One Reason Why America is Different

Guns scare most people, and with good reason. Perhaps as much as anything, the right to keep and bear arms represents the very nature of the relationship of the People to their government. As someone once summarized, the People have a government, not vice versa. The Second Amendment is both a manifestation and a reminder of that fundamental arrangement.

Charles C.W. Cooke, a former(?) Briton who writes for National Review recently had an article published about this. He grew up believing that Americans were "batty" and wondered, "Who needs an AR-15? What is all this nonsense about 'liberty'? If you want to play with weapons, join the military." He started out with that in mind as he put together his thesis in school. As he got into the topic, he discovered some interesting things.

Tench Coxe, the 1789 delegate from Pennsylvania, on the importance of the proposed Second Amendment noted: "As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms."

One great quote from Cooke's article, "As Coxe implied, the oft-repeated notion that the Second Amendment exists as an anachronism or was passed to protect 'sport shooting' or 'hunting' is as defective as the idea that the First Amendment exists to protect Shakespeare or the Beatles. Certainly it does those things, too. But primarily such protections were chiseled deep into American scripture in order to afford the people the perennial scope to take their government to task."

He goes on to say, "Nobody doubts what guns do. The important question is, Who in society gets such weapons?" He also points out that it was John Locke's beliefs that led us to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (as expressed by Thomas Jefferson). "...from the notion that one controls one's body and may defend it, we get the attendant right to bear arms; you can't defend yourself with parchment." "The police, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly held, are employees of the public, not the sole enforcers of public order. Americans who would leave the means of violence in the hands of the state and, inevitably, the criminals would remove the means of self-defense from the one group in American life for whom the social compact was constructed: the People."

It seems to me that there is too much unjustified trust in the government to handle all our affairs. As Mr. Cooke points out, our own history shows that governments can and do go bad, and that "it did happen here." In the 17th century, he notes, "colonies prohibited the sale of guns to Indians, while the 'Black Codes' of 18th-century Louisiana required free French colonists not only to disarm but to beat 'any black carrying any potential weapon.'" "After the Civil War, the Democratic party's own 'Black Codes,' which were designed to prohibit freed slaves from owning guns in the South, had the same execrable purpose. [As a response to this abuse] the first draft of the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act rendered it a federal crime to 'deprive any citizen of the United States of any arms or weapons he may have in his house or possession for the defense of his person, family, or property." It's easy to say it can't happen here, that we can't become like Venezuela. History says otherwise, I think. "We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion."

As unpleasant as guns may be to some or many, it seems to me that things would be very different (worse, I think) without them.