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Educating the defenders
of liberty

by Alan Keyes
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The Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms is in jeopardy these days —
dangerously so. The purpose of the Second Amendment is to ensure that we will
remain an armed people, able to defend our liberty. In our defense of firearm
rights, we must emphasize this fundamental purpose of the amendment. If we
leave the impression that we think that the right to keep and bear arms
concerns hunting and sports shooting, and making sure Americans have the
right to entertain themselves with guns, we will actually contribute to the
false view that the Second Amendment is an historical curiosity, hardly
deserving the effort it would take to officially remove it from the
Constitution.
The right to keep and bear arms derives from our duty to retain the basic
means necessary to defend our country and our liberty. Certainly it is true
that the actual defense of our national borders is normally delegated to the
professional military. But we must never think that this revocable delegation
of responsibility for national defense is a transfer of ultimate
responsibility. We, the people, are responsible for the defense of country
and liberty, and the Second Amendment is crucial to our performance of that
duty.

The presence of the Second Amendment in our Constitution reflects the history
of the emergence of self-government in the modern world. One key impediment
to the assertion of the political rights of the common man throughout much of
history was that military conflict was usually left to a professional elite.
Until common people were able to get on battlefields and defend themselves,
they left that defense to professional classes of warriors. Inevitably, or at
least naturally, such warriors became the rulers of the people whose country
they defended.

Our Founders understood that leaving matters of defense entirely in the hands
of a professional military class was inconsistent with self-government. The
American Founding was a decisive break with the old European order in many
ways, but the care our Founders took to ensure an armed citizenry is one of
the most striking. Indeed, the formal Constitutional guarantee that the
sovereignty of the people would be defended by that people themselves, and
with their own weapons, is a kind of condensed summary of the entire doctrine
of self-government on which the nation is founded.

For this reason, it is a matter of clear national interest that we make sure
that our citizens understand the meaning of their Second Amendment rights —
indeed, their Second Amendment duties. It is difficult to see how any citizen
could have a clear understanding of his general civic responsibilities if he
does not understand the fundamental duty he bears to join with his fellow
citizens at all times in remaining vigilant to any threats to liberty. And it
is difficult to see how he could understand this if he is allowed to come of
age with a hostile or trivial view of the Second Amendment.

Accordingly, I propose that we add a serious and mature formation in
America’s Second Amendment heritage to the basic civics education that all
our young people receive. We must teach our children about the Constitution,
its heritage and background, and its ultimate dependence on the principles of
the Declaration of Independence. But we should also, as an ordinary part of
their education, teach them about the relation of arms to liberty.

We must teach our children that the preservation of liberty, and of an order
of society conducive to human dignity, 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 explanations
of the purpose of the Second Amendment, and see the great care with which
they discussed the basis on which any use of the militia against government
might be contemplated, much less determined upon. Indeed, any study of the
Founders is a study of prudence in action, and this is particularly true in
the matter of the decision to take up arms in defense of liberty.

But the perennial awareness that such citizen defense against domestic
tyranny is the ultimate material defense of our liberty is a crucial
component of civic formation. Conveying to our young citizens a mature
understanding of the prudential judgments required of them as members of the
American sovereign will be difficult, no doubt. But it was done in the past,
and it can be done again, if only we cease shying away from a clear
acknowledgment of the real anatomy of our political order.

Being an American citizen is a weighty responsibility. We must again convey a
sense of that weight to a generation of young people that is tempted,
watching the floating superficialities of our current crop of political
leaders, to think that freedom is a breezy and simple affair, with no deep
consequences beyond the constant pursuit of pleasure.

If we are serious about conveying a sense of the weight of civic
responsibility, we will not shrink from giving our students the experience of
feeling a gun in their hand as well. And so, in addition to the theoretical
component of a Second Amendment civics class, we should require of every
American student, in the senior year of high school, a practical civics
course in the basics of firearms familiarity and safety, and of self-defense.

And really, the practical side of Second Amendment education is not optional.
We cannot allow ourselves to become habitually afraid of the instruments that
must be used to defend our liberties and our country. The Second Amendment
civics course I am proposing must include the holding and firing of basic
weapons. We need to demythologize guns before the liberal attempt to create a
totemic fear of them succeeds. If the gun control mentality promoting fear of
guns themselves becomes our national mentality, we would turn the clock back
to the days when a warrior class ruled over the people because only they had
the confidence and expertise to deploy the means of defense and coercion. The
gun control agenda will turn us into a people too timid to defend themselves
from our would-be masters. We must give our young people a reasonable and
responsible confidence in their ability to defend themselves and their
liberties. We need to make sure that these weapons are demystified, and that
people understand their responsible use, and see in themselves the capacity
to handle them responsibly.

Some will say that recent, highly-publicized incidents of violence show that
high school is precisely the wrong time to offer “hands on” training in
firearms. But the fact that such episodes occur simply emphasizes that we
need to educate young citizens to distinguish between the right and the wrong
uses of the means of self-defense. We do not conclude from the carnage on the
highways that we shouldn’t teach our kids how to drive, even though it is
true that adolescents tend to look first on cars as toys or symbols or
emotional outlets. But through education we are able to turn most of them
into responsible drivers. The same would be true with respect to firearms, so
that the country will in fact be safer, and less prone to violence, as a
result of such education.

The course should include the sort of weapons that people would use for
personal defense. But it should also include introducing them to the weapons
they might be called upon to use to defend their country. The Founders
intended that American citizens would be familiar with the basic weapon of
the infantry of the day. Today it would be an M-16. Tomorrow it may be a
laser weapon, or something else.

Such a course would be, in effect, a preparation for a basic education in the
nature of military activity. And this was what the Founders intended to be
the role of the militia. The universal preparation of our young people to
receive such education would represent a partial return to the right concept
of “militia.” The Founders intended that the militia would include every
able-bodied person who was capable of defending the community. One goal of
civic education in our secondary schools should be to prepare future members
of the militia so that they can be called upon as necessary to participate in
that effort.

Through negligence and a failure to think clearly about the implications of
citizenship we are in danger of allowing the liberal elite in America to turn
the essential weapons of self-defense into mythologized totems. Firearms
education is necessary to prevent a national return to the pre-republican
mentality of docility to whichever experts in contemporary techniques of
violence happen to be in a position to intimidate us. Let’s pay serious
attention to what it will take to educate our children in the material, as
well as the moral, foundations of our liberty.