The Real History of the Second Amendment

By Rick Green
Monday, April 10, 2000
Austin-American Statesman

The Austin American Statesman’s April 3 editorial, “A history of the Second Amendment,” called the pro-freedom position of gun owners “willful and systematic distortion of the Constitution” But the editorial, claiming that “there is no constitutional guarantee for private ownership of firearms,” is the true example of
such distortion.

You may be able to fool readers raised in a watered-down education system
void of the founding fathers and their writings, but you will have a hard time
with the folks who have actually read The Federalist Papers (please see No.
29). All of the founding fathers, including Noah Webster, James Madison,
Thomas Jefferson, George Mason, Samuel Adams and Patrick Henry, made it
crystal clear that the Second Amendment, just like the other enumerated
rights, is an individual liberty.

The Second Amendment prevents federal interference with the citizen’s right
to keep and bear arms for personal defense. As Patrick Henry put it, the
“great object is, that every man be armed . . . Everyone who is able may have
a gun.” James Madison, the author of the Second Amendment, said that
Americans have “the advantage of being armed,” which is lacking in other
countries, where “the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”

The authors of the Bill of Rights made it clear that all of the amendments were
intended to protect individual rights. Madison wrote that the Bill of Rights was
“calculated to secure the personal rights of the people,” and Albert Gallatin
said “it establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which
consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of.” Despite such plain
intent, the anti-gun folks love to claim that this key provision of the Bill of
Rights, important enough to be No. 2, was intended to protect some vague
“right of states to have militias,” even though they can never cite an
18th-century source to support this ludicrous assertion.

I agree with the Statesman that a national debate over the Second
Amendment is needed. Despite the intentional distortion by the media, a
debate will bring out the truth and re-establish the principles of freedom upon
which this nation was founded. A national debate also will put an end to the
“blame game” played by liberals such as Bill Clinton, who would rather blame
gun manufacturers for crime than look at the real problems in America. The
debate would reveal that the mere presence of guns does not increase crime
as your editorial suggests. On the contrary, Yale law professor John Lott has
shown that where you have higher gun ownership, you have less crime and
that firearms are used five times more often in America to stop a crime than
they are to commit a crime.

If you want to stop “the national plague of gun murders” in America, you stop
the murderer, not the gun. We do not have a gun violence problem, we have a
human violence problem. We should expect nothing less than school
shootings when we teach our children that there is no right and wrong and
their classmates are nothing but randomly gathered protoplasm, accidents of
a “big bang” rather than created beings. Guns were more easily accessible to
kids 40 years ago than they are today. Yet it was not until we stopped
teaching kids they are “endowed by their Creator” (it’s much harder to distort
the Declaration of Independence) that we had towns such as Jonesboro,
Littleton and Pearl etched into our brains forever.

As author of legislation passed in Texas to prevent cities from blaming gun
makers for crime, I was proud to see that Texas still has enough common
sense to blame the criminal for the crime, not the maker of the inanimate
object the criminal chose to illegally use. Surely we also have enough sense
to not give up our liberties by rewriting the Bill of Rights in the mythical
interpretation of the misguided anti-gun zealots.

Green, R-Dripping Springs, is a state representative and Board member of the Civil Liberties Defense Foundation.

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Civil Liberties Defense Foundation
P.O. Box 163653
Austin, Texas 78716
(512) 476-0419
www.libertydefense.com
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