My Favorite Relic : The original intent of the Founding Fathers was to annoy today’s liberals.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/slipsky/?id=95000833

BY SETH LIPSKY
Wednesday, July 18, 2001 12:01 a.m. EDT

Advocates of gun control are flummoxed this week over a new federal Second Amendment policy. Sunday’s Boston Globe reported that Attorney General John Ashcroft has quietly changed the official Justice Department position on the Second Amendment, “reinterpreting it to mean that individuals, not just militias, have a right to bear arms.” Fueling the Globe’s outrage is a letter Mr. Ashcroft sent in May outlining this view to the National Rifle Association.

Mr. Ashcroft’s view has now become the official position of the Justice Department, and President Bush supports the decision, Anne Kornblut reports in the Globe. The story asserts that for “almost half a century, most administrations, along with the courts and the Justice Department, have read the Second Amendment as a relic of the American Revolution.”

Now that’s a phrase that got my juices going on a cold and foggy morning along the shores of Tunk Lake here in that relic of the Missouri Compromise, the state of Maine. Usually your correspondent has to make do with writing about other relics of the American Revolution, like the rusting hulk of the First Amendment or the confounded bicameral legislature. As it happens, the Second Amendment is one of my favorite pieces of detritus left over by the framers. More than any other, it illustrates the enduring principle that the original intent of the Founding Fathers was to annoy the modern-day liberal. In any event, I reacted to the dispatch in the Globe by going to that wonderful compendium, the Constitution, to get a little perspective.

It was as refreshing as a dip in the lake, even if the bottom is a bit murky. University of Chicago professors Philip Kurland and Ralph Lerner have assembled “The Founder’s Constitution,” providing a raft of documents illuminating the history and intent of each clause. They’ve also compiled other material that may have come along after ratification. What I was looking for was the August 1789 debate in the House, when the First Congress was hashing out the Second Amendment. A House committee put the proposition as follows: “A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; but no person religiously scrupulous shall be compelled to bear arms.”
Rep. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts jumped in to say he was apprehensive because the clause would provide an opportunity for people in power to destroy the Constitution itself. “They can declare who are those religiously scrupulous,” he warned, “and prevent them from bearing arms.” He wasn’t worried about forcing people to bear arms, but rather he was worried about people being disarmed against their will. He went on to ask: What is the use of the of a militia? He answered his own question with an explanation that it was to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty. Clearly the machinations of the British Crown were still fresh in his mind. At this point, Rep. Joshua Seney of Maryland wished to know what was the question, in order, as the annals have it, “to ascertain the point upon which the gentleman was speaking.”

Next someone pointed out that it was unlikely that all the people of the United States would become Quakers, thereby refusing to bear arms for the defense of the community. The excerpts also meander back and forth around the problem of conscientious objector and standing armies, and fretting about the possibility that the government will compel people to bear arms. It clearly got sorted out with the matter of religious scruples dropped, letting the legislature deal with it. A century later, when Joseph Story wrote his commentary on the Second Amendment, he stressed its importance and called it “the palladium of the liberties of a republic,” since “it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers” and will “enable the people to resist and triumph over them.”

The attorney general is now focussing in on the Second Amendment seating the power to own firearms among the people, as opposed to the states or the militias. “While some have argued that the Second Amendment guarantees only a ‘collective’ right of the States to maintain militias, I believe the amendment’s plain meaning and original intent prove otherwise,” he wrote to the NRA, the principal defender of those who wish to own guns. An NRA official told the Globe that neither side wants to push the issue “and risk what a clear decision of the Supreme Court might make.”
But the Globe asserts that in recent decades, the consensus among gun control advocates and “across the spectrum within the legal profession” is that the Second Amendment is no longer a serious issue in the gun-control debate.

I browsed the Constitution at the offices of Alan Baker’s Ellsworth American newspaper. On the way back up to the lake, I stopped off a bookstore, where there’s a rack of newspapers. I snagged copies of The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Globe. As I was stepping away, my eye caught two other newspapers, which I hadn’t seen before: Shotgun News and Gun List, the Indexed Firearms Paper. They were so thick I nearly needed a forklift to hoist them into the car. There are ads for ammunition, sights, pistols, rifles and various sorts of semiautomatic firearms, from Gatling gun kits to AR-15s. It was a reminder that a lot of people seem to be getting use out of that relic of the Revolution.

Mr. Lipsky is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal. His column appears Wednesdays.