “best possible security” against a standing army. For any of this to be remotely feasible, the people would have to retain their own arms.20
In Federalist 46, James Madison noted, “Ultimate authority wherever the derivative may be found, resides in the people alone” and not in the federal or state governments.21 If the federal government attempted to expand its “power beyond due limits” at the expense of states, the “latter would still have the advantage in the means of defeating such encroachments”. The States would resist the federal government by force. Even if the latter had the resources to raise powerful standing armies, states would always possess a greater resource in the number of citizens within their boundaries. State militias would outnumber a federal army.22 He added that Americans possessed a great advantage over all others in the world; whether the threat came from federal or state governments, the people are armed. In America, all government is “subordinate to the people” and the people are ultimately the masters of the militia because they are the militia.23
The Founders are clear. People have an individual right to keep and bear arms independent of membership in any form of militia or military unit. States have a right to resist, by force, federal usurpation of State rights and Constitutional liberties. The people retain the same rights with respect to both. Why do some attempt to tie firearms ownership to service in a quasi-professional militia or “national” (sic), State guard? Perhaps they do not trust the common man to be the master of his affairs including responsibility for his safety. People buying, building, and selling arms sans government oversight frightens them. What you smell is the aroma of elitism that permeates all aristocracies, economic, political, or professional. They have never trusted the Great Unwashed with freedom. To the elite, for anyone to claim people have the right to keep and bear arms, as a defense against the federal and state governments is unthinkable. Nevertheless, that is how this nation was born.
11 Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate The Constitution, 1787-1788 (New York N.Y., Simon & Schuster, 2010), 67.
1010 Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence, Kansas, University Press of Kansas, 1985), ix, 60-63. See also, Gary T. Amos, Defending The Declaration (Brentwood, Tennessee, Wolgemuth & Hyatt, Publishers, Inc., 1989), 35-74, 117-118. Sheldon Richman, “Properly Interpreting the 2nd Amendment”, Human Events (June 16 1995), Halbrook’s The Founder’s Second Amendment, 221, and Gary A. Shade, “The Right to Keep and Bear Arms: The Legacy of Republicanism vs. Absolutism”, at https://www-firarmsandliberty.com/papers-shade/TheRightToKeepAndBearArms.Pdf
1212 Leonard L. Richards, Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 43-62.
1414 Kevin R. C. Gutzman, J.D., Ph.D. The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution (Washington, D.C. Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2007), 15-28.
1515 Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, The Federalist (Birmingham, Alabama, Library of American Freedoms, Palladium Press, 2000), 170-171.
My opposition to Red-Flag laws has been steadfast countenancing no exceptions. Until now. Liberal Time Magazine’s Girl, er um “Person”1 of the Year’s trembling quivering rage-filled Greta Thunberg, who should be starring in H. P. Lovecraft inspired movies, could be that one exception. Ghostwriters and Handlers, please, do not allow Greta near sharp objects or anything that goes bang. Perhaps parents should be scheduling counseling sessions rather than enabling Greta’s delusions of imminent human extinction. Scandinavia once gave the world Vikings. What happened?2
From the Great Depression, mass starvation, to man-created global warming, the Left needs crises with which to menace people. Only through scare tactics terrifying the masses can they evoke reaction based on emotion rather than reason. People who have lost their minds seldom make good decisions. Since the Second World War, the Left, either through ideological compatibility or supreme naïveté, has promoted notions the way to deal with adversarial nations (Communist dictatorships) and people is through non-violent appeasement. Leftists are moral relativists rejecting concepts of good and evil. Therefore global and personal conflicts result from misunderstandings not malevolent intentions. Because people have “issues”, not problems, conflicts can be resolved without anyone having to accept blame or facing consequences. All Stalin needed was a couch, a good listener, and a hug. Today, if the puny underweight wretched victim of bullying stands up to his tormentors, school administrators suspend him along with the thugs. Through its evangelists teaching in public schools, the Left has indoctrinated Americans to reject notions of self-reliance and taking responsibility for their own safety. Lockdowns, shelter-in-place, hide under your desk or in your home…Hence, they grow up to despise the Second Amendment. They are aghast at the idea citizens can own guns and decide when and where to use them in self-defense. Appearing on Fox’s Martha MacCallum Show in response to the Fort Worth Texas church shooting, Democrat strategist Doug Schoen argued people are not competent to carry guns for personal defense. This he added, should be left to the police who, coincidentally, were not there.3 The Left hates the Second Amendment for two reasons; first, it exposes their unwillingness to stand up to bullies and criminals whether on American streets or as heads of State. Think, Justin Trudeau. Second, it is an obstacle to the Great Project.
Whether taking the name Liberal, Socialist, Progressive, Central Planner, Democratic-Socialist, and so forth, Statists are determined to dismantle the Second Amendment either through abolition or redefining it out of existence. Until accomplished, it remains the single greatest impediment to The Project begun by 19th century American Progressives and European Socialists. Its central imperative is to bend the will of the individual completely to the volition of the State to plan, control, and regulate every aspect of human existence. And, the Left is the State. Because altering the Constitution has proven un-doable, the Left has chosen to redefine the Second Amendment as they did the Commerce, General Welfare, Necessary and Proper, and Supremacy clauses until they mean the opposite of their intent. For example they claim owning firearms is dependent upon membership in a federal (Army, Air Force, Navy, Marines) or State (“National” sic Guard) standing army. This claim could not be more wrong.4
Proponents and enemies of the Bill of Rights have debated the Founders’ meaning of “militia” ad nauseam. Rehashing it here would seem superfluous. That is, if its enemies were not using mass media, popular culture, and public dis-education to peddle lies conjoined with an American public too intellectually lazy to read and think for itself. As a recovering public school teacher, I can attest to the pervasiveness of this mental lassitude.
Mises Institute’s Ryan McMaken writes that the Founders’ idea of a militia was not one comprised of “unorganized amateurs”, called up by local authorities, to address insurrection or invasion. Instead, it was to consist of men between a certain age range, proficient in arms, possessing some degree of training in military discipline and tactics, a system of choosing officers, subject to call up by State or local authorities, and under civilian control.5 McMaken’s conclusion is problematic. In the 1740s, the French, perennially at war with England, established a large fort at Louisbourg near Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. From there the French threatened New England with invasion and provided safe haven for pirates and “cruisers” who raided its fishing villages and naval commerce. Finding the British unwilling to act, in 1744 New England raised an army of unorganized amateurs including commoners, farmers, merchants, fishermen, and so forth. With little or no experience, these New England boys executed a successful amphibious landing under difficult conditions, besieged the fort for three months, and forced the French to surrender.6 During the French and Indian War, the British could not have defeated the French without the assistance of colonial militia troops, amateur soldiers who fought as local units under American command.7
On 1 October 1768, in a lead up to what became the War of Independence, Britain dispatched 700 troops led by General Thomas Gage from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Boston. His orders were to suppress resistance to British commerce, trading, and tax laws.8 A month later (8 November 1768), King George III declared Bostonians to be in rebellion against English law and government. British political and military leaders drew up plans to subdue the insurrection.9 They employed their standard method of subjugation; round up, jail, and execute the rebellion’s leaders and door-to-door searches for arms and munitions in private hands. Colonials often stored gunpowder in storehouses outside of town due to its volatility. In order to prevent the Red Coats from seizing it, locals formed militias to guard them. In Virginia, Patrick Henry led the Hanover Independent Militia Company comprised of armed locals independent of the Governor’s control. They comprised the nucleus of resistance against British forces. Other colonies replicated this strategy.10
In 1774, British soldiers marched from Boston into the countryside to seize colonial supplies of gunpowder and weapons in Charlestown, Cambridge, Medford, and Salem. Forty thousand militiamen met the British, called “Bloody Lobsterbacks”, by locals, at Charlestown. These amateurs drove them back to Boston without firing a shot.11 British confiscation of private arms led to the “shot heard round the world”, the British march on Concord and Lexington, Massachusetts, to seize arms.12 Among the militiamen awaiting the British attack were farmers, craftsmen, mechanics, gentlemen, laborers, slaves, dairy farmers, and veterans of the French Indian War. Americans gave as good as they got forcing the British back to Boston.13
McMaken contends, “Gun Rights advocates fixate” on the latter part of the Second Amendment, “The people having a right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” as the rationale for private ownership of arms separate from militia membership. He asserts the Second Amendment’s purpose was to guarantee that States “would be free to raise and train their own militias as a defense against federal power and as a means of keeping defensive military force available to Americans while remaining outside the direct control of the federal government”.14 He is correct state militias are supposed to be outside federal control but his assertion the militia is the primary focus of the Second Amendment is incorrect. The Second Amendment clearly contains two independent parts that framers could have fashioned into separate amendments. In fairness to McMaken, his purpose was to demonstrate State Militias are to be independent of federal control and that the so-called “National” (sic) Guard is a standing army and a gross violation of the Constitution.
Drafters wrote definitions of a militia into State Declarations of Rights and later into the federal and State Constitutions from 1791 on. They typically refer to “the mass of ordinary citizens, trained to arms” who would be available for call-up by State or local authorities, and to which was often appended an age range for those subject to service. Founding Fathers from Patrick Henry, George Mason, John Adams to Thomas Jefferson made clear the purpose of the Second Amendment was “that every man” be armed.15 Was this not so that the people would be equipped for militia service if needed? True but only in part. The Founders clearly saw that as an auxiliary advantage. However, the stress was that all men possess the right to keep and bear arms and government in no way have the power to infringe on this right or disarm the people. During debates over ratification of the proposed Constitution (1788) at the Virginia Convention, Patrick Henry declared, “The great object is that every man be armed…Everyone who is able may have a gun”. Zachariah Johnson added, “The new Constitution could never result in religious or other oppression because ‘the people are not to be disarmed of their weapons”. Not militias, people. At the Massachusetts’ ratifying convention, Samuel Adams stated, “That the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience, or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms”.16 Again, these rights, freedom of speech, religion, and arms belong to individuals, not states or any other form of organized political entity including militias.
Many States, including Arkansas, Colorado, Missouri, and others specifically state people have an individual right to keep and bear arms and it is not tied to membership in a militia, military, or any form of security force.17 The Founders knew Americans opposed standing peacetime armies (as we have today) and that States were reluctant to cede any of their sovereignty to this new untried federal system of government. They also knew government, like an irresistible force of nature, attracts to it men of ambition, those craving power, and men with no moral scruples. Therefore, they added the militia phrase. States would retain the means to resist federal usurpations of their power and infringement against the liberties of people. Under the proposed Constitution, the federal government, facing a national emergency such as invasion or insurrection, could request the states call up their militias. Governors would send them to federal authorities who in turn would arm, equip, and organize them into a standing army. The States would retain the right to choose officers commanding their militia units. Once the crisis was resolved, militiamen would return to their respective states and mustered out of service. Constitution or not, efforts to “federalize” (actually, “nationalize”) State militias placing them under presidential control began almost at once just as so-called Anti-Federalists had warned.18 The individual right to possess arms was always a separate issue.
English philosopher John Locke’s Treatises On Government were widely read (1689) in the colonies. He argued man had a “natural” (G-D given) right to life, liberty, and property. Inherent in each is the right to the means of defending it.19 Under the supervision of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Robert Livingston, and Roger Sherman, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence.20 Drawing on many widely held philosophical and theological roots; Jefferson wrote that all rights are individual and a gift from G-D. Among them are the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (property, wages, and the fruits of one’s labor). Rights imputed by Divinity are inherent in the nature of each individual’s humanity. People are born already possessing these rights. A right to life presupposes a right to the means of defending it.21
The Second Amendment employs the words “right” and “shall not be infringed demonstrating it refers to “a right that is already assumed to exist” (which comports with the Declaration). It does not say, “The people shall have a right to keep and bear arms.” The amendment recognizes but does not grant the right” [emphasis in the original].22 Requirements to join the military, a militia, or engage in a government specified activity in order exercise a right would negate that right. Any regulation, red tape, or hoops one must jump through before accessing a right is a gross infringement and, again, negates it as a right. Governments can in no way qualify a right. No vote by a majority of one’s neighbors to limit a right in any way is legitimate. In addition, people cannot through constitutions or laws, “agree to an infringement on their rights”.23 This is because of the inherency of rights. Only Divinity can alter or abolish rights divinely created. So why does the Second Amendment continue to confound people?
George Mason’s proposed draft of the amendment read, “That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state”.24 Madison’s version read, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed and well-regulated militia being the best security to a free country: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person”.25 Madison, like Mason and other Founders, wanted it understood that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right separate from membership in any form of militia. For example, those objecting to military service on religious grounds, still possessed the right to keep and bear arms. This would not be true had the right been dependent on being in a militia. Madison’s intent “is clear not only from his wording, but also from his notes for his speech proposing the amendment”. He states it pertains to an individual right which his “colleagues clearly understood the proposal to be protective of individual rights”. Massachusetts delegate Fisher Ames wrote that among other rights, that of bearing arms “to be inherent in the people”. Writing under the name “A Pennsylvanian” in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, Madison’s friend Tench Coxe argued that the delegates wrote the Second Amendment to “guarantee the right of the people to have ‘their private arms’ to prevent tyranny and to overpower an abusive standing army or select militia”. Madison read Coxe’s articles and agreed, the amendment pertained to an individual right.26
So much, did the Founders write about the Second Amendment; its meaning is beyond question. These documents and writings are available to anyone. On what basis can opponents of an individual right interpretation justify their position? Simple. The truth is unimportant. Only the Great Project matters. All narratives, including history, must be made to fit and support it. Like a starfish turning a clamshell over searching for a vulnerability by which to penetrate its defenses, so too do enemies of the Bill of Rights search for weaknesses. They find it in contemporary American’s unfamiliarity with grammatical construction.
It is important to keep in mind, of the Bill of Rights none refers to “States having rights”. Each refers to a right of the people. These are individual rights. To argue the Second Amendment applies only to members of a military organization turns it into a State not individual right. We have clearly seen that was not the Founder’s intention. If the Founders had intended military or militia membership dependency in order to own or possess arms, “Why would they say, ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”? Madison and those who shaped the amendment’s wording “chose to put the militia reference into a dependent phrase” choosing “the weakest possible construction by using the participle (word formed from a verb) ‘being’ instead of writing say, ‘Since a well regulated militia is necessary…” The militia wording’s weak form demonstrates its framers listed it as a right of states. “The main independent clause” of the amendment reads, “The people’s right to have guns ‘shall not be infringed”.27
An independent clause is a stand-alone sentence dependent on nothing. The militia part of the Second Amendment forms a dependent phrase. It cannot stand alone by itself containing a subject, verb, and complete thought. Therefore, it is secondary in importance to the main independent clause. The words; “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state” would mean what by itself? The words; “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” would mean what without the first part of the amendment? People have a right to keep and bear arms. By reversing this order, the amendment’s drafters made emphatic that the independent clause was its most important part. “The Founders correctly intuited that in a bill of rights (list), the last thing the reader should have ringing in his mind’s ear is the absolute prohibition on infringement of the natural right to own guns”.28
If the Bill of Right’s enemies read America’s founding documents and writings, they know the truth. None of that matters. What does matter to them is total disarmament of American citizens. The Great Project cannot culminate until that happens. Toward that goal, the end always justifies the means.
11 Unlike men and women since the dawn of time, those on the Left are stymied when it comes to determining their sex, of which, there are but the two aforementioned options.
22 As with the Marjory Stoned Man Douglass high school “useful idiots,” Emma Gonzalez, Cameron Kasky, David Hogg, et al, the Left cowardly uses kids as stooge props, their youth supposedly giving them and their terribly immature and uninformed rantings an unassailable immunity against critique. Isn’t this what Muslim terrorists do, hide behind children?
33 Martha MacCallum Show, FOX News, 31 December 2019.
44 Sheldon Richman, “Reading the Second Amendment”, The Freeman 2 (February 1998), 112.
66 Marvin Olasky, Fighting For Liberty And Virtue: Political and Cultural Wars in Eighteenth Century America (Wheaton, Illinois, Crossway Books, A Division of Good News Publishers, 1995), 93.
1616 Stephen Halbrook, That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right (Albuquerque, New Mexico, University of New Mexico Press, 1984), 73-75.
1818 Edwin Meese III, Matthew Spalding, and David Forte, The Heritage Guide to the Constitution, (Washington, D.C., Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2005), 139-143.
2020 Clarence B. Carson, A Basic History of the United States, Volume I: The Colonial Experience 1607-1774 (Wadley, Alabama, American Textbook Committee, 1987), 182-183.
2121 Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence, Kansas, University Press of Kansas, 1985), ix, 60-63. See also, Gary T. Amos, Defending the Declaration (Brentwood, Tennessee, Wolgemuth & Hyatt, Publishers, Inc., 1989), 35-74, 117-118.
2222 Sheldon Richman, “Properly Interpreting the 2nd Amendment” Human Events (June 16, 1995), 16.
