Common Sense.I just bought my son his first air rifle. It
is a Gamo G-Force breech break rifle in .177 caliber (4.5 mm) shooting a 12
gram steel ball or pellet at 360 feet per second: painful, but not dangerous
unless you hit someone in the eye.
The synthetic polymer stock and steel barrel
weigh in at just over 4 pounds and from butt plate to muzzle crown, the
single-shot rifle is just over 37 inches long. It is perfect for a young man or
woman, and will bring him many pleasurable hours shooting at targets,
“plinking” or convincing the neighborhood field rats that they are not welcome
on our property.
More importantly, it will teach him the
discipline of arms: safety first and always, the responsibility for maintenance
and care of the equipment, accuracy and pride in accomplishment when hitting a
difficult target, and respect for the weapon and its potential harm when
carelessly or maliciously used.
The
right to bear arms
In our country, the US, the right to bear arms
is enshrined in our Constitution: important enough that the framers of that
document included it as the second of ten amendments designed to preserve the
liberties of our people and avoid the despotism of a tyrannical government.
It was almost left out: not because the right
was disputed, but because agreement was so general and complete that many
Founding Fathers thought it unnecessary. After all, the necessity of arms had
just been proven in the Revolutionary War, with simple farmers and townsmen
taking up their weapons in defense of their hearth, their home and their
freedom from oppressive old King George.
During the extended public debate over the
proposed constitution, both those for and against the new, more powerful
Federal government assumed that the public would be armed. The Anti-Federalists
especially feared the power to form a standing army granted the new government,
like the hated redcoats sent over by Parliament. Patrick Henry, in typically
dramatic Patrick Henry fashion, argued that freedom was won and would be
maintained only by force of arms; that an armed citizenry was not only the
necessary and proper shield against foreign invasion, but also the
indispensable guardian against domestic tyranny.
Armed
citizenry
In answer to the anti-Federalist fears of a
standing army and centralized government, the Federalists also turned to the
existence of an armed citizenry. Alexander Hamilton countered:
“If
circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any
magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people
while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in
discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their rights and
those of their fellow-citizens.”
Fellow Federalist James Madison agreed with
Hamilton and assured the public that anti-Federalist fears of a central government
tyranny were overblown: “the people need never fear the government because of
the advantage of being armed.”
The right to bear arms was not an innovation
of the Founding Fathers; it was one of the “traditional English liberties”
which they had started the Revolution to protect. The militia system had a long
and robust history in English law and tradition dating back at least to the
Plantagenet kings of the 12th century, who required:
“that
every man in the same country, if he be able-bodied, shall, upon holidays, make
use, in his games, of bows and arrows…and so learn and practice archery.”
It was the property-owning English freeholder,
the backbone of the medieval peasantry, whose brawny arm and skill with the
longbow had won the battles of Crecy and Agincourt. It was they, as much as the
barons, who had imposed Magna Carta upon a reluctant King John. And during the
English Civil War, it was the armed farmers and villagers who formed the core
of the Parliamentary Army that went on to defeat the aristocratic cavaliers and
cut off the head of King Charles Stuart.
An
English liberty
The delegates to the Constitutional Convention
were intimately familiar with the English Bill of Rights, secured by the
victors of the Civil War during the restoration of the Stuarts, which
guarantees:
“No
Royal interference in the freedom of the people to have arms for their own
defence as suitable to their class and as allowed by law.”
The English Bill of Rights had enormous
influence on the American Constitution and Bill of Rights. The American version
goes further than the English bill, to raise the bearing of arms to the level
of a natural right. This was in keeping with the direct experience of colonial
history in the English colonies, from the first settlements to the Revolution,
which was one of an armed citizenry banding together to defend hearth and home
against native attack and foreign invasion, sometimes both. No doubt the
memory of the citizen militia of Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill played a
major role in shaping the minds of the delegates to the Convention; so too did
British attempts to disarm the citizenry to impose Parliament’s will by force.
Today, the right to bear arms is not as
universally accepted as it once was. There are a number of reasons for this,
which have been explored by many authors over the last four decades. Yet it
would be a mistake to dismiss the Second Amendment as something irrelevant to
our times. It is much more than a license for a few farmers or sportsman to go
into the woods and shoot at wild animals every now and then; it goes beyond
mere self-defense. Every right the citizen reserves has a countervailing duty
as well, and the obligation to bear arms is at the heart of our republican form
of government.
Representative
government
To understand why this is so, you have to
first comprehend that representative government, whether a republic or a
democracy, is an innovation that conferred tremendous military advantage on the
people who adopted it.
Yes: democracy is primarily a military
innovation. That will sound grating to many ears, especially to those who
believe armaments and militaries to be unsavory relics. But throughout all of
human history, civilization has progressed as much by war as by peaceful
cooperation and trade. In the Ancient world – as well as the modern one – you
did not need to hold a sword to die by one, and slavery or death was the all
too common lot of those people who failed to defend themselves adequately. In
an international landscape of brutal and unfettered competition between tribes,
cities and states, anything that conferred military advantage for offense or
defense was highly desirable.
Representative government offered exactly that.
In fact, so advantageous was it, that throughout history you have examples of
republics routinely defeating much larger and at first blush more powerful
autocratic states: the allied Greek cities defeating the vast Persian Empire;
the Roman Republic defeating all comers to conquer the Mediterranean; the
Venetian Republic defending itself from the Ottoman Empire; the Dutch Republic
waging 70 years of revolution and war to defeat Imperial Spain; the United
Kingdom conquering half the globe in the eighteenth century; the French
Republic overcoming internal disorders and the enmity of all of Europe to
defend the Revolution and then to conquer most of the continent under the
leadership of Napoleon Bonaparte; and, of course, the United States, the most
powerful republic of them all.
Representative
republicanism
Strictly speaking ,there are no true
democracies in the world today, only republics. In a republic, people vote for
representatives, who vote in their name and interests (supposedly). In a
democracy, like that of classical Athens, the people vote on all matters
directly.
What makes republicanism such a powerful
military tool? There are a number of factors that have been pointed to by
learned men from Aristotle to Madison:
1. Representative government depends upon the rule of law more than any
other system. Autocratic states are ultimately
legitimized banditry, which acts as a disincentive to production and
investment. States with a strong rule of law protect property rights and avoid
arbitrary taxation and rent-extraction, which encourages investment and
productivity. Money has always been the sinew of war so
a more productive society starts with a material advantage in its war-making
capability. Naval warfare is particularly expensive – anyone can deploy a mass
of infantry – which is precisely why the most successful naval powers have all
had representative government: the Athenians, the Romans, Netherlands, the
United Kingdom, the United States;
2. Representative governments are also more efficient at financing their
military struggles. Because they enjoy greater legitimacy than autocrats, they
are able to more effectively levy exactions on the population that would lead
to revolts in other systems. The repeated bankruptcies of the House of Habsburg
was a principal cause of Imperial Spain’s defeat by the smaller Dutch Republic,
that never suffered a cash shortage despite fighting the entire 70 years of war
on their territory. The Venetian Republic was so proverbially efficient and
stable financially that the ducat was the gold standard of currency for the
entire Renaissance and much of the early Enlightenment. The English Civil War
broke out over taxes as did the French Revolution;
3. Republics and democracies, based on a much broader franchise and
participation in government than autocracies, are better able to mobilize and
energize their populations for the defense of the state. The Greeks and Romans
were able to mobilize much more significant percentages of their populations
than their imperial competitors and came closest to the concept of the “people
in arms” in the Ancient World. This is how the Greek city states were able to
routinely beat the stuffing out of the Persian Empire after 479 B.C. despite
the enormous advantage enjoyed by the later in size, population and total
wealth. The Roman Republic suffered catastrophic defeats against Hannibal for
more than a decade during the Second Punic War, but was able to reorganize army
after citizen army to take the field and win eventual victory. The Dutch
Republic defeated the might of the Spanish Empire and the feared tercios with
a tenth of the population and resources of the latter; and the French
Revolution reintroduced the levee en masse to go from utter defeat to
total victory on all fronts in the pre-Bonaparte wars. It took the entire might
of all of Europe’s great powers to defeat Republican France in 20 years of war.
The rent extraction, suppression of revolts
and internal policing that are a common feature of autocracies are all
expensive to install and maintain. They require substantial resources, which
must be diverted from the common defense or expansion to internal security and
repression.
An army that is garrisoning the major cities
and towns to prevent revolt is not one that is easily able to deploy abroad, or
very efficient when it does. Because of their greater legitimacy,
representative governments can use their resources more efficiently and are able
to face the prospects of sending most of the military on foreign adventures or
reducing the size of the peace-time army without fear of the peasantry
immediately taking up their pitchforks.
Enter
the people
If the benefits of representative government are
so self-evident and decisive, the obvious question is: why haven’t there been
more of them? Republics and democracies have been as rare as hippogriffs for
most of human history; the five or six examples I’ve cited above pretty much exhaust
the list until the late eighteenth century. The reason for this should also be
obvious: in democracies and republics, the people have a greater share of
power. It is an unfortunate reflection on human
nature that the vast majority of elites in all times and all places have shown
far less interest in pursuing the common interest than in maximizing their own
power, influence and wealth.
It is an unfortunate reflection on human
nature that the vast majority of elites in all times and all places have shown
far less interest in pursuing the common interest than in maximizing their own
power, influence and wealth. “Commonwealth” is synonymous with “republic” but
elites have almost always shown that they would prefer to dispense with the
“common” and keep all the wealth themselves. For this reason, it has always
taken an unusual set of circumstances to bring forth representative government
and military necessity has often been one of those catalysts.
While representative government is
unquestionably the most advantageous for the general public in securing their
rights and wealth and the rewards of industry, it is also the most exacting and
demanding in the imposition of obligations upon the whole body politic. In an
autocratic state, the only obligation is obedience: all other civic duties are
forbidden since they lead to political power. For a representative government
to function properly, the people must exercise their power and fulfill their
duties. It is not enough to vote periodically: citizens must run for office,
perform jury duty, serve in the military, attend local assemblies, and stay
informed of the issues of the day. Citizenship in a republican or democratic
state is hard-work. There is no room for apathy or uninterest: this leads
rapidly to the concentration of power in elite hands.
No
shirking
There is no such thing as a republic with a
mercenary army or with a dynastic political cadre. In ancient Athens,
citizens were obligated by law to participate in government and fulfill their
duties: shirkers not only faced fines, they were reviled and shamed by their
peers.
Our republican form of government belongs to
us, the citizens; ultimately, it is ours to defend or to lose. National service
– in all its forms – is not something to be avoided by running to Canada, nor
can it be fulfilled by others so that we are not inconvenienced. Representative
Steve King recently said to Europeans “you can’t save your civilization with
someone else’s babies.” But he should have reflected that Americans can’t save
their republic if no one serves it.
The congressmen should perhaps be more
concerned about the family dynasties that are increasingly prevalent in US
politics and business or the fact that the vast majority of soldiers in our
military are from a tiny percentage of underprivileged citizens and foreign
immigrants: a situation many Late Empire Romans would have found surprisingly
familiar.
So before you decide that the Second Amendment
is an anachronism fit only for psychotics and hillbillies, you may want to
reflect that the entire history of republican government rests on the
willingness of an active citizenry, familiar with and having access to arms,
defending their hard won rights from all enemies who would strip them of those,
both foreign and domestic.
You may want to reflect that the Founding
Fathers might have thought about and debated the constitution they were
drafting a bit more than you have; and that it has survived for 230 years with
only periodic updates to improve it. You may want to consider the wise words of
former President Barack Obama: “rights may be self-evident, but they have never
been self-executing.” There is always someone somewhere who wants to take them
away from you.
This
article was originally published on Common
Sense on April 13, 2017 under the title, The Second Amendment: A Duty as Much as a
Right.