To Keep and Bear Arms

The forever debate between revisionists and traditionalists on the 2nd Amendment of the Constitution has swirled around the issue of whether "to keep and bear arms" refers to an individual right or a collective one. If it is a collective one, then, I suppose it was orginally intended as a legal mechanism for the local colonial militia to store arms in a local armory so that in case of immediate attack, someone could go and wake up the armorer so he can fumble around for his keys in the middle of the unlit night until he arrives at the armory to issue weapons and ammunition to the local minutemen--whose job, then, I guess, was to arrive at the collective armory in under one minute so that weapons could be issued in time to fend off an immediate attack by, say, the local Indians who would patiently wait for everyone to show up armed.

If you are Marine veteran, like me, than that sounds about like any morning before you drew weapons, doesn't it. I suppose it was no different back in the revolution either, when, the National Guard, (i.e., the "militia") like me, in my day, spent countless mornings waiting two hours or more on line for the armorer to issue me my personal weapon. Clearly, then, like those who interpret the right as a collective right, can see that the idea of the "minuteman" was not to get the average citizen to the fight before the enemy arrived in force, but out to the local armory so that he, too, could wait in line for several hours while the armorer checked the serial number of each weapon against his data in the armorer's book...after he spent half the morning looking for the keys he misplaced since the last time he opened the armory. Of course, ammunition issue is a separate issue that we won't go into here, except to wonder at how we can expect responsible citizens to keep ammunition and firearms together if we cannot even expect that highly trained, responsible professional soldiers and Marines to not accidentally load ammunition into weapons placed on safe without magazines.

Of course, I am being facetious. I have to say that I am being facetious because some of my readers will take my ridicule of our over-redundant safety procedures at face value. These safety measures are meant to circumvent a lack of common sense which we can no longer take for granted. (I have learned the hard way that common sense is no longer common or sensible. Many people say, think, and do stupid things today. It has become an epidemic. In fact, if 51% of the nation considers themselves "liberal", than it is a fair statement to say that just over half the nation fits in the "lacks common sense" category. These are the same people who will not believe in the existence of God, or that Jesus (the Christ) was actually a historical figure and not the figment of a bunch of early Christians' imaginations--how can there be "Christ"-ians if there is no "Christ"?--but who believe in UFOs which, after nearly half a century of life, I still haven't seen.

But I digress. What is not reflected upon in the 2nd amendment debate is the purpose of an amendment that is separate from the constitutional establishment of the local militia. The second amendment establishes the right to keep and bear arms. Why would the issue of arms even come up in the first place if it was not meant as an individual right? England and every European nation at the time had armies, ARMED--isn't that the point of an ARMy? Why would something so obvious need to be stated in our constitution? The constitution established both a militia and an Army separate from the 2nd amendment. Furthermore, the militia would be made up of "the people," armed with their personally owned firearms, while the Army would have its own standing federal armories. The militia, i.e., "the people" whose individual right it is to own and bear arms, was purposely left to remain in place precisely to be able to fight off the tyranny of OUR OWN government--if it came to that (See West's Encyclopedia of American Law, Vol.I, "Armed Services"). This idea was part of the radical uniqueness of "the American experiment". Private ownership of firearms by the masses was part of what was new and different about America that no other nation permitted. Stalin used disinformation and deceit to disarm the Chechens before he rounded up their population and sent them off to Sibera. Hitler did the same to his people once he took office. So did the Chinese communists once they took power.

Liberal ideologues in our own nation still actively seek to disarm our population, I guess, because we're all grown up now in 2008, and we no longer need anyone but the government to "protect" us. This is the same government that the 51% described above believe concocted 9-11 in order to justify the war in Iraq. Yes, the very same G.W. Bush who is not smart enough to win the war in Iraq, was somehow smart enough to concoct all the details of 9-11 with the same help he has in Iraq now. But I digress again. (It's hard not too on this subject because it's all related.)

The trite arguments hold true. Statistics continue to bear out that the cities with the strictest gun laws still have the highest crime rates. (I give you Washington D.C., and Philadelphia, PA, who between the two of them, have had more private citizens killed per year through murder than the number of U.S. casualties in all of Iraq in one year. Add NYC and Philadelphia together, and more U.S. citizens are murdered in those two cities than there are U.S. killed in two years of fighting in Iraq! The streets of Iraq are safer than NYC and Philadelphia combined.) Far from turning the nation into Dodge City, law-abiding citizens who are allowed to "keep" and "bear" arms, have kept crime rates down. The formula is simple. The Founding Fathers knew it. Let's stick with what history has shown works. Let the Second Amendment remain as an individual right as it was intended until the Lord comes to beat our swords into plowshares.