Updated May 14, by Joseph Sobran

GUN CONTROL AND THE FRAMERS WASHINGTON — A friend of
mine once made some bumper stickers reading: “There are no
guns in this household.” He used to offer them to liberal
gun-control advocates so that they could put them on their
doors.

Nobody ever accepted them, of course. Even liberals
want criminals to worry about the immediate consequences of
breaking into their homes. The more the prospective burglar
has to worry about being shot, the safer we all are.

Yet most liberals have a visceral hatred of guns, and
they demand federal gun-control legislation, in spite of the
Constitution. The Second Amendment clearly prohibits feder-
al infringement of “the right of the people to keep and bear
arms.” Yet few liberals will admit that they are demanding a
plain violation of the Bill of Rights.

Some cite the opening words of the Second Amendment to
prove that its sole purpose was to enable state militias to
exist. The amendment in its entirety reads: “A well-regu-
lated militia being necessary to the security of a free
state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall
not be infringed.” According to this view, the amendment was
adopted only to permit such gun ownership as state militias
might require.

Even if that were so, the federal government is forbid-
den to infringe the right. And it’s called a “right,”
because the framers of the Constitution recognized self-
defense as among our primary rights.

So why does the amendment speak of a state militia?
Because the framers also recognized the possibility that the
militias would be needed to mount armed resistance to the
federal government, if it were to usurp powers not granted
to it. Yes, they actually contemplated civil war as a
necessary and legitimate response to federal tyranny!

Alexander Hamilton was among the most ardent advocates
of a stronger federal government; for him, the Constitution
didn’t go far enough in making the “general government,” as
he called it, superior to the state governments. Yet in
“The Federalist,” No. 28, he acknowledged the right of the
people to revolt against the federal government, and he
envisioned civil war to protect the people’s rights against
federal “usurpations” and “invasions”:

“If the representatives of the people betray their
constituents, there is then no resource left but in the
exertion of that original right of self-defense, which is
paramount to all positive forms of government; and which,
against the usurpations of the national rulers, may be
exerted with infinitely better prospect of success, than
against those of the rulers of an individual state. …
Power being almost always the rival of power, the general
government will at all times stand ready to check the usur-
pations of the state governments; and those will have the
same disposition toward the general government. The people,
by throwing themselves into either scale, will infallibly
make it preponderate. If their rights are invaded by eith-
er, they can make use of the other as the instrument of
redress. …

“It may safely be received as an axiom in our political
system that the state governments will in all possible
contingencies afford complete security against invasions of
the public liberty by the national authority.”

So the Second Amendment would ensure that the states
could be sufficiently armed to resist federal tyranny. The
Ninth Amendment backs it up, saying that the people “retain”
many rights that aren’t explicitly listed in the Constitu-
tion itself; and surely the “original right of self-defense”
would be one of these. The 10th Amendment, moreover, says
that all powers not “delegated” to the federal government
are “reserved” to the states and the people. So any power
to regulate guns would have been among these “reserved”
powers. Gun control by state legislatures may be constitu-
tional, but not by Congress.

It’s rather quaint to imagine the states taking up arms
against the federal government today; the federal government
has nuclear weapons, and the states don’t. (Though maybe
they could buy back some nuclear secrets from China.)

Besides, few Americans even know (or care) what the
Constitution says anymore. Most people accept the lazy
notion that if it sounds good, the federal government should
do it, whether it’s eliminating guns or bombing Yugoslavia.

COPYRIGHT 1999 UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE