No, Salon, the U.S. Was Not ‘Founded on Gun Control’

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‘The U.S. was actually founded on gun control. . . . If you study your history, you’ll see it.” So begins the latest attempt to rewrite the republic’s history, and thereby to achieve by revisionist “interpretation” what cannot be achieved via Article V.

The attempt was published in Salon, and one of its authors, Ed Asner, is a 9/11 truther. Given that, the quality of the work is about what you’d expect. Having proposed that Congress, the Supreme Court, and the majority of Americans “claim the Second Amendment is not simply about state militias but guarantees the unfettered right of everyone to own, carry, trade and eventually shoot someone with a gun” — ah, yes, the right to “eventually shoot someone with a gun,” so beloved to those of us who can read — Asner and his co-author, Ed Weinberger, proceed to offer up the most comprehensively illiterate and most embarrassingly researched example within what is, alas, a growing genre. As an example of Second Amendment trutherism, this one will likely never be beaten.



We might start with the purely factual errors. Asner and Weinberger claim that “as written, the Second Amendment follows closely in meaning and in language previous state and national Constitutions — all of which explicitly refer to militias and not individuals.” This is wrong. The Second Amendment was ratified in 1791, which is 15 years after Vermont’s Bill of Rights, which held that “the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state”; 15 years after North Carolina’s Bill of Rights, which proposed that “the people have a right to bear arms, for the defence of the State”; and a year after Pennsylvania’s Declaration of Rights, which ensured that “the right of the citizens to bear arms in defence of themselves and the State shall not be questioned.” It is also eleven years after Massachusetts confirmed that “the people have a right to keep and to bear arms for the common defence” — a plain statement that, like the others quoted, contains no references to a “militia,” “explicit” or otherwise, but does mention “the people.”

Asner and Weinberger also claim that Justice Scalia’s “odd” take on the Second Amendment’s grammar not only was incorrect, but was one that “nobody’s ever heard of, then or since.” His decision, they propose, ignored “200 years of precedent, historical context, the Framers’ Intent.” The ignorance or dishonesty that it must have taken to write these two sentences is, I must confess, beyond my ken. As Eugene Volokh has pointed out at length, the construction used in the Second Amendment was not peculiar for the era, but was in fact “commonplace.” Here, for example, is a pre–Bill of Rights provision from New Hampshire’s constitution, designed to protect the freedom of the press:

The Liberty of the Press is essential to the security of freedom in a state; it ought, therefore, to be inviolably preserved.

Moreover, the phrasing of the Second Amendment has been a topic of discussion since long before Justice Scalia’s ancestors had even thought about emigrating to America. Most famously, Justice Thomas Cooley considered the question in his 1880 classic General Principles of Constitutional Law in the United States of America — a book that was written, it should be noted, after the use of prefatory clauses had fallen out of fashion. “It may be supposed from the phraseology of this provision,” Cooley wrote,

that the right to keep and bear arms was only guaranteed to the militia; but this would be an interpretation not warranted by the intent.  The militia, as has been elsewhere explained, consists of those persons who, under the law, are liable to the performance of military duty, and are officered and enrolled for service when called upon.  But the law may make provision for the enrolment of all who are fit to perform military duty, or of a small number only, or it may wholly omit to make any provision at all; and if the right were limited to those enrolled, the purpose of this guaranty might be defeated altogether by the action or neglect to act of the government it was meant to hold in check.  The meaning of the provision undoubtedly is, that the people, from whom the militia must be taken, shall have the right to keep and bear arms, and they need no permission or regulation of law for the purpose.  But this enables the government to have a well regulated militia; for to bear arms implies something more than the mere keeping; it implies the learning to handle and use them in a way that makes those who keep them ready for their efficient use; in other words, it implies the right to meet for voluntary discipline in arms, observing in doing so the laws of public order.

“Then or since,” indeed.

As for the “Framers’ intent” and the “historical context,” both of these line up squarely on the side of what is, for good reason, described as the “Standard Model.” It cannot be repeated often enough that the “odd” position in the debate over the Second Amendment is not the one taken by the Supreme Court, but the preposterous “collective right” theory that Asner, Weinberger, and a handful of other truthers have taken to peddling in the modern era. To “study the history,” as Asner commands, is to discover this immediately, and thereby to realize the absurdity of the claims that the United States was “founded on gun control”; that our “American forefathers limited any and all freedoms when they clashed with public safety”; and that, ultimately, the Constitution was written because “the Founders were afraid of guns.” It wasn’t. They didn’t. And they weren’t. Rather, they understood that they had entrenched within the federal Constitution the principle that, as St. George Tucker put it in 1803,

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Amendments to C. U. S. Art. 4, and this without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government

Which meant, as William Rawle wrote in his seminal A View of the Constitution of the United States of America, that:

The prohibition is general. No clause in the Constitution could by any rule of construction be conceived to give to congress a power to disarm the people. Such a flagitious attempt could only be made under some general pretence by a state legislature.

Or, as outlined by Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story in his influential 1833 work, Commentaries on the Constitution,

The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpations and arbitrary power of rulers; and it will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.

Know who else wrote like this? James Madison, a man whom Asner and Weinberger inexplicably cast as a “scared’ gun-controller. A quick reading of Federalist 46 – in which Madison distinguished repeatedly between “the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation” and “the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed” — should suffice to disabuse anybody of the first position. In Europe, Madison observed in the same document, “governments are afraid to trust the people with arms”; in America, those people had won independence, and they would do so again if it came to it. There is no way of squaring this document with the claim that Madison was either against the private ownership or arms per se, or that he wished it to be contingent upon militia service. (Those who are interested should also read this excellent explanation of how brazenly the pair is lying about Madison’s “Preservation of Deer” bill.)

What about the Second Amendment’s drafting history, confusion over which lies at the root of Asner and Weinberger’s essay? Does what we know about that process show that we — along with every major commentator from the period — have made a dreadful historical mistake, and that the Second Amendment is in fact there to protect the individual right to join a state body over which the federal government had control? That, certainly, is the authors’ contention: that the first draft of the amendment — which was rejected — indicates that the final version doesn’t mean what it says.

This approach is a weak one in general. In what other context would we treat what a legislature started with as being more indicative of its will than what it finished with? But it also falls apart when one gets to the substance.

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One has only to have watched what the Bureau of Land Management tried to do under Obama to anticipate what the government, under like-minded despots, would to to We the People without the 2nd Amendment.

I wonder if the editor fpr Salon read Micheal Bellsellies fake book ARMING AMERICA which was already proven he had faked the data and lied their getting as bad as TIME and NEWSWEEK in their owb stupidity and distorting history and the facts to suit their own leftists goals everybody needs to boycott Salon and its advertisers and sponsors

Being the highly educated ignoramuses surrounded by same with no grasp how citizens built the country, not the government.