Where will you be when the Blackhawks land?

The Second Amendment:  A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

First of all lets get the English teacher side of me out of the way and deal with the horrible punctuation in that (ahem) sentence.  Actually, the amendment has two historical versions.  The one above was the first one written, I suppose, by James Madison.  The one congress finally approved and the states ratified, eliminated the first and last commas.

"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall  not be infringed."

 There, that's better.

But as I see it, there are two problems with the construction of that sentence.  First, some history.  The Bill of Rights was added to the Constitution at the insistence of the anti-federalists, particularly George Mason and James Madison of Virginia.  They were both spurred on by an equally anti-federalistic Thomas Jefferson kibbitzing from France.  The anti-federalists were not interested in giving that much power to a central government without protecting the rights of the individuals and the states.  The federalists in the person of Alexander Hamilton thought the inclusion of a Bill of Rights would not only  be redundant, since all the rights enumerated in the first ten amendments were already implicit in the Constitution, but also draw attention to those rights not explicitly guaranteed.  Thomas Jefferson didn't like the idea of a Constitution whose laws had to be inferred.  He would rather have them spelled out, thank you very much.  It is the same position Dragline held in COOL HAND LUKE:  "When it comes to the Law, nothing is understood."

So, to make a long story short, Madison was ultimately responsible for The Bill of Rights with much help and guidance from sources of all descriptions.  The main thing to remember here is that The Bill of Rights was created to protect the freedom and rights of the individual and the states against the possibility of an over reaching government.  After all, look at what happened with England.  Therefore, there is a lot of language in the Constitution devoted to spelling out the different rights and responsibilities held by the states versus those GRANTED to the federal government.

Now back to the Second Amendment.  The biggest problem with the wording, at least for me, is the use of the term "free state."  Since I've never really given that much thought to the subject, I always just assumed that "free state" referred to the body politic--you know, to The United States.  But that interpretation is clearly wrong.  The amendment is concerned over the security of free individual states (read: Virginia, or Massachusetts, or Rhode Island) when threatened by outside forces up to and including the federal government.  The militia is needed to defend the state from the government!

The next problem is the use of the phrase "the people" rather than simply "people."  In my reading, "the people" is an abstraction.  It suggests that communities may create militia for their protection.  If the amendment simply said "people" it would suggest that everyone could have a gun.

And of course the biggest problem is the phrase "a well regulated militia."  Gun control advocates use that phrase to support the idea that guns are not an individual right, but only a right when in the military.  Gun  rights advocates generally ignore the phrase as being anachronistic.

The interesting thing is that all this got resolved by The Supremes in 2008 (US vs. Heller).  This was the first time a higher court ruled on the individual right to bear arms.  The first time!  Antonin Scalia wrote the majority opinion which overturned a Washington D.C. law banning fire arms in the city limits.  Scalia cited a previous case (US vs. Miller) to support an individual's right to carry a gun.  The idea of a militia when the amendment was written was a community wide commitment by able bodied, free white men to grab their guns and run to the Commons where they would form into a militia when called to repel invading indians, or French, or British, or perhaps invading clouds of Black Hawk helicopters.  Therefore it was clear that not only did individuals have a right to carry a gun, they almost had a responsibility.  Cool argument.  They went on to say that the men who came running were toting only those guns that most everybody else had access to.  In other words, plenty of muskets and powder horns, precious few oil pots, catapults, or Bushmasters.

Finally, Scalia also made it clear that there was nothing in the decision to suggest that other means of controlling weaponry or the people who use it are not perfectly consistent with the amendment.

All this kind of explains the lunatic paranoia over the GUVMINT coming to take our guns.  We have a long history of that kind of thinking and a lot of it was justified.

But is it justified any more?  The arguments just don't ring true.  I was watching coverage of a gun rights protest outside some state house.  The TV type stuck her mic in one man's face and asked him why he was against an assault weapons ban.  He gave the old "slippery slope"  argument.  You know, first they take our assault weapons, next they'll be after our squirrel rifles.  Implicit in all of this is the notion of THEY.  Our government is THEY and THEY are our enemy.  If I was carrying a musket in 1785, I would understand that kind of thinking (Although, I'd want something with a little more fire power when the Blackhawks start landing in my back yard.).  In 2013 it just seems crazy.