Right and wrong.
How long have Americans possessed the constitutional right to own a handgun? Ask this question of most people and you’re likely to get answers that run the gamut from “Forever, right?” to “A really long time.” Almost nobody would come up with the real answer, which is 2008. For it wasn’t until that year, more than 220 years after the Constitution was written, that the Supreme Court decreed that the Second Amendment protects the right of an individual to own a firearm for self-defense. The 2008 decision, which applied only to federal property, was duly followed by a 2010 decision that declared that individual states had no power to deprive their residents of legally owned firearms.
You could trace the revolutionary nature of this decree by checking the Wikipedia page the night before and the night after the 2008 decision was announced. Overnight, the opening sentence of the article went from simply quoting the text of the Amendment and calling its meaning “contested” to flatly declaring that the Amendment protects “a right to keep and bear arms.” Overnight, gun control laws at every level—federal, state, and local—became an unbearable intrusion upon the “liberty” of the individual American.
What has come of this revolutionary decree? An unspeakable wave of murderous violence, draining away our morale with every dreadful week. For not a single week has gone by, in President Obama’s second term, that a mass shooting has not happened in the United States. So horrendous was this week’s shooting, at a community college, that it actually shocked that infallible barometer of semi-informed public opinion, Donald Trump, into making a relevant observation. “It’s happening more and more,” Trump told a Washington Post reporter. “I just don’t remember—years back, I just don’t remember these things happening. Certainly not with this kind of frequency.”
For once, Trump was entirely correct. “These things” did not begin happening in such dreadful, rapid-fire succession until the Supreme Court destroyed the legitimacy of the nation’s gun control laws and made the power to own a deadly weapon a “right” to be upheld at every level of government, to be defended as if it were no different than the right to freedom of expression. We must recognize the utter falsity of this doctrine. For we can never end this epidemic of violence and terror—an epidemic that, in the past 10 months alone, has claimed nearly three times as many American lives as the 9/11 terrorist attacks—until we force ourselves to confront the truth behind one of the most successful lies in American history.
The one-sentence text of the Second Amendment is simple and—for us—mysterious: “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.” What exactly does this mean? Most contemporary Americans skim right over the opening words, the way most of us automatically do over unfamiliar phrases, and seize on “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms.” The first half of the sentence means almost nothing to us because most contemporary Americans have barely the dimmest notion of what a “Militia” is.
When the Constitution was written in 1787, each of the Thirteen Colonies had its own “militia,” a semi-theoretical army made up of every able-bodied citizen, ready to be called upon in times of crisis. These militias were cherished as a republican alternative to a standing army, which was widely regarded as a potential menace to Americans’ hard-won liberties. Thus, the new Constitution did not create any provision for a national armed force, but simply acknowledged the right of each of the states to maintain its own militia. Rather than being saddled with a potentially dangerous national army that an ambitious commander in chief could use to start needless trouble, the militias would serve as “a barrier against the enterprises of ambition” from would-be tyrants both at home and abroad, in James Madison’s words. In fact, the Second Amendment simply reiterated the language of the old Articles of Confederation, which called for “every state … [to] keep up a well regulated and disciplined militia” and to keep “arms, ammunition and camp equipage” on hand for use of the citizen-soldiers.
The inadequacies of the militia system were made clear during the War of 1812, when the untrained state militia forces found themselves hopelessly outclassed and outfought by the experienced and disciplined British soldiers. By the 1840s, the militias were little more than ragtag outfits notorious for their lack of discipline, unwillingness to train, and what one angry observer referred to as “beastly drunkenness.” Militias also suffered from divided loyalties. When Confederate forces fired on an American fort and ignited the Civil War, President Lincoln—presiding over a nearly defenseless capital, with most of the small Regular Army stationed in the Western frontier—issued a call for the state militias to provide troops to end the rebellion and “cause the laws to be duly executed.” Four states refused to obey the president’s order.
In 1903, Congress divided all of the state militias into an active force and a reserve force. The active force evolved into the modern-day National Guard. The reserve force still exists, but it has effectively been superseded by the vast federal armed forces of the United States, the most powerful military in the history of the world. Each state reserves the right to its own defense force, but only 22 states actually bother to keep up actual military units.
Thus, the Second Amendment—in the sense that it was understood and interpreted for most of its existence—no longer means much of anything at all. It is, or should be, as obsolete as the Fugitive Slave Clause. Its modern meaning is almost entirely an invention of the extremist right-wing movement that has gradually taken over modern American politics.
As a valuable 2014 article in Politico noted, of all the articles in law journals published from 1888 to 1959, not a single article argued that the Second Amendment protected an individual’s right to own a firearm. The very first article to do so, in fact, did so by introducing a novel and ominous argument: “that the amendment enforced a ‘right of revolution,’ of which the Southern states availed themselves during what the author called ‘The War Between the States.’ ” Coincidentally or not, this “right of revolution” argument came into existence right as those same Southern states were preparing once again to rebel against the federal government, this time over the issues of segregation and civil rights.
It is almost impossible to raise the subject of the Second Amendment today without being informed that the Amendment exists so that honest citizens can overthrow the government if it gets too high-handed. This has become, by far, the most prominent and passionate argument put forth by advocates of limitless gun ownership, and understandably so; it is the only plausible way to frame the right to own a gun as a political right. The Bill of Rights, after all, is exclusively concerned with political rights. Owning a gun for hunting or even self-defense cannot be construed as a political right, any more than owning a car or a washing machine. The Framers of the Constitution did not spend a single second at the Philadelphia Convention debating the right to own a weapon for self-defense. The subject did not even come up; James Madison does not mention it at all in the exhaustive notes he kept for the Convention’s proceedings. The case that the Second Amendment protects an absolute individual right to own a gun must stand or fall on the strength of the “overthrow the government” argument.
After a lifetime of hearing the “overthrow the government” argument, it can come as something of a shock to realize that this argument was not made by any of the Framers, who otherwise had much to say about the dangers of tyrannical government. The authors of the Constitution hoped to forestall executive mischief by relying on a decentralized militia system to protect the country from foreign threats; they did not argue that violent uprisings were the appropriate response to misgovernment. In fact, the actual text of the Constitution provides Congress with the authority to call out “the militia to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions,” thus explicitly granting the federal government the power to put down violent uprisings. The “overthrow the government” argument is not just wrong; it is a deliberate inversion of the truth. As former Chief Justice Warren Burger put it in 1990: “The gun lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud—I repeat the word, ‘fraud,’ on the American people by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
The culprits are not hard to identify. The “new” Second Amendment was thrust into our lives by the newly radicalized National Rifle Association, which had previously been a rather benign group that advocated for marksmanship training and safety education. After right-wing activists seized control of the NRA in the 1970s, it became one of the country’s most powerful lobbies, effectively shutting down any proposed federal gun control laws and frightening congressional and presidential hopefuls away from the issue. But the NRA alone no longer bears the brunt of the blame; no single lobby group can hold an entire country hostage. The fact is that the fake interpretation of the Second Amendment has been adopted by the entire right-wing establishment, whose vision of American politics rests on the fantasy of a country of armed vigilantes, ready to shoot it out with the government at the slightest provocation.
In this, as in so much else, the modern radical right bears little resemblance to traditional American conservatism, which sought to defend existing American institutions against the perceived threats of the modern world. By dredging up ancient arguments in favor of nullification, secession, and violent rebellion, the right-wing activists of our era have adopted the revolutionary rhetoric of a long-gone era—not the revolutionary words of the Founding Fathers, who spoke in terms of liberty and universal rights, but the revolutionary South of the antebellum era. Their true ancestor is not George Washington but Senator John C. Calhoun, the South Carolinian who argued that individual states had the right to ignore federal laws. This is why contemporary right-wingers sound so frightening and extreme even to the Republicans of a slightly older generation; their rhetoric and reasoning are from an alien world.
The consequences of flirting with this kind of rhetoric are real and dangerous. Some of the mass shooters of recent months have used right-wing rhetoric—and its reclusive cousin, white-nationalist rhetoric—in reciting their grievances, but the real danger is probably more subtle than that. When the language of violence comes to seem normal and even routine, the societal codes that push most of us away from violent behavior may begin to loosen their hold. The bitter, resentful, and unhinged people who float through our lives like dust motes, barely noticed, may find validation in celebrations of violence as noble, heroic, and even just. They are told every day that the ability to own a handgun—to have power over the lives of others—is one of their most precious rights, perhaps the most important one of all. Why not use it?
The universal availability of deadly weapons is a curse on our society. But it is a curse we have placed on ourselves, and it is one that can be lifted. If we are to do that, we must begin by ridding ourselves of the belief that the power to own any kind of gun, unencumbered by regulations of any sort, is a vital democratic right. Again, this belief is not just false; it is the precise opposite of the truth. No country, and indeed no community of any sort, can live at the mercy of vigilante violence.