The Second Amendment

"A well regulated militia being necessary to the survival of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

So what does it mean?

The first thing that has to be kept in mind when analyzing what the Second Amendment really means, is who the militia is.
For starters, it's not the U.S. Army. As a matter of fact, the Constitution expressly and explicitly forbids the maintenance of a standing army, and it's absurd to suggest that the "Militia" of the Second Amendment to the Constitution could refer to something specifically prohibited by that same document.
Neither is it the National Guard. The National Guard did not come into being until about 130 years after the ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It's equally absurd to suggest that the Second Amendment could have been written to refer to something that would not exist until a century and a quarter in the future.

Perhaps the clearest answer to the question "Who is the militia?" comes from James Madison, who answered that question as follows in 1779 during the ratification of the Bill of Rights:

"No free government was ever founded, or ever preserved its liberty, without uniting the characters of citizen and soldier in those destined for the defense of the State. Such are a well regulated Militia, composed of the freeholders, citizen, and husbandman; who take up arms to preserve their property, as individuals, and their rights as freemen." Nine years later, in 1788, George Mason added the following statement, and caveat:

"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people ... To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them."
The concept of the militia as the whole of the people was best formalized in the James Act, of 1836, which establishes "the unorganized militia" as being the entire able-bodied male populace between the ages of 17 and 45, plus military veterans to the age of 65. This interpretation stands to this day, and is in fact enshrined in Title 10, United States Code, Section 310.
So who is the militia? By United States law, if you are male, the chances are - YOU are the militia.

So why should the people be armed?

Well, Thomas Jefferson was very blunt on this subject. His views on the question of the right to keep and bear arms are best summarized by these two statements:

At the present time, a recent TIME poll showed that 52% of the American people feel that the federal government is too powerful, and is a threat to their safety, liberty and privacy. We are perilously close to tyranny.
Why are arms a barrier against tyranny? Why is it desirable that the government be in fear of the people, rather than vice versa? Because it keeps them honest. Noah Webster said as much, in 1787:

"The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword, because the whole body of the people are armed and consitute a force superior to any band of regular troops." It was only a few years ago that Justice Louis Brandeis of the United States Supreme Court warned against the government's encroachment upon personal freedoms and liberties.

"Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficent ... the greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding." This very clearly echoes the warning given by Daniel Webster, although Webster gave his warning in stronger and clearer terms:

"Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters." William Pitt also felt the same way. Pitt, however, is less trusting of the good intention of government.

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." Patrick Henry, in 1788, had a few more succinct words to say:

"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined." Earlier, in 1775, he argued in favor of the right to kep and bear arms, citing the defence of the United States. It was the militia in the form of armed citizens that won the War of Indepencence; and, as he rightly pointed out, a country whose citizens are all armed, and willing and able to fight in their own defense, is well-nigh impregnable against invasion.

"The millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us...I know not what course others may take, but as for me; give me liberty or give me death." Thomas Paine agreed with him:

"Arms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property...Horrid mischief would ensue were the law abiding deprived the use of them." Armed citizens are a defense not only against external enemies, but against internal ones, too. It's a sad comment upon how far we have fallen from the glorious ideals of the Founding Fathers that these days, some of the worst enemies of our rights and freedoms are those elected representatives who have sworn to uphold them - and, before the echoes have died away, turn around to savage them.

During self-defense hearings in 1994, Dr. Suzanne Gratia, one of the few survivors of the massacre at Luby's restaurant in Killeen, Texas, told this to anti-gun Congressman Charles Schumer (D-NY):

YOU

Dr. Gratia, forbidden by Texas law to carry a firearm upon her person, had to watch her mother and father murdered in front of her eyes, and was herself shot and paralyzed from the waist down, knowing the whole time that her own .380 semi-automatic pistol was out of reach in her car outside. She insists, and has done so since the shooting, that had she been allowed to carry her pistol that day, she could have easily shot down the gunman before he was able to carry out his murders. He had his back to her when he started shooting, and she would have had no difficulty in simply shooting him in the head. Had Dr. Gratia had her gun that day, 20 lives or more would probably have been saved.
The plaintive wail "If it saves just one life, it's worth it" is often used by the anti-gun lobby in defense of new "gun control" measures. Well, if it's "worth it" to take away people's right to self defense to save one life, is it still "worth it" if it costs 20 lives?

Isn't it dangerous for ordinary citizens to be armed?

Joel Barlow didn't think so. In his 1792 book, Equality in America, he wrote:

"It is because the people are citizens that they are with safety armed. The danger (where there is any) from armed citizens, is only to the government, not to the society." A very clear illustration of this fact can be seen by simply observing the successes and failures of gun control laws to date.
For instance:

20% of the violent crime in the U.S. is concentrated on just four cities - Washington, D.C; New York; Chicago, Illinois; and Detroit, Michigan - which have between them only 6% of the U.S. population.
The common factor linking these four cities is that they have the strictest gun control laws in the U.S.
Washington D.C, with a total ban on all guns except for a few "grandfathered" rifles in private collections, has the nation's highest murder rate, 80.2 per 100,000, ten times the U.S. national average.
As Washington D.C.tightened its gun laws over the past 40 years, the crime rate progressively rose. In every case, the largest jumps in crime came just AFTER the passage of newer and more restrictive laws.
It's not just Washington D.C. that is affected. Each time the waiting period to buy guns in California was extended, the crime rate in California rose during the period immediately following the extension.
The latest triumph of the gun control advocates, the Brady Bill, has resulted in thousands of denials of gun purchases. The vast majority, though, turned out to be errors - and even the ones that were legitimate denials resulted in almost no prosecutions. The Justice Department is simply not prosecuting the few real lawbreakers. To date, there have been only four convictions from the Brady Bill. Each of those four convictions has cost U.S. taxpayers over $14,000,000. The money spent on those four convictions could have put nearly 2,000 full time police officers on the nation's streets.

On the other hand, what happens when gun control laws are loosened?

When Florida loosened restrictions on concealed carry in 1988, violent crime in Florida immediately dropped 21%, during a period when it rose by 14% in the rest of the U.S., and the crime rate has remained lower since.
The dire predictions by anti-gun organizations that gunfights in the streets would ensue over traffic disputes, and the streets would become "rivers of blood", have simply not materialized. Only a bare handful - 0.008% - of concealed weapons permits issued in Florida were subsequently revoked, most of them for reasons not involving criminal use of a firearm.
When the township of Kennesaw, Georgia, passed an ordinance requiring every household in Kennesaw to have a firearm in the house, violent crime in Kennesaw during the following year nosedived by 75% compared to the same period a year before. The following year, crime dropped a further 49% compared to THAT level. That was in 1982, and in the 13 years since, there have been only two murders in Kennesaw. (Both of which were stabbings.)

The picture is similar all across the nation, and the conclusion is not hard to reach. Where gun control laws are strict and legal gun ownership is low, crime is high. Where gun control laws are minimal and gun ownership is widespread, crime is low. Criminals don't like to take risks; they don't like having their victims armed.
Currently, 40 states allow their law-abiding citizens to carry concealed weapons, either with or without a permit. When these 40 states are compared to the remaining states, with more restrictive self-defense laws which do NOT permit their citizens to go armed, the overall homicide rate in the restrictive states is 19% higher, and the robbery rate is 28% higher, than in those states which do permit their citizens to exercise their right of armed self defense.

A recent study by the Congressional Institute of Justice, surveying 2,000 felons in federal prisons, found that:

57% said they feared armed citizens more than they feared the police.
78% said that their worst fear when illegaly entering a home was encountering an armed homeowner.
92% said that upon at least one occasion, they had decided NOT to commit a crime, merely because they thought that their intended victim MIGHT be armed.

You can't get much clearer than that.
Anti-gun lobbyists have made a great public spectacle of bleating that relaxation of concealed carry laws would lead to "a return to the Old West". Florida is an excellent example of the fallacy of their doom-and-gloom viewpoint. But what if they were right? What if it did? That actually might not be such a bad thing. David Kopel, quoted in the Wall Street Journal (Feb 28, 1994) in a culomn entitled "Have Gun, Will Eat Out", made this very cogent point:

"Liberalizing concealed carry laws won't lead to a return to the Wild West - though it wouldn't be bad if it did. ... in 19th Century cattle towns, homicide was confined to transient males who shot each other in saloon disturbances. The per capita robbery rate was 7% of modern New York City's. The burglary rate was 1%. Rape was unknown."

But what about gun accidents?

The current scare about guns as a public-health issue is just that - manipulative scare tactics designed to create public hysteria. The fact is, deaths from all firearms-related causes combined don't even add up to the number of accidental deaths from motor vehicles each year. The 38,000 deaths cited by the gun control lobby includes all the police shootings, all the lawful self-defense shootings, and all the suicides, as well as accidents and criminal shootings.
Suicides alone account for almost 23,000 of those deaths. Guns are involved in about 25% of suicide attempts, but 60% of successful suicides. The majority of gun suicides have attempted suicide before and failed. They're determined enough that they'll keep trying until something works.
Another 2,000 of those shootings are lawful self-defence shootings by crime victims in fear for their lives. 1,000 are police shootings. (Yes, that's right; armed citizens lawfully shoot and kill twice as many felons per year as police do.)
As a matter of fact, only about 1,200 of those deaths are due to firearms accidents. That's less than the number of accidental deaths in swimming pools. As a matter of fact, firearms don't even make it into the top 5 causes of accidental death in this country - and the number of accidental deaths due to firearms has dropped every single year, without fail, since it peaked in 1936, even as firarms ownership has soared to record levels.
(Ironically, recent gun control laws like the Brady Bill and the Crime Bill have created the biggest surge in firearms and ammunition purchases in the history of this country.)

But aren't most of those accidental deaths children?

In a word, no. Of those 1,200 fatal firearms accidents, around two thirds - 800 or so - are hunting accidents that occur in the field. The gun control lobby and the Center for Disease Control have done a lot of screaming that firearms are the second most common cause of death for children in U.S. cities, but what they don't tell you is that in order to make the numbers look that bad, they had to redefine the word "children" to include young adolescents between the ages of 15 and 22. Sure, there's a lot of firearms-related deaths in that age bracket, especially in poor inner-city districts. Most of those deaths are gang-bangers, drug dealers and their customers, murdering each other over turf and drug disputes. The CDC would rather you didn't know that, though.

Just how serious is the Second Amendment?

To paraphrase a slogan originated by the women's movement:

Which part of "shall not be infringed" is it that you don't understand? The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America states the following:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Thus, any law passed at the state level which restricts or eliminates any of the freedoms guaranteed in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights is unconstitutional, and therefore null and void. As a matter of fact, EVERY state law which restricts the types of arms that law-abiding citizens may possess, imposes undue restrictions on their acquisition, imposes taxes and permit fees so as to price them out of the reach of the common people, or prohibits citizens from going armed about their lawful daily business, is in fact in violation of the 14th Amendment, and is unconstitutional and illegal.
The Texas Supreme Court further reinforced this interpretation, in the decision on Cockrum vs. State of Texas, 1859:

The right of a citizen to bear arms, in lawful defense of himself or the State, is absolute. He does not derive it from the State government. It is one of the 'High Powers' delegated directly to the citizen by the United States Constitution, Amendment II, and "is excepted out of the general powers of government". A law cannot be passed to infringe upon it or impair it, because it is above the law, and independent of the law-making power. Less than twenty years later, in 1876, the United States Supreme Court went one step further, in their decision in U.S. vs. Cruickshank:

"The right confirmed by the Second Amendment is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence." The gist of this portion of the Cruickshank decision is that the Constitution did not create or grant a right to keep and bear arms; it merely acknowledged and recognized a prior, existing, inalienable right.
The Second Amendment, theoretically, should be inviolable. The Constitution is, after all, the supreme law of the land. But at this time, it is under attack as never before, not from external foes, but from factions within this country who want its citizens disarmed, disenfranchised, and powerless. It is not too strong to say that the Second Amendment is the most important article of the Bill of Rights - because it protects all the others.

The Second Amendment, the First, the Fourth, the Ninth - these keep us free. And one and all, they are under attack. If we do not defend them by any and all legal means open to us, then we deserve to be the slaves that we surely shall become.

A few closing thoughts...

"And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms....."

-- Samuel Adams, United States Congress, Bill of Rights Ratification, 1779 "They that can give up an essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety".

-- Benjamin Franklin (1759) "Those who trade a little freedom for a little security will soon find out that they have none of either."

-- Jeff Poling, on the Net, 1995 "The Constitution preserves the advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation...(where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms."

-- James madison, Federalist Papers #46 "That government which fears arms in the hands of its law-abiding citizens, should."

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