The True Meaning of the Second Amendment

Well, it may be the most controversial and the most contentious right that we have as Americans – the right to keep and bear arms. Now, the root of that contention is in the often misunderstood intention of the Founders and Framers.

So, what is the Second Amendment really about?

Well, there are so many questions being debated in the media these days about what rights we have under the Second Amendment. One of those questions that has come up, is the Second Amendment outdated? If the Founding Fathers of this country had been aware of the kind of weapons we would have today, would they have kept the Second amendment in the Bill of Rights? And is the Second Amendment really about protecting yourself, or is it more about hunting and sportsmanship?

Well, let’s start with the actual language of the amendment. It reads: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, and the right of the people to keep and to bear Arms shall not be infringed.” Well, over the years Politico, the Atlantic, The New Yorker, and other media outlets have reported about the National Rifle Association’s efforts in the 1980′s, that they say, caused the well-regulated militia part of the Second Amendment to become ignored. And thanks to what all-out push by the NRA, the meaning of the Second Amendment was expanded from the militia to the individual. Jeffrey Toobin – a senior legal analyst for CNN, a staff writer for The New Yorker – he wrote an article for the magazine on this very topic. He writes this: “The re-interpretation of the Second Amendment was an elaborate and brilliantly executed political operation, inside and outside of government. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 brought a gun rights enthusiast to the White House…” “…At the same time, Orrin Hatch, the Utah Republican, became chairman of an important subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and he commissioned a report that claimed to find clear and long-lost proof that the Second Amendment to our Constitution was intended as an individual right of the American citizen to keep and to carry arms in a peaceful manner, for protection of himself, his family, and his freedoms.”

Well, now Toobin’s analysis may be historically correct in his observation of the change in the public’s understanding of the Second Amendment today, but when he gets it wrong is when he indicates that the Second Amendment did not originally grant the right of private ownership of a gun for individuals. Let’s read that Second Amendment one more time just for clarity: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, and the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.” So, what about those well-regulated militias? What are we talking about? What were the Framers talking about?

See, the answer lies in the history of our country. Of all the fears held by our Founding Fathers, none was stronger than the fear of standing armies. As constitutional scholar David E. Young has observed, “The necessity of an armed populace, protection against disarming of the citizenry, and the need to guard against a select militia and assure a real militia which could defend liberty against any standing forces the government might raise were topics interspersed throughout the ratification period.”

Now, this is likely a very foreign concept to many Americans. But understand this, the very first battle over the Second Amendment was not about whether or not the people should be armed. It was he given at the time of the writing of the Bill of Rights – everybody was armed. No, the battle was over whether or not we would have a standing army. A battle between the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. The Anti-Federalists – among them George Mason, Patrick Henry, and Samuel Adams – were staunch advocates of the inclusion of a Bill of Rights in the Constitution because they did not trust the power of the federal government to be self-restrained.

Don Kates, a constitutional and Second Amendment scholar, explains it like this: “During the ratification debate, the Federalists vehemently denied that the federal government would have the power to infringe freedom of expression, religion, and other basic rights – expressly including the right to arms. In this context, Madison secured ratification by his commitment to support and to safeguard the fundamental rights that all agreed should never be infringed.”

Now, on the other side of the debate were the Federalists. That included John Jay, James Madison, and George Washington. These men supported a Second Amendment because they believed that a central federal government would be capable of controlling a standing army. Instead of a standing army, Anti-Federalists wanted every able-bodied man in America to be armed in the event that a federal government, or even America’s own standing army, turned against its own people.

So what you need to know is that for many Americans this is a very difficult and uncomfortable truth – the Second Amendment is not about hunting, it’s not about defense of your property. The Second Amendment was written by men who ultimately believed that governments and armies would turn on their own people. And it was written as a way to guarantee that that would never happen.