The 2nd Amendment (Part 1)
Intro To The Constitution (Part 13)
Previous article in this series: “Fully Semi-Automatic”
“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.”
— 2nd Amendment of the Bill of Rights; US Constitution
The first thing to note is that it does not say that the right of the “militia” to keep & bear arms shall not be infringed; such that only those people who are members of the militia would qualify for protection under this right. That is not what it says at all. There are several reasons why it does not say that, and we will get to those shortly, but for now, let’s just look at what it does say.
It says the right of the “people” to keep & bear arms shall not be infringed. It prefaces the Amendment by emphasizing a universally agreed upon truth among the founders, that a competent militia is “necessary to the security of a free State”. And because that truth is so important, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
So, why does it switch from saying “the militia” in the first part, to then saying “the people” in the second part? For 2 reasons: (1) the militia is made up of the people, so in that sense, they are one & the same. But also, (2) there was significant concern at the time among some of the founders, in the distinction between the “general” militia, and a “select” militia. While the “general” militia refers to every able-bodied man of age within a population, “select” militias were portions of the population which were selected out of the general population, and set apart as a special select group. While the mere existence of a select militia does not necessarily exclude the co-existence of a general militia, there was great concern among some of the founders that if select militias became prominent, that this specialized distinction was a slippery-slope, which could ultimately result in the uneven application of rights, and perhaps even the revocation of the rights of the general militia, in favor of the select militia, and that over time, the select militia could become {psychologically & emotionally} separated from the common man, until it began to operate no different from a standing army. And yet again, they were right, and that is exactly what has happened. For this reason, the 2nd Amendment was phrased in the way that it was; to acknowledge the importance of militias in all their forms, but to explicitly clarify that the right to keep & bear arms is not contingent upon any special classification or membership in an official “select” militia, but rather that the right to keep & bear arms was inherent to the people in general.
Next article in this series: Who Are The Militia?
Citations
This entire Constitution series was written as a single big document over the course of several years; so, all the citations are mixed up together. When I went back to break it up into pieces, I wasn’t confident that I could redistribute all the citations & their reference numbers without screwing something up. So, I decided to leave all the citations together, and post them as the final article in the series.
