As heirs to the majestic constitutional history of England, the intellectual and political leaders of the new Colonies intended nothing less than to incorporate into their new government the laws and liberties of Englishmen, including the well-established right of the law-abiding citizen to keep and bear arms.

Yet, while engaged in bringing about one of the most radical political changes in the history of the Western world, the Founding Fathers remained conservative republicans who valued tradition and their English heritage ― the dynasties of the Angles, Saxons, Picts, and Jutes; 1066 and the Norman Conquest; the Magna Carta; the reigns of the Norman, Lancastrian, Plantagenet, Tudor, Stuart, and Hanoverian kings, the Civil Wars; the Restoration; the Glorious Revolution; and, most particularly, the Age of Enlightenment and the Whig philosophies that came to dominate English political thought during the hundred years preceding the American Revolution.

They revered English customs and law. Chief Justice Howard Taft observed that:

This analysis by Chief Justice Taft explains, in part, the confusion that has developed, especially in this century, over the interpretation of the language of the Second Amendment. The meaning of such words as "militia," "keep arms," "bear arms," "discipline," "well regulated," and "the people" was the meaning of these words as they were used in the English common law of the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries ― not as they are used today. As Chief Justice Taft further commented:

Thomas Jefferson, by no means an imprecise thinker, was well aware of this consideration. In commenting upon how the Constitution should properly be read, he said:

Yet despite this clear evidence, gun control and prohibition proponents attempt to squeeze out of the text of the Second Amendment the meaning that only a “collective” ― not an individual ― right is guaranteed by the amendment. They argue that the words of the amendment allegedly apply only to the group in our society that is "well regulated" and "keeps and bears arms," the National Guard. But they are wrong.

David I. Caplan, who has examined this issue in depth, provides this analysis:

Privately kept firearms and training with them apart from formal militia mustering thus was encompassed by the Second Amendment, in order to enable able-bodied citizens to be trained by being familiar in advance with the functioning of firearms. In that way, when organized the militia would be able to function well when the need arose to muster and be deployed for sudden military emergencies.

Therefore, even if the opening words of the Amendment, "A well regulated militia…" somehow would be interpreted as strictly limiting "the right of the people to keep…arms"; nevertheless, a properly functioning militia fundamentally presupposes that the individual citizen be allowed to keep, practice, and train himself in the use of firearms.

The National Guard cannot possibly be interpreted as the whole constitutional militia encompassed by the Second Amendment; if for no other reason, the fact that guardsmen are prohibited by law from keeping their own military arms. Instead, these firearms are owned and annually inventoried by the Federal government, and are kept in armories under lock and key.

With this preliminary understanding, let’s examine how the Amendment came into being and was then ratified into the U.S. Congress.

The First Continental Congress, which convened at Carpenters’ Hall in Philadelphia on September 5, 1774, was the first major political gathering of the American Colonies. This Congress was to become the de facto revolutionary government that directed the war for independence.

The principal outcome of this first meeting was the issuance of a petition called the Declaration of Rights and Grievances, an appeal to King George III to restore harmony between Britain and the Colonies. At that time, there was considerable discord between them, chiefly because of the passage by the British Parliament in March 1774 of the so-called Intolerable Acts, a series of punitive measures directed against the Colony of Massachusetts for its rebellious conduct, which had been recently evidenced by the Boston Tea Party. Before adjourning, the First Continental Congress also arranged for a second Congress to take place in Philadelphia if the king failed to respond favorably to their petition.

As it turned out, not only did George III fail to respond favorably, he began preparations for war. In August 1775 he issued a proclamation "for suppressing rebellion and sedition" in the Colonies and hired 20,000 Hessian mercenaries, who were soon sent to America.

The Second Continental Congress convened on May 10, 1775. Delegates to this meeting ― including George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson ― began to organize the colonies for war. George Washington was commissioned to organize a continental army, and the Congress formulated regulations for foreign trade, issued paper money, and sent emissaries abroad to negotiate with foreign powers for financial, diplomatic, and military assistance. Jefferson, aided especially by John Adams, drafted and Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776; and on November 15, 1777, Congress drafted and adopted the Articles of Confederation, which were ratified by the thirteen colonies in 1781.

A common claim of the anti-gun lobby is that the Founding Fathers never meant that individuals should be armed; they only intended for the Second Amendment to apply to a militia, such as the National Guard.

These self-proclaimed interpreters of the Constitution also ignore the Second Amendment's specific reference to "the right of the people." The fact that the "rights of the people" appears in the Fourth, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments as well--and that the courts have ruled repeatedly that these rights belong to individuals--matters little to them. They retreat to their standard charge that the Founding Fathers never intended for the people to have the right to keep and bear arms.

Even a casual reading of our Founding Father's works would prove these foes of the Second Amendment wrong. Volumes upon volumes of articles, pamphlets, speeches, and documents that laid the foundation for the Bill of Rights clearly define the founders' purpose, including what they intended with the Second Amendment.

In pre-revolution America, the threats posed by a standing British army loomed large in the minds of the colonists. Resistance was widespread. In response to the dissent, the British increased their military presence. Two years later, in 1770, unarmed citizens were gunned down in the streets of Boston, in what became known as the Boston Massacre.

The Boston Massacre was the fuse that lit the powder keg of debate over the right of the people to be armed. ironically enough, the colonists did in fact have the right to be armed under English common law. John Adams, then serving as a defense counsel for one of the British soldiers who participated in the shooting, acknowledged this in his opening argument:

Here, every private person is authorized to arm himself, and on the strength of this authority, I do not deny the inhabitants had a right to arm themselves at that time, for their defense, not for offense ....

With the courts of the time affirming the colonists' right to keep and bear arms, the British oppressors were placed between the proverbial "rock and a hard place." From that point on, quelling dissent would involve the denial of a basic right afforded all British citizens.

Nonetheless, the British proceeded down a path that could only lead to revolution. Not only did the British strengthen their military chokehold on Boston, they instituted a program of arms confiscation. Citizens could leave the city only upon "depositing their arms with their own magistrates."

British confiscation of arms focused the attention of our Founding Fathers on the threats posed by a standing army quartered among the people, and the necessity of having an armed citizenry to prevent the tyranny of such an occupying force.

No doubt inspired by the Boston arms confiscations, George Mason, the subsequent co-author of the Second Amendment, wrote in his Fairfax County Militia Plan:

... A well-regulated Militia, composed of the Gentlemen, Freeholders, and other Freemen was necessary to protect our ancient laws and liberty from the standing army ... And we do each of us, for ourselves respectively, promise and engage to keep a good Fire-lock in proper order & to furnish Ourselves as soon as possible with, & always keep by us, one Pound of Gunpowder, four Pounds of Lead, one Dozen Gun Flints, and a pair of Bullet Moulds, with a Cartouch Box, or powder horn, and Bag for Balls.

The anti-gun lobby devotes considerable intellectual energy to the definition of "militia" as it appears in Mason's writings. Mason, however, made a very clear distinction between a "standing army," such as a guard unit, and a "militia," composed of private citizens. The anti-gunners nevertheless claim that the militia refers to a national guard, not to the citizenry at large. To eliminate any doubt, however, Mason made his point clear in other writings as, for example, when he said, "To disarm the people [is] the best and most effectual way to enslave them."

Mason's sentiments were echoed by Samuel Adams who admonished the uneasy colonists that:

... It is always dangerous to the liberties of the people to have an army stationed among them, over which they have no control ... The Militia is composed of free Citizens. There is therefore no Danger of their making use of their power to the destruction of their own Rights, or suffering others to invade them.

In this passage, Samuel Adams further clarified Mason's thinking on the power of government in respect to the armed citizen: rights are sacred when the beneficiaries of those rights are entrusted with their safekeeping, and have the means to do so.

Our Founding Fathers clearly understood that, once armed, Americans would defend their freedoms to the last breath. Nowhere was this notion more evident than in Patrick Henry's "Give me liberty, or give me death" speech. The context of that oration – the importance of an armed population – has unfortunately been lost in today's "politically correct" anti-gun climate. Yet, Henry's words are there to defend the embattled Second Amendment. When speaking of revolution, Henry proclaimed:

They tell us … that we are weak--unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? ... Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? ... Three million people, armed in the holy cause of liberty ... are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against US.

Patrick Henry not only issued this warning, he acted upon it. Following the British attempt to seize arms and ammunition in Boston, and the subsequent historic skirmish at Lexington, the British seized gunpowder at Williamsburg, Virginia. The Hanover Independent Militia, led by Patrick Henry, was unable to retake the powder, but they forced the British to pay restitution. At this point, the British denial of the colonists' right to keep and bear arms became the driving force behind the armed resistance.

This fundamental right--the importance of an American's ability to defend his liberties--became the principal argument of our Founding Fathers for independence. Following the "shot heard round the world" at Lexington, Thomas Jefferson penned these words in the Virginia Constitution of 1776: "... No free man shall be debarred the use of arms within his own land."

Nowhere are Jefferson's thoughts about the rights and powers of the citizenry more explicit than in the Declaration of Independence, which he had such a hand in writing: "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it."

Certainly Jefferson, and his co-authors of the Declaration, preferred peaceful changes in government. But those four words – "the Right of the People" – state in plain language that the people have the right, must have the right, to take whatever measures necessary, including force, to abolish oppressive government.

Jefferson was not alone in sounding the call to arms. Henry, Adams, Washington all called upon the colonists to arm themselves. And the call was issued to all Americans, not only landowners and freemen. Thomas Paine, renowned for his treatise, Common Sense, urged religious pacifists to take up arms in his pamphlet Thoughts on Defensive War:

... The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world not destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside ... Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them ... the weak will become a prey to the strong.

In the case of the American Revolution, however, it was the strong that became the prey of the weak. Indeed, seasoned British troops were beleaguered by the armed and resolute citizens of the colonies.

Our Founding Fathers wasted no time in attributing this victory to the right of the people to keep and bear arms. James Madison, the father of the Second Amendment, congratulated his countrymen:

Americans [have] the right and advantage of being armed – unlike citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.

Indeed, it was President George Washington who urged the first Congress to pass an act enrolling the entire adult male citizenry in a general militia. The father of our country further urged that "A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined."

Washington's sentiments about the militia, and who should be included in the militia in the infant United States, were echoed by George Mason in the debate on the ratification of the Constitution before the Virginia Assembly: "I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials."

"Except for a few public officials." With these six words, George Mason made explicit his deep-set belief that the individual armed citizen was the key to protection against government excesses and in defense of freedom.

James Madison expanded on this point in The Federalist Papers, number 46, where he downplayed the threat of seizure of authority by a federal army, because such a move would be opposed by "a militia amounting to half a million men."

In 1790, since the population of the United States was about 800,000, Madison wasn't referring to state reserves. By militia, Madison obviously meant every able-bodied man capable of bearing arms. This, undoubtedly, was also the meaning of "militia" when the Second Amendment was written.

Across the nation, Federalists echoed our Founding Fathers' insistence that the right to keep and bear arms become part of the Constitution. In a pamphlet advocating Pennsylvania's ratification of the Constitution, patriot and statesman Noah Webster declared:

Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword, because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States.

Not only did our Founding Fathers focus their debate on the right of the people to keep and bear arms, they devoted considerable energy to issuing a warning to future generations that the battle to defend these freedoms will take precedence over all other work.

It was Patrick Henry at the Virginia convention on the ratification of the Constitution who articulated the necessity of guarding the rights of an armed citizenry.

Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are mined.

And James Madison, in the National Gazette, January 19, 1792:

Liberty and order will never be perfectly safe until a trespass on the Constitutional provisions for either, shall be felt with the same keenness that resents an invasion of the dearest rights.

Unfortunately, the invasion of our dearest rights is taking place today. As this book goes to press, there are sixteen gun-ban bills before the United States Congress, and hundreds more before the state legislatures and city councils. The politicians, in the name of fighting crime, are attacking the sacred constitutional rights of law-abiding American citizens. Today, it is politically correct to ignore the Founding Fathers and their clear intent. For the sake of political expediency, the anti-gun lobby, the anti-gun media, and the anti-gun politicians, including the [former] president [Clinton], have twisted, tangled, and reinterpreted their words. The anti-gunners would do well to pay heed to the words of Benjamin Franklin:

They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty not safety.

Unfortunately, a large part of this tragedy-the wanton disregard of our essential liberties-can be laid at the feet of Americans who have not taken action to protect their freedoms. To quote C.S. Lewis: "We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst."

Every American must leap to the defense of his or her liberties. We must answer, word for word, the vicious attacks that pour out from the TV screen and newspaper pages around the country. We must attend town meetings in protest and we must hold our elected officials accountable. We must not allow them to misinterpret our Founding Fathers’ directives. Then, and only then, will freedom be safe for future generations.

In the words of Dwight D. Eisenhower, "Freedom has its life in the hearts, the actions, the spirit of men and so it must be daily earned and refreshed-else like a flower cut from its lifegiving roots, it will wither and die."

The Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms

Columnist Don Shoemaker dismisses as "idiocy" the belief that the Second Amendment prevents government from banning guns.

Leonard Larsen of Scripps-Howard News Service says "only gun nut simpletons [and] NRA propagandists ... defend against gun controls on constitutional grounds."

Such rhetoric, including the suggestion that the constitutional right to keep and bear arms applies only to the state militia and National Guard, is commonly heard in the media's anti-gun campaign.

Some columnists, however, are willing to concede that their views on the Second Amendment don't square with scholarship on the issue. In a column in the Washington Post, March 21,1991, George Will wrote concerning Sanford Levinson's Yale Law Journal article, "The Embarrassing Second Amendment":

The National Rifle Association is perhaps correct and certainly is plausible in its "strong" reading of the Second Amendment protection of private gun ownership. Therefore gun control advocates who want to square their policy preferences Constitution should squarely face the need to deconstitutionalize the subject by repealing the embarrassing amendment.

Anti-gun lawyer-activist Michael Kinsley, co-host on CNN's "Crossfire" and formerly editor-in-chief of the New Republic, regularly calls for gun control and proudly holds membership in Handgun Control, Inc. But in an op-ed article in the Washington Post, January 8, 1990, Kinsley wrote:

Unfortunately, there is the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

The purpose of the First Amendment's free-speech guarantee was pretty clearly to protect political discourse. But liberals reject the notion that free speech is therefore limited to political topics, even broadly defined. True, that purpose is not inscribed in the amendment itself. But why leap to the conclusion that a broadly worded constitutional freedom ("the right of the people to keep and bear arms") is narrowly limited by its stated purpose, unless you're trying to explain it away? My New Republic colleague Mickey Kaus says that if liberals interpreted the Second Amendment the way they interpret the rest of the Bill of Rights, there would be law professors arguing that gun ownership is mandatory. [Emphasis added.]

Despite an occasional admission that the Second Amendment means what it says, many columnists, with little or no understanding of the roots of the Constitution, rush to embrace a view that finds virtually no support among high-ranking constitutional scholars.

According to an article in the Encyclopedia of the American Constitution summarizing Second Amendment literature in 1986, of the thirty-six law review articles published since 1980, only four support the anti-gun position, while thirty-two articles support the individual right position advocated by the National Rifle Association.

The individual rights authors include leading constitutional scholars who don’t own guns and who "never expected or desired the evidence to crush the anti-gun position."

Professor Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas Law School, co-author of the standard law school text on the Constitution, Processes of Constitutional Decision Making, is a ACLU stalwart. In his 1989 Yale Law Journal article, cited by George Will, Professor Levinson admits his own embarrassment at having to conclude from his research that private gun ownership cannot be prohibited – he must have hoped to find the opposite.

Like Levinson, Yale Law Professor Akhil Amar, a visiting professor of constitutional law at Columbia University, is held in high repute by liberal constitutional scholars. Yet Amar trounces the anti-gun states’ right theory, emphasizing again and again that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to arms to "the people," not "the states":

[W]hen the Constitution means "states" it says so.… The ultimate right to keep and bear arms belongs to "the people," not the "states,".... Thus the "people" at the core of the Second Amendment [a]re [the] Citizens – the same "We the People" who "ordain and establish" the Constitution and whose right to assemble...[is] at the core of the First Amendment.... Nowadays, it is quite common to speak loosely of the National Guard as "the state militia," but [when the Second Amendment was written]…"the militia" referred to all Citizens capable of bearing arms. [Thus] "the militia" is identical to "the people".…

Are these eminent constitutional scholars "gun nut simpletons, [and] NRA propagandists"? Activist Michael Kinsley doesn't think so.

After reviewing a Michigan LawReview article by Professor Don Kates, Kinsley wrote in an op-ed piece, February 8,1990, in the Washington Post:

If there is a reply, the [gun] controllers haven't made it.... Establishing that a flat ban on handguns would be [unconstitutional,] Kates builds a distressingly good case.

Kinsley is distressed because "a flat ban on handguns," preferably all guns, is precisely what he wants. His article concludes:

Gun rants are unconvincing (at least to me) in their attempts to argue that the individual right to bear arms is still as vital to freedom as it was in 1792. But the right is still there. [Emphasis added.]

Two major contributors to constitutional scholarship are neutral historians with no personal interest in the "gun control" debate. One is Professor Joyce Malcolm, a political historian whose work on the English and American origins of the right to arms has been underwritten by the American Bar Foundation, Harvard Law School, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right (Harvard University Press, 1994), Professor Malcolm writes:

The Second Amendment was meant to accomplish two distinct goals.... First, it was meant to guarantee the individual's right to have arms for self-defense and self-preservation.... These privately owned arms [emphasis added] were meant to serve a larger purpose [militia service] as well...and it is the coupling of these two objectives that has caused the most confusion. The customary American militia necessitated an armed public...the militia [being]…the body of the people.… The argument that today's National Guardsmen, members of a select militia, would constitute the only [emphasis hers] persons entitled to keep and bear arms has no historical foundation.

Professor Robert Shalhope, a non-gun-owning intellectual historian, whose interest is the philosophy of the Founding Fathers, agrees. In the 1982 edition of the Journal of American History, Professor Shalhope writes:

When James Madison and his colleagues drafted the Bill of Rights they ..firmly believed in two distinct principles: (1) Individuals had the right to possess arms to defend themselves and their property; and (2) states retained the right to maintain militias composed of these individually armed citizen.… Clearly, these men believed that the perpetuation of a republican spirit and character in their society depended upon the freeman's possession of arms as well as his ability and willingness to defend both himself and his society. [Emphasis added.]

As Professor Kates put it, "Historical research shows that our Founding Fathers out NRAed the NRA."

Thomas Paine believed it would be better for "all the world to lay [arms] aside...and settle matters by negotiation" – "but unless the whole will, the matter ends, and I take up my musket and thank Heaven He has put it in my power."

Paine clearly doubted that criminals could be disarmed and deemed it important that decent people be armed against them:

The peaceable part of mankind will be continually overrun by the vile and abandoned while they neglect the means of self—defense..... [Weakness] allures the ruffian [but] arms like laws discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe and preserve order in the world.... Horrid mischief would ensue were [the good] deprived of the use of them...[and] the weak will become a prey to the strong.

Or, simply stated – criminals prefer unarmed victims. Consider the similar views of the great eighteenth-century Italian criminologist Cesare Beccaria, which could be described as an older rendition of today's slogan "when guns are outlawed only outlaws will have guns."

Thomas Jefferson translated the following from Beccaria's Italian and laboriously copied it in longhand into his own personal compilation of great quotations:

False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm those only who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity, the most important of the code, will respect the less important and arbitrary ones, which can be violated with case and impunity, and which, if strictly obeyed, would put an end to personal liberty-so dear to men, so dear to the enlightened legislator-and subject innocent persons to all the vexations that the quality alone ought to suffer? Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man. They ought to be designated as laws not preventive but fearful of crimes, produced by the tumultuous impression of a few isolated facts, and not by thoughtful consideration of the inconveniences and advantages of a universal decree.

The Founders unanimously agreed. "The great object," thundered Anti-Federalist Patrick Henry, "is that every man be armed." James Madison, Federalist author of the Bill of Rights, reviled tyrants for being "afraid to trust the people with arms" and extolled "the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation."

The Anti-Federalists endorsed Madison's Bill of Rights while claiming it was their own idea. They characterized the Second Amendment as a mere rewording of their Sam Adams’ proposal "that the [federal] Constitution be never construed to prevent the people who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms." The Federalist analysis said the amendment confirmed to the people "their private arms."

Limitations on the Right to Arms

Are there any limits on either the kinds of arms the Second Amendment guarantees or the kinds of people it protects?

Neither felons nor children under eighteen, of course, have the right to own arms – any more than they have the right to vote. This restriction is based on solid historical reasons. The National Rifle Association, moreover, has for over seventy years supported laws to prohibit gun ownership by these who have been convicted of violent felonies. By the same token, the NRA has for decades supported and helped pass tough penalties to keep those who misuse guns in prison where they belong. The NRA was among the earliest and strongest proponents of "Three Strikes and You're Out" laws which would put repeat violent offenders in jail permanently.

Yet the anti-individual rights crowd accuse the NRA of claiming the Second Amendment guarantees guns for all including criminals-and all weapons-including weapons of war like bazookas and bombs. Such has never been the case, and there is no reason for anyone to believe otherwise-the facts have been available to all. Prominent constitutional scholar Professor Stephen Halbrook has summed it up:

"[A]rtillery pieces, tanks, nuclear devices and other heavy ordinances," he said, "are not constitutionally protected" arms which civilians have a Second Amendment right to possess; neither are "grenades, bombs, bazookas and other devices...which have never been commonly possessed for self-defense...."

But the right to arms does protect ordinary small arms handguns, rifles, and shotguns – including "assault weapons." Indeed, "assault weapons" are just ordinary semiautomatic firearms like those that have existed in this country for over a century. They fire no faster than revolvers or pump action rifles and shotguns. As Rutgers law professor Robert Cottrol notes:

It has been argued that "assault weapons" are far more deadly than 18th Century arms. Actually, modern medical technology makes them far less deadly than blunderbusses were in the 18^th Century. (In fact, "assault weapons" are less deadly – and far less often used in crime – than ordinary shotguns or hunting rifles.)

Professors Cottrol and Don Kates agree that if the many changes in conditions since 1792 when the Second Amendment was enacted could justify ignoring it, other rights protected by the Bill of Rights would also be endangered: "changing times affect many constitutional rights, not just the right to arms."

Take, for instance, radio, TV, and the movies. These didn't exist when the Bill of Rights was written, yet all three are now embraced by its free speech and press clauses. The Supreme Court enforces that stand. The media's First Amendment rights we soundly defended even though it is widely accepted that they may exert far more influence than a book or newspaper-even prompting some suggestible people to commit violent acts.

By the same token, sensationalized national network coverage can spread new crimes. Car-jacking, first confined to Michigan, caught on nationwide as other criminals picked up on the idea. Freedom of the press in our modern era has many other drawbacks, but we continue to expand our constitutional free press protections to cover new forms of disseminating news and opinion.

To quote Professors Cottrol and Kates:

If the Bill of Rights is to continue, we must apply its spirit even as conditions change. That is the nub of the Second Amendment controversy: Modern intellectuals who tend to feel self-defense is barbaric-that government should have a monopoly of arms with the people being dependent on it for protection have difficulty accepting the Founders' diametrically opposite views.

The Warren Court had this to say when its decisions vindicating the privilege against self-incrimination were assailed as inconsistent with the government's need to detect modern criminals and subversives:

If it be thought that the privilege is outmoded in the conditions of this modern age, then the thing to do is to [amend] it out of the Constitution, not to) whittle it down by the subtle encroachments of judicial opinion. [Ulmann , United States, 350 U.S. 422, 427-8 (1956)]

Can an Armed People Resist Tyranny?

Those who claim that the only purpose of the right to arms is to enable citizens to resist a military takeover of our government sometimes argue that the Second Amendment is obsolete since a populace armed with only small arms cannot defeat a modern army. That is doubly wrong. Even if overthrowing tyranny were the amendment's only purpose, the claim that an armed populace cannot successfully resist assault stems from an unproved theory.

The twentieth century provides no example of a determined populace with access to small arms having been defeated by a modern army. The Russians lost in Afghanistan, the United States lost in Vietnam, and the French lost in Indo-China. In each case, it was the poorly armed populace that beat the "modern" army. In China, Cuba, and Nicaragua, the established leaders, Chiang Kai-shek, Battista, and Somoza lost. Modern nations like Algeria, Angola, Ireland, Israel, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe only exist because guerrilla warfare can triumph over modern armies. While we may not approve of all the resulting governments, each of these triumphs tells a simple truth: a determined people who have the means to maintain prolonged war against a modern army can battle it to a standstill, subverting major portions of the army or defeating it themselves or with major arms supplied by outside forces.

The Founders’ purpose in guaranteeing the right to keep and bear arms was not merely to overthrow tyrants. They saw the right to arms as crucial to what they believed was a prime natural right-self-defense.

Those who claim that the right to arms is outmoded tend to think of armed personal self-defense as does former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who described it as "anarchy, not order under law – a jungle where each relies on himself for survival."

Handgun Control, Inc. (HCI) chairperson Sarah Brady claims that "the only reason for guns in civilian hands is for sporting purposes," i.e., not self-defense. "Pete" Shields, Brady's predecessor as HCI head, in the book titled Guns Don't Die, advised victims never to resist rape or robbery: "give them what they want or run."

Not surprisingly, HCI has proposed a national licensing law confining gun ownership to sportsmen-self-defense not being considered proper grounds for ownership. In an October 22, 1993, editorial, the Los Angeles Times agreed. But author Jeff Snyder points out in his essay, "A Nation of Cowards," in Public Interest Quarterly/Fall 1993:

As the Founding Fathers knew well, a government that does not trust its honest, law-abiding, taxpaying citizens with the means of self-defense is not itself worthy of trust. Laws disarming honest citizens proclaim that the government is the master, not the servant of the people....

The Bill of Rights does not grant rights to the people, such that its repeal would legitimately confer upon government the powers otherwise proscribed. The Bill of Rights is the list of the fundamental, inalienable rights, endowed in man by his Creator, that define what it means to be a free and independent people, the rights which must exist to ensure that government governs only with the consent of the people.