So You Think You Know the Second Amendment?

These words, written into our Constitution via the Bill of Rights in December of 1791, have been the stuff of debate in the centuries that have followed their adoption.

"None but an armed nation can dispense with a standing army. To keep ours armed and disciplined is therefore at all times important." --Thomas Jefferson, 1803 

"It is more a subject of joy [than of regret] that we have so few of the desperate characters which compose modern regular armies. " --Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe, 1813

In the times that the Bill of RIghts were written, regular national armies were looked at with some large amount of mistrust. It was not unusual to see a country's legitimate ruler overthrown by an army under the command of a particularly ambitious general. And soldiers as a whole were not the most reputable of people, so in the world of the late 18th Century, in a country with no more than a fledgling regular army, it was the local militias that were the country's primary protection.

For the first two hundred years of our county's existence, the courts, both the Supreme Court and lower courts, broke the amendment into two clauses ... the "militia clause" and the "bear arms" clause. For most of our country's history, it was the "militia clause" that was deemed the operational of the two. According to the Supreme Court, the amendment conferred on state militias a right to bear arms - but did not give individuals a right to own or carry a weapon.

Then came 1977. Prior to then, the National Rifle Association (NRA) had been a non-political organization whose main focus was to educate gun owners and promote gun safety. But that changed at the 1977 board meeting of the NRA.

A coup d’état at the group’s annual convention in 1977 brought a group of committed political conservatives to power. … The new group pushed for a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that gave individuals, not just militias, the right to bear arms. It was an uphill battle. (From The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin)

It was then that the US gun culture was born. This was also a time in which the conservatives in the Republican Party were starting to gain strength as well as electing a president from their ranks, Ronald Reagan in 1980. With his appointments to the Supreme Court, it too had become conservative. In 2010, Justice Scalia wrote his opinion in the majority ruling on a Second Amendment case; "Nowhere else in the Constitution does a 'right' attributed to 'the people' refer to anything other than an individual right."

Today, while fully automatic firearms are banned for the general population, a ban on semi-automatic weapons was allowed to expire in 2004. Today, President Obama created a commission to be chaired by Vice-president Biden to recommend actions to take to prevent tragedies such as occurred at Newtown, Connecticut from happening in the future. The re-instatement of the semi-automatic ban will probably be among the suggestions.

Whatever is reported out of that commission, it is certain that it will need to be a combination of many things including gun control and mental health issues.

18th Century Cures For 21st Century Ills?

This is pure sacrilege, but maybe it is time that we consider repealing the second amendment to the US Constitution.

With all of the senseless killings that seem to be happening more frequently, perhaps it is time to look at the second amendment and how it relates to us today.

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.

When this was written in 1789, our country was still brand new and very weak. We didn't have the strongest military in the world as we do now to protect ourselves. The most recent memory of this country was that it had to fight for its independence and that fight began with a militia of farmers from Massachusetts being our only line of defense. In the war that followed, much of our fighting was done by volunteer militia as opposed to (what passed for) professional soldiers.

Ironically it was Barry Farber, a conservative talk show host, from whom I first heard the statement that you cannot cure 20th century (this was in the 1980's) ills with 18th century medicine. He was referring to laws and procedures that were created in the 1700's for conditions that existed at that time. The issue then was "cruel and inhuman punishment" and how the framers of our Constitution were referring to tossing a prisoner in a cold, damp and dark dungeon and possibly questioning him using a form of torture. He didn't believe that they would see revoking a modern day prisoner's television rights as "cruel and inhuman."

Does anyone actually believe that we have (or even need) a "well regulated Militia" (as comprised in the 18th century) for the security of the United States of America? What possible purpose could personal ownership of an automatic assault weapon serve in today's world? Just mention the names of Columbine or (now) Aurora, Colorado. What images do those names now bring to mind?

Yes, I have heard the argument that if these firearms are illegal then only the criminals will have them, but if they are unavailable through simple means as is now the case in the state of Colorado, most criminals would not be able to obtain them. Stronger background checks? The strongest background check would not have prevented James Holmes from obtaining his weapons under current Colorado law.

We Americans are proud of our Bill of Rights, and rightly so. It was the first time that any government had ever codified these basic rights in this manner. Religious freedom, freedom of speech and of the press, protection against unreasonable search and seizure, due process of law and the right not to be forced to self-incriminate, the right to a speedy and public trial by a jury of one's peers, and the protection against cruel and inhuman punishment are very high ideals that we as Americans live by and are still relevant to us and our times. But the second amendment is dangerously outdated. The authors of the Constitution gave us a mechanism to change it when necessary. Shouldn't we bring ourselves into the 21st century?