By David Harsanyi
MARCH 28, 2018
This week, retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens advocated a position that most liberal pundits and activists have been incrementally working towards for a long time: repealing the Second Amendment. And while many liberal columnists argued that Stevens had only given fodder to gun advocates — because his position was unfeasible right now – not one that I read argued that Stevens was wrong on the merits. Not one claimed that American citizens did, in fact, have an inherent individual right to protect themselves with firearms.
Whether repeal of the Second Amendment is feasible or not, historical revisionism is meant to mangle its meaning into irrelevancy. Stevens claims that his conception of gun rights is “uniformly understood,†yet offers no legal precedent to back the contention up. Stevens claims the Second Amendment’s explicit mention of right of “the people†does not create an “individual right†despite the inconvenient fact that other times the term is mentioned — in the Fourth, Ninth, and 10th Amendments — they have been found to do exactly that.
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The debate over the Second Amendment centered on a dispute over who should control the militia, the federal or state governments. Everyone understood that a militia consisted of free individuals who would almost always grab their own firearms — the ones they used in their everyday existence — to engage in concerted efforts to protect themselves, their community, or their country (sometimes from their own government.)
This might surprise some, but the Minutemen did not return their muskets after Lexington.
In the writings and speeches of the American Founders, the threat of disarmament was always a casus belli. Which makes sense for practical and ideological reasons. For one, none of the natural rights codified in the Constitution, none — not freedom of speech, press or religion, or the ability to vote or to demand due process — had a longer or deeper history in English common law and tradition than the right to defend oneself.
Guns were so prevalent, in fact, that some framers noted that a tyrant would never take the nation because the general public out-armed the state. Noah Webster reasoned that, “The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any bands of regular troops …†His only mistake was trusting the whole body of the people would always uphold the Constitution.
http://thefederalist.com/2018/03/28/you-can-try-to-repeal-the-2nd-amendment-but-you-cant-repeal-history/
