One of the talking points that gun fondlers are always putting out is that “our founding fathers believed in an individual right to keep and bear arms in order to overthrow tyranny, and it says so right in the Federalist Papers!”.
So: I went to a site with the complete text of the Federalist Papers, and went searching for the word “arms”.
The word “arms” appears 27 times in the Federalist Papers. It appears in two contexts — in reference to the arms of foreign nations, and in reference to the arms of the militia.
There is not a single reference to arms in the context of individuals. The militia, however, are referenced 64 times in the Federalist Papers, or almost three times as many times as the word “arms”. Think the Founding Fathers thought the militia was important? If you think the Federalist Papers are an accurate depiction of their thought, they sure did! The militia are mentioned primarily in two contexts: as a defense against tyranny, and as the principal military force used to resist invasion of the United States.
Remember the militia clauses from Article 1 Section 8 of the Constitution?
To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;
The arguments put forth were that the militia clauses were necessary in order to
a) make sure that the militia was properly armed and organized so that the militia, not the regular Army, could be the principal armed force of the country. The regular Army’s duty would be to hold off the attacker until the militia could be called up to deal with them, and the militia had to be armed and trained to regular army standards because the militia would work with the regular army,
b) the militia had to be able to be placed under Federal control in order to coordinate effectively when doing so.
One argument was that if put under Federal control, the militia could be used to enforce tyranny. The answer was that by reserving the appointment of officers and the authority for training to the states, if the Federal government tried to impose tyranny using the militia, the fact that the officers are appointed by the states would lead to the militia refusing to obey those tyrannical orders.
But what if a state’s militia attempted to impose tyranny within that particular state? Well, by being able to federalize the surrounding states’ militias, the Federal government and surrounding states could overthrow that tyranny and bring back democracy.
The militia, then, was viewed as the principal means to resist a tyrannical government, whether it was a tyrannical state government or a tyrannical Federal government. Federalist #46 takes that to its ultimate extreme. James Madison states that the individual states amongst them were capable of raising up to 500,000 militia from amongst themselves, and the Federal government was incapable of arming and feeding more than 50,000 soldiers, or literally 1/10th of that number, thus if the Federal government decided to use its military to enforce tyranny, the states had the ability to resist and overthrow said government.
Based solely on the text of the Federalist Papers, therefore, the only right I can see that the founding fathers had in mind when they wrote the 2nd Amendment was the right of members of state-organized militias to keep and bear arms. They viewed state-organized militias, not individuals with muskets, as the principal bulwark against tyranny.
But read the text yourself and see what you think. Don’t believe what anybody else says about the Federalist papers. You’re an adult. You can read. Read it yourself and come to your own conclusions. If you think you can find an individual right to keep and bear arms in order to resist tyranny mentioned anywhere there, please let me know which paper and which paragraph you found it in. Curious penguins are… curious!
– Badtux the Reading Penguin
Pretty funny to read Washington’s opinions of the Minutemen, compared to professional soldiers. I suppose the NRA doesn’t use THAT founding father’s opinions.
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It seems pretty clear that the only people who have a constitutional right to bear arms are members of the militia. Hey military gun lovers, it is time to join up or give up!
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I wouldn’t go that far, Jerrycritter. The 2nd Amendment has context beyond the Federalist Papers. In particular, the arms used by the anti-slave-uprising militias in the South were owned by individual plantation owners, not by the government, and part of the point of the 2nd Amendment was to maintain their individual right to keep and bear the arms needed to put down slave rebellions. However, it is clear that the Founding Fathers had no truck with the notion of a mob with individually purchased firearms taking on tyranny. Then, as now, the word for an unorganized rabble taking on a professional army is “road kill”, and they’d known this ever since the New Model Army in the English Civil War. Rather, they viewed the organized trained state militias using military weapons provided by the government as what would prevent the new Federal government from becoming tyrannical. They viewed those organized militias, not an armed rabble, as what would deal with a dictator if a dictator came to power and used the Federal army to impose dictatorship.
The whole point of the 2nd Amendment’s *individual* right to keep and bear arms, in other words was to maintain the ability to *impose* tyranny (upon black people), not *resist* tyranny. And indeed, that is how it has been used ever since its creation — not to resist tyranny, but, rather, to impose it upon minority populations, as slavery, the KKK, White Leagues, etc. should make clear.
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According to James Madison, who was most influential in writing the Constitution and subsequently published his notes from the Convention, the militia was supposed to take the place of a standing army. As every militia man needed to be ready to answer the muster call, he needed to own musket or rifle. With the creation of the US Army and subsequent reorganization of militias into the National Guard, the government assumed responsibility for equipping and arming the troops, effectively mooting the Founders intention for including the 2nd. Like the 3rd Amendment it has become an appendix, no longer of any known use.
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Uhm, no on the whole “own musket or rifle” thing. Militia weapons, with the exception of the weapons used by the anti-slave militias, were military weapons provided by the state that were placed in a village arsenal when not in use. They were not individually purchased weapons. Furthermore, aside from rifles and muskets, the queen of the battlefield was cannon, and those were the most important weapons in the village arsenal. Remember that the whole Lexington and Concord thing that started off the American Revolution was caused by the Brits deciding to destroy a couple of these village arsenals because they were concerned about the cannon in them. If you read the Federalist Papers, Madison spends a *lot* of time talking about the necessity of the Federal government properly arming the state militias. He wouldn’t have spent time doing that if he didn’t believe in a militia armed with standard military weapons (not a hodge-podge of random personally-owned weapons).
It may be that Madison had other ideas expressed in other venues such as personal notes or letters. But just from the text of the Federalist Papers as well as the text of the militia clauses in the Constitution itself, all you can conclude is that he wanted a militia armed with standard military weapons paid for by the Federal government (ideally). Militia weapons in the hands of individuals are mentioned nowhere, militia weapons are *only* mentioned in terms of organized militias operated by the states.
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The Founders – well, maybe not Washington, who had a little of the crusty-old-tawny in him about soldiering – had a horror of “standing armies” that, while it had its’ roots in English history, went back to the irritations visited on the colonies by the English troops stationed there going back to the early 1700s. So, yeah, the idea was the the new nation would be defended by its militiamen. The “People” who had the right to keep and bear arms were the People as a collective, the state governments, the militia organizations.
The notion that the Founders and Framers wanted an armed mob of individual citizens to “resist tyranny” is utterly confounded by those same leaders’ responses to Shay’s and the Whiskey Rebellions; that is, immediate military force. To people like Madison and Jefferson the U.S. government WAS “the People”; a bunch of yahoos with rifles fighting the legal dictates of the Congress was, by definition, not “resisting tyranny” but impeding the will of the People in Congress…
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While they list the impositions of the British troops posted there as one reason for independence, the reality is that there really wasn’t a whole lot of imposing being done, because the number of British troops stationed in the 13 colonies was always fairly minimal. The entire British Army at the outbreak of hostilities numbered only 40,000 soldiers, and most of those were in India. There were only 5,000 troops in all of the Americas, and most of those were in Canada.
However, the English Civil War was not ancient history to them, and the example of what Oliver Cromwell did when given a large organized regular army with no effective means of resisting it was not lost on them, even if the only specific reference to Cromwell was in Federalist #21.
And yeah, the response to Shay’s and Whiskey rebellions pretty much disproves the whole “arm mobbed resisting tyranny” motive for the 2nd Amendment.
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I propose the following as legislation before Congress. I call it the Well-Regulated Militia Act, and it goes as follows:
1. The right of the people to keep and bear arms in a well-regulated militia shall not be infringed.
2. Well-regulated militias shall not arm those under adult age, nor arm those found guilty of treason as defined by the Constitution.
3. States have the right to enforce additional regulation of their militias.
Compare and contrast sentence 1 of the Well-Regulated Militia Act with the original 2nd 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.”
Alas, poor Amendment! The sentence lies there, broken into four fragments, as if someone had dropped it on the floor. My critique of the 2nd Amendment is both literary and political; for its shattered incoherence is due to an unresolved political dispute. Washington insisted on good regulation of Jefferson’s popular militias; his objection was jammed on as a subordinate clause given top billing.
Sentence 1 of the Well-Regulated Militia Act fixes the grammar of the 2nd Amendment. It’s a single coherent clause; that prevents partisans from exaggerating one clause and ignoring another. The original had well-regulation as an explanation for the need for the right to bear arms; here well-regulation is part of the right itself. This makes explicit the necessary link between rights (arms) and responsibilities (well-regulated). Sentence 1 is as much about gun control as about gun rights.
This re-emphasis on regulation empowers sentence 2. No children in arms, nor traitors; that’s necessary. If the militia is well-regulated, then it may not arm children or adolescents, who are not well-regulated people; and if the militia is of the state, then it may not arm those levying war upon the states. I choose these two regulations for the sake of clarity. Age is a matter of public record; and treason is defined in the Constitution. (Article 3, section 3.)
Sentence 3 establishes that the militias belong to the states, which they may regulate as they see fit, as a matter of state’s rights.
This proposal is very conservative – in the non-Orwellian sense of the word ‘conservative’. It makes few changes in the original text, beyond rewriting it for clarity. This rewriting explicitly mandates both gun rights and gun control. Such rewriting is necessary because of the 2nd Amendment’s fragmented condition.
Since the 70s, we have been living with a partial interpretation of the shattered 2nd Amendment, one that ignores the first two fragments and fetishizes the next two. So for over forty years the 2nd Amendment has been half-repealed, to malign effect now self-evident.
I say that we repair it, and reinstate it, whole.
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“The notion that the Founders and Framers wanted an armed mob of individual citizens to “resist tyranny” is utterly confounded by those same leaders’ responses to Shay’s and the Whiskey Rebellions; that is, immediate military force. To people like Madison and Jefferson the U.S. government WAS “the People”; a bunch of yahoos with rifles fighting the legal dictates of the Congress was, by definition, not “resisting tyranny” but impeding the will of the People in Congress…”
Paradoctor: On one of its many “Cletus Safaris” (hat tip to Haywood J), this one visited rural rustics in Oregon. There is discontent with those dependent on a rape and pillage/extraction economy and sympathy for the Bundy Ranch gang. They need to have your paragraph pounded into their heads.
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I meant to mention New York Times in my mangled first sentence.
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This was interesting in the comments over at Alicublog.
Second Militia Act of 1792:
“The second Act, passed May 8, 1792, provided for the organization of the state militias. It conscripted every “free able-bodied white male citizen” between the ages of 18 and 45 into a local militia company. (This was later expanded to all males, regardless of race, between the ages of 18 and 54 in 1862.)
Militia members, referred to as “every citizen, so enrolled and notified”, “…shall within six months thereafter, provide himself…” with a musket, bayonet and belt, two spare flints, a cartridge box with 24 bullets, and a knapsack. Men owning rifles were required to provide a powder horn, ¼ pound of gunpowder, 20 rifle balls, a shooting pouch, and a knapsack.[5] Some occupations were exempt, such as congressmen, stagecoach drivers, and ferryboatmen.”
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This occurred during a panic after half of the U.S. Army had been wiped out at St. Claire’s Defeat when it was feared that an Indian and British confederation was about to wipe out the new United States and was never actually implemented.
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I appreciated the linky to St. Claire’s Defeat, Tux. I never heard of that one, and I’m a keen reader of American history who lived in various parts of the Midwest for several years. Ten times as many soldiers killed there as at the more infamous Little Bighorn! And to contemplate about how 200-some camp followers were exterminated, and “execution pyres”… Gives some perspective to the American military’s later habit of massacring all the inhabitants of Indian encampments. I wonder how much of a role St. Claire’s loss played in the American popular imagination at the time, plus what it meant in terms of the mythology of “the savage Injuns who burned white people at the stake” that later developed in media portrayals such as Western movies. Other stuff too, such as George Washington (the not-so-noble) invoking executive privilege so he wouldn’t have to turn over evidence of military incompetence to Congressional investigators… Stclaireghazi!
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Anyone know why the 2nd was interpreted to be an individual right to bear arms since individual is not in the amendment?
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Anyone know why the 2nd was interpreted to be an individual right to bear arms since the word individual is not in the amendment?
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