The 2nd Amendment. (photo: unknown)
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
22 September 13
alse
history can kill, as the American people have seen again in the
slaughter of 12 people working at the Navy Yard in Washington D.C. on
Monday, when an emotionally disturbed gunman gained access to the
military facility and opened fire, adding the site to a long list of
mass-murder scenes across the United States.
Though the focus after the latest rampage has been on
the need for better mental health detection and for better security at
bases, the underlying story is again how easy it is for people in the
United States, like the troubled Aaron Alexis, to obtain lethal weaponry
- and how hard it is to keep guns away from dangerous individuals.
In that sense, the Navy Yard narrative is just one
more bloody patch in the grim tapestry that stretches from Virginia Tech
to Aurora to Newtown to hundreds of other locations where thousands
upon thousands of innocent lives have been taken by gun violence in
America.
But a key reason why the nation is frozen in a
shocking paralysis, unable to protect even little children, is that the
American Right has sold much of the country on a false history regarding
the Second Amendment. Right-wingers and other gun-rights advocates
insist that the carnage can't be stopped because it is part of what the
Framers designed.
Yet that is not and never was the actual history. When
the First Congress passed the Second Amendment in 1789, the goal was to
promote state militias for the maintenance of order in a time of
political violence, potential slave revolts and simmering hostilities
with both European powers and Native Americans on the frontiers.
The amendment was never intended as a blank check for
some unstable person to massacre fellow Americans. Indeed, it defined
its purpose as achieving "security" against disruptions to the country's
new republican form of government. The Second Amendment read:
"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." In other words, if read in context, you would
see that the Second Amendment was enacted so each state would have the
specific right to form "a well-regulated militia" to maintain
"security," i.e. to put down armed disorder.
In the late Eighteenth Century, the meaning of
"bearing" arms also referred to a citizen being part of a militia or
army. It didn't mean that an individual had the right to possess
whatever number of high-capacity killing machines that he or she might
want. Indeed, the most lethal weapon that early Americans owned was a
slow-loading, single-fired musket or rifle.
No Anarchists
And, the Framers of the Constitution were not some
anarchists who wanted an armed population so people could overthrow the
government if they weren't happy with something. Indeed, one of the
crises that led to the Constitution was the inability of the old system
under the Articles of Confederation to put down the Shays's Rebellion in
western Massachusetts in 1786-87.
The Framers - people like George Washington, James
Madison, Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris - were the
Establishment of the day. They also recognized how fragile the nation's
independence was and how novel was the idea of a constitutional republic
with democratic elections. They were seeking a system that took
political action that reflected the will of the people, yet within a
framework that constrained the passions of democracy.
The whole idea of the Constitution - with its mix of
voting, elected representatives and checks and balances - was to create a
political structure that made violence unnecessary. As the Preamble
states, two key goals were to "promote the general Welfare" and to
"insure domestic Tranquility."
So, the Framers weren't encouraging violent uprisings
against the republic that they were founding. To the contrary, they
characterized violence against the constitutional system as "treason" in
Article III, Section 3. They also committed the federal government to
protect each state from "domestic Violence," in Article IV, Section 4.
And one of the first uses of the new state militias
formed under the Second Amendment and the Militia Acts was for President
Washington to lead a federalized force of militiamen against the
Whiskey Rebellion, a tax revolt, in western Pennsylvania in 1794.
Though it's true that many Americans owned a musket or
rifle in those early years especially on the frontier, regulations on
munitions were still common in cities where storing of gunpowder, for
instance, represented a threat to the public safety. As the nation
spread westward, so did common-sense restrictions on gun violence.
Sheriffs in some of the wildest of Wild West towns enforced gun bans
that today would prompt a recall election financed by the National Rifle
Association.
This history was well understood both by citizens and
courts. For generations, the U.S. Supreme Court interpreted the Second
Amendment as a collective right, allowing Americans to participate in a
"well-regulated Militia," not as an individual right to buy the latest
weaponry at a gun show or stockpile a military-style arsenal in the
basement.
False Narrative
However, in recent decades - understanding the power
of narrative on the human imagination - a resurgent American Right
rewrote the history of the Founding era, dispatching "researchers" to
cherry-pick or fabricate quotes from Revolutionary War leaders to create
politically convenient illusions. [See, for instance, Steven Krulik's compilation of apocryphal gun quotes.]
Among the false narratives was the one about the
Second Amendment, which the Right (and some on the Left) transformed
into a supposed device by which the Framers authorized armed rebellion
against the constitutional Republic. Rather than people who believed in
the rule of law and social order, the Framers were contorted into mad
radicals who wanted citizens to be empowered to shoot police, soldiers,
elected representatives and government officials.
These "scholars" love to cite provocative comments by
Thomas Jefferson, who was not even a participant in drafting the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights because he was the U.S.
representative in France at the time. But these revisionists still will
quote Jefferson in a 1787 letter criticizing the Constitution for its
commander-in-chief provisions. Jefferson argued that violence, like the
Shays's Rebellion, was to be welcomed. He declared that "The tree of
liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots
and tyrants. It is its natural manure."
It is ironic, however, that Jefferson was never
willing to risk his own blood as that "natural manure." During the
Revolutionary War when traitor Benedict Arnold led a force of Loyalists
against Richmond, Jefferson, who was then Virginia's governor, declined
to rally the state militia in defense of the capital but rather fled for
his life. Later, when British cavalry approached Charlottesville and
his home of Monticello, Gov. Jefferson again took flight.
Despite his personal cowardice, Jefferson had a lust
when it came to others shedding blood. He also was eager for Virginia to
have a state militia of armed whites to crush possible black slave
rebellions, another prospect that terrified him.
As a slaveholder and a pseudo-scientific racist,
Jefferson surely did not envision blacks as having any individual right
to own guns themselves or to fight for their own liberty. Reflecting on
blacks who fought bravely in the Revolution, Jefferson concluded that
their courage was an illusion resulting from their intellectual
inability to recognize danger.
Yet, whatever one thinks of Jefferson's racism and
cowardice, it's a historical error to cite Jefferson in any way as
speaking definitively about what the Framers intended with the
Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He was not directly involved in
either.
Still, this false history was advanced by the American
Right in the last half of the Twentieth Century as a kind of
neo-Confederate call to arms, with the goal of rallying whites into a
near-insurrectionary fury particularly in the South but also in rural
areas of the North and West. Many fancied themselves an armed resistance
against the tyrannical federal government.
Southern whites brandished guns and engaged in
violence to resist the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s,
when the federal government finally stepped in to end Jim Crow laws and
racial segregation. In the 1990s, "citizens militias" began to pop up in
reaction to the election of Democrat Bill Clinton, culminating in the
Oklahoma City bombing of 1994.
Winning the Court
While designed primarily for the weak-minded, the
Right's faux Founding history also had an impact on right-wing
"intellectuals" including Republican lawyers who worked their way up
through the federal judiciary under Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and
George W. Bush.
By 2008, these right-wing jurists held a majority on
the U.S. Supreme Court and could thus overturn generations of legal
precedents and declare that the Second Amendment established an
individual right for Americans to own guns. Though even these five
right-wing justices accepted society's right to protect the general
welfare of the population through some gun control, the Supreme Court's
ruling effectively "validated" the Right's made-up history.
The ruling created a political dynamic in which even
liberals in national politics, the likes of Barack Obama and Joe Biden,
had to genuflect to the supposed Second Amendment right of Americans to
parade around in public with guns on their hips and high-powered
semi-automatic rifles slung over their shoulders.
As guns-right activists struck down gun regulations in
Congress and in statehouses across the nation, their dominant argument
was that the Second Amendment offered no leeway for restrictions on gun
ownership; it's what the Framers wanted.
So, pretty much any unstable person could load up with
a vast killing capacity and slouch off to a bar, a work place, a church
or a school - even an elementary school - and treat fellow Americans as
targets in a violent video game. Somehow, the right to life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness was overtaken by the "right" to own an
AR-15 with a 30-or-100-bullet magazine.
When right-wing politicians talk about the Second
Amendment now, they don't even bother to include the preamble that
explains the point of the amendment. The entire amendment is only 26
words. But the likes of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, apparently find the
preamble inconvenient because it would undercut the false storyline that
they foist on uneducated Americans. So they just lop off the first 12
words.
Nor do Cruz and his fellow Tea Partiers explain to
their followers what the Framers meant by "bear arms." The phrase
reflected the reasoning in the preamble that the whole point was to
create "well-regulated" state militias to maintain "security," not to
free up anybody with a beef to kill government representatives.
This bogus narrative of the Framers seeking to
encourage violence to subvert the peaceful and orderly process that they
had painstakingly created in Philadelphia in 1787 also has been pushed
by prominent right-wingers, such as radio host Rush Limbaugh and Fox
News personality Andrew Napolitano.
After last December's massacre of 20 children and six
educators in Newtown, Connecticut, Napolitano declared: "The historical
reality of the Second Amendment's protection of the right to keep and
bear arms is not that it protects the right to shoot deer. It protects
the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them
effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon us."
The clear message from the Right has been that armed
Americans must confront the "tyrannical" Barack Obama - the
twice-elected President of the United States (and the first
African-American to hold that office) - especially if he presses ahead
seeking commonsense gun restrictions.
Which brings us back to the Navy Yard massacre in
Washington D.C. It has quickly and quietly taken its place among the
other mass slaughters that can't be stopped because the Right's powerful
propaganda apparatus has sold millions of Americans on the dangerous -
and false - notion that the Framers of the U.S. Constitution wanted it
this way.
These modern "revolutionaries" have been persuaded
that they are channeling the intent of the Framers who supposedly saw
armed uprisings against the legally constituted U.S. government as an
important element of "liberty." But that belief is not the historical
reality. Indeed, the reality is almost the opposite.
esterday
morning on ABC's "This Week," Newt Gingrich and I debated whether House
Republicans in should be able to repeal a law - in this case, the
Affordable Care Act - by de-funding it. Here's the essence:
s
the pope Catholic? Forgive the posing of a question that is usually
rhetorical, the absolute benchmark of certainty, and traditionally
regarded as even more settled than the one pertaining to the lavatorial
arrangements of bears.
