The U.S. Second Amendment is Sounder for Those Words
(c) 2018, Davd
A recent BBC News commentary included “Repeal the Second Amendment” as the last of “Six Radical Ways to Tackle US School Shootings”. A more recent BBC article explains, incompletely: “The second amendment in the US constitution protects the ‘right to keep and bear arms‘.” Perhaps the national news media of Britain — the empire from which the United States departed by revolutionary war — can be forgiven for ignoring the first half of the text of that “Second Amendment”; it is sad that so much of the debate and discussion in North America misses it also, and especially those first four words.
Consider CBC’s Keith Boag writing:
I could wonder — Is it the word militia1, or the nature of republics and democracies, that Boag doesn’t understand? Far from being clumsy, the Second Amendment specifies the locus and the disciplining of that “right to keep and bear arms.”
If Britain might not want to remember what a “Well-Ordered Militia…” is, Canada really should — and we all should remember the main points of the history and early government of the United States. In context of a local militia, the right to keep and bear arms is disciplined, and in the interests of the people.
As a foreigner who “was educated in that country”*, i recall those words well, perhaps better than many of those who have listened more closely to the U.S. gun-control debates of recent decades. I believe they offer vital wisdom to the debate that began2 when an “obviously crazy man named Adam” attacked an elementary school, and revived this year when a gun-loving loner named Nikolas Cruz attacked a secondary school.
A militia is more local than a national army. Its members are not full-time soldiers, they might not even be paid. In specifying a militia, the U.S. Founding Fathers were neither proposing to fund and administer a large standing army, nor advocating centralization—rather the alternative. They were saying that the sensible and public-spirited men of each locality should get together, organize provisions for the common defense, develop a command structure by consensus, and meet on some kind of mutually agreeable schedule to practice. These men (and i would guess, a tiny minority of women with an aptitude for such things) would then be among the first responders to violent trouble—and, if the US National Guard stories i’ve read be an indication, also responders to natural disasters.
It is in that context—of locally organized and led, locally and more-or-less consensually disciplined, public service and defense—that i read the Second Amendment to protect “the right to keep and bear arms.” It protects the local citizenry from being disarmed by a central government, but i read it to protect the local citizenry as a community, not as individuals. It was written within a generation’s time after the Revolutionary War, when the forced quartering of British troops in American homes and the brutality of Hessian mercenaries were living memories; and i read it as much more a matter of direct local democracy and self-defense than of individualism.
The “Minute-men” who turned back the British at Concord in April 1775 after Paul Revere’s famous night ride, were a militia3. (Less close as an approximation were the Sheriff’s-posses of the Wild West stories and movies: They served on a much more temporary basis; and we don’t read nor hear much about Sheriff’s posses having practice sessions.)
An important part of the wisdom that “a well ordered militia” has to offer, is the superiority of local personal knowledge of who’s who and what each man is like, over bureaucratic administration. No bureaucracy can know every member of the public half as well as his neighbours can. No bureaucracy can supervise the local population half as well as the neighbours can. (The strictly non-violent Hutterites know the value of “primary group” co-ordination and supervision from hundreds of years of experience; and they value it enough to divide their communities if they seem in danger of growing too large.)
Would a militia have accepted either killer? We cannot be certain, of course; but my estimate is that if he looked at all risky during basic training, he would have been assigned to what the U.S. Army called “KP” (cook’s helper) or [non-medical] “orderly” (cleaning, painting, and such), or even turned away.
He would have been “monitored”, in 1965 military talk, meaning the other men would have observed what he did and said. What weapons, if any, he learned to use, and was allowed to carry, would have been those the other men in the militia could trust him with. He would have been taught discipline in the handling and use of the weapons involved… and that discipline would have been much of the basis for assessing what weapons he had and whether he was handling them appropriately.
No well-ordered militia sends any of its members into a school with an assault-rifle and hundreds of rounds of live ammunition. If a demonstration of military equipment is put on for a school, the ammunition will be dummy or possibly blank rounds. There will be more than one man putting on the demonstration. Possibly, one or two “MP”s (Military Police, not Members of Parliament) will carry holstered pistols with which to fend off possible theft attempts.
(Does a modern militia need assault-rifles? Home-stored pistols? I should not answer those questions here, because i know too little about how well-armed the threats are. It seems very unlikely indeed that every militiaman needs one of them in his bedroom closet, with or without lock and key.)
I can express great doubt that bureaucracy will solve the problem; and also, great doubt that armed police in elementary schools (as i heard suggested by their “National Rifle Association” on CBC Radio News after the Sandy Hook killings) or training teachers and school janitors to double as armed auxiliary police, will improve the social climate of the USA. Organizing local weapons holding via militiae and hunting clubs—that, i do believe, would improve it significantly.
“The obviously wise thing to do,” it seems from here, is suggested by those four words “a Well-Ordered Militia”: Put access to guns into the care of local community hunting groups and militiae, where the best knowledge of the individuals involved, is held between the ears of the locals, and kept current by those ears and the eyes that go with them.
Notes:
1. Wictionary defines militia as: “An army of trained civilians, which may be an official reserve army, called upon in time of need, the entire able-bodied population of a state which may also be called upon, or a private force not under government control.” [accessed February 28, 2018)
* M. A. 1965, Ph.D. 1966, University of Washington, Seattle.
2… in this century, as seen from Canada.
3. I recall the song “Yankee Doodle Dandy”, which originated in the New England States. It refers to going “down to camp” to see men drilling and marching. Wells’ Outline of History contains a description of how the militiamen harassed, then stopped and defeated, a British Army unit.
