Second Amendment, Guns & Ammo, March 2000
By Ambassador Alan Keyes

Educating an Armed Citizenry
We Have a Duty to Teach Firearms Safety in Our Schools

I am a strong supporter of the Second Amendment, as I know are the readers of Guns & Ammo. That?s not enough. We must understand clearly the real nature of the right to keep and bear arms. The Second Amendment is still in the Constitution of the United States, contrary to what some elite would like us to believe. But if it is to be more than words on a parchment in Washington, we must keep alive in the hearts and minds of our fellow citizens an understanding of why the Founders put the Second Amendment into the Constitution and what it means.
Gun control advocates suggest that the right to bear arms is an archaic remnant of an earlier time. They seem to think that the issue is no more relevant to today?s society than the muskets of 200 years ago are to the weaponry of a contemporary army. As a result, their respect for the constitutional status of the right is diminished not that the liberals need much encouragement to disrespect the Constitution and encroachments of law and administrative practice follow.
Sometimes I think we encourage this process by failing to make the best case for the Second Amendment. We need to make clearer that the Founders did not intend merely to allow us to intimidate burglars or hunt rabbits to our hearts content. This is not to deny that hunting for dinner or defending against personal dangers were anticipated uses for firearms, particularly on the frontier. Above all, the Founders added the Second Amendment so that when after a long train of government abuses upon our natural rights, we will have the means to protect and recover our rights. That is why the right to keep and bear arms was included in the Bill of Rights.
In fact, if we make judgments that our rights are being systematically violated, according to the Declaration of Independence, we have not merely the right, but the duty to alter or abolish the power responsible. That duty requires that we maintain the material capacity to resist tyranny, if necessary. That is hard to do if government has all the weapons. A strong case can be made that it is a fundamental duty of the free citizen to keep and bear arms.
Such is the logic of the Declaration of Independence, although in our time there are many people who find it most inconvenient. They make one argument, which in tortured logic pretends that the word ?people? in the Second Amendment means something that it does not mean in any of the other nine amendments in the Bill of Rights. They say that the Founders had an odd lapse, and wrote ?people? instead of ?states.? And so, they say, the Amendment refers to a right inherent in the state governments.
This position is incoherent and has been disproved by every piece of legitimate historical research. For example, Jefferson refers in his letters to the militia as ?every able-bodied man in the state.? The militia had little or nothing to do with state government. The words ?well-regulated? had something to do with organizing that militia and drilling it in the style of the 18th century, but ?militia? itself referred to able-bodied citizens of the state and commonwealth not to the entity of state government.
It would make no sense to restrict the right to keep and bear arms to the state governments, since the principle on which our nation is based, as articulated in the Declaration, recognizes that any government, at any level, can become oppressive of our rights. Accordingly, we must be prepared to defend ourselves against the abuses of government at any level.
The movement against the Second Amendment rights is not just a threat to our capacity to defend ourselves against physical tyranny. It is also a part of the much more general assault on the very notion that human beings are capable of moral responsibility. Consider the absurd assertion that certain weapons should be banned because ?they have no purpose except to kill people.? It is people that kill people, and they can use countless kinds of weapons or fertilizer or cars or pretty much anything that is handy but only if killing is in their hearts.
So let?s get down to the real issue: Are we grown-ups or are we children? If we are grown-ups, then we have the capacity to control our will even in the face of passion and to be responsible in the exercise of our natural rights. If we are children, then all the dangerous toys must be controlled by the government. But this solution implies that we can trust the government with a monopoly on guns, even though we cannot trust ourselves with them. This is not a ?solution? that I trust.
Advocates of banning guns substitute thing-control for self-control. This approach will not work. It is the human moral will that saves us from violence, not the presence or absence of weapons. We should reject utterly the absurd theory that weapons are the cause of violence.
Anyone who is serious about controlling violence must recognize that it can only be done by rooting violence out of the human heart. That?s why I do not understand those who say they want to save us from guns even while they cling to the coldly violent doctrine that human life has no worth except what they ?choose? to assign to it. If we want to end violence, we must warm our people?s hearts with a renewed dedication to the God-given equality of all human beings. We must recapture the noble view of man as capable of moral responsibility and self-restraint. If we purify the hearts of our people, we will not have to worry that they will misuse their weapons.
As part of a renewal effort to meet our citizen duty and to treat our young people with the dignity they deserve as citizens of this great republic, I propose that we add a serious and mature formation in America?s Second Amendment heritage to the basic civics education taught in high school. We must teach our children about the Constitution, its heritage and background and its ultimate dependence on the principles in the Declaration of Independence. But we should also, as an ordinary part of their education, teach them about the relationship of arms to liberty.
We must teach our children that the preservation of liberty requires that a free people retain the moral and material means to discipline its own government should the temptation to tyranny take root. We must read the Founders? own explanation of the purposes of the Second Amendment and see the great care with which they discussed the basis on which the use of the militia against the government might be contemplated, much less determined upon. Indeed, any study of the Founders is a study of high prudence, and this is particularly true in their deliberations about whether to take up arms in defense of liberty.
Past generations of Americans were taught the relationship between Second Amendment rights and our liberty. While the popular culture will resist our returning to this sort of education, we can do it if we are willing to devote ourselves to the principles of our Founders.
If we want students to realize just how serious their civic responsibility is, we should give them the experience of feeling the weight of a gun in their hand. In addition to the theory part of Second Amendment civics classes, we should require in the senior year of high school a practical civics course in the basics of self-defense, including firearms familiarity and safety.
This practical side of the Second Amendment should not be optional. We cannot allow ourselves to become habitually afraid of the instruments used to defend ourselves and our country. The Second Amendment course I am proposing must include the proper safety handling and operation of firearms. We need to demythologize guns before the liberal attempt to create a basic fear of them succeeds. If the gun control mentality, promoting fear of guns, becomes the national mentality, we would be turning back the clock to the days when a warrior class ruled over people because only that class had the confidence and means to deploy the defense and coercion. The gun control agenda would turn us into a people too timid to defend themselves from our would-be masters. We need to make sure that these weapons are demystified, and that people understand their responsible use. Above all, we must instill in our young people a confidence in their own ability to handle firearms in a morally responsible and safe manner.
Such courses would be a primer for basic education in military activity. This was the Founders? intent for the role of a citizen militia. The universal preparation of our young people would be a return in the direction of the right concept of ?militia.? Just as the Founders intended that every able-bodied citizen be included in the militia, secondary school citizens trained in the safe effective use of firearms could comprise a part of our citizen defense reserve.
Also, sometimes when we defend the Second Amendment, we focus on the right to keep arms and neglect the right to bear arms. Students who complete such training should become eligible to bear arms (concealed carry) across state lines just as someone receiving a driver?s license in any one state can drive in another.
The case for our Second Amendment rights is the assertion that we intend to control ourselves and submit to the moral order God intends for our lives. Proper education in our Second Amendment heritage, principles and practical instruction in safe firearm use can ensure that liberty will continue for generations to come.

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Ambassador Alan Keyes, the 49-year-old candidate for President of the United States, received his B.A. and Ph.D. in Government Affairs from Harvard University and began work for the U.S. State Department where, in 1983, he was appointed Ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council. Since then, he has been Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, Republican nominee for senator from Maryland, president of the Citizens Against Government Waste, president of the Ronald Reagan Alumni Association and the host of the syndicated radio talk show The Alan Keyes Show: America?s Wake Up Call. Ambassador Keyes is married, has three children and resides in the state of Maryland.