Parry writes: "False history continues to kill Americans, as we saw once
again last week at Umpqua Community College in Oregon."
Doug Allen of Greenville, North Carolina, holds a pro-gun flag during a
protest near the White House. (photo: Larry Downing/Reuters)
The Second Amendment's Fake History
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
08 October 15
A numbness followed the latest mass shooting - this time at a community
college in Oregon. Many Americans were frozen in futility as powerful
political forces asserted that the Second Amendment prohibits any gun laws.
But that claim is historically false, writes Robert Parry.
False history continues to kill Americans, as we saw once again last week at
Umpqua Community College in Oregon where a disturbed young man whose mother
had loaded the house with loaded handguns and rifles executed nine people
and then committed suicide - one more mind-numbing slaughter made possible,
in part, by an erroneous understanding of the Second Amendment.
A key reason why the United States is frozen in political paralysis, unable
to protect its citizens from the next deranged gunman and the next massacre,
is that many on the American Right (and some on the Left) have sold much of
the country on a false history regarding the Second Amendment. Gun-rights
advocates insist that the carnage can't be stopped because it was part of
what the Constitution's Framers designed.
Republican presidential candidates have been among the leaders in promoting
this fake narrative, with surgeon Ben Carson saying the latest slaughter and
all the other thousands of shootings are just part of the price of freedom.
"I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking
the right to arm ourselves away," Carson said, noting that he had removed
bullets from a number of gunshot victims.
But the Constitution's Framers in 1787 and the authors of the Bill of Rights
in the First Congress in 1789 never intended the Second Amendment to be
construed as the right for individuals to take up arms against the Republic.
In fact, their intent was the opposite.
The actual goal of the Second Amendment was to promote state militias for
the maintenance of order in a time of political uprisings, potential slave
revolts and simmering hostilities with both European powers and Native
Americans on the frontiers. Indeed, its defined purpose was to achieve
"security" against disruptions to the country's republican form of
government. The Second Amendment read:
"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." In
other words, if read in context, it's clear that the Second Amendment was
enacted so each state would have the specific right to form "a
well-regulated militia" to maintain "security," i.e., to put down armed
disorder and protect its citizens.
In the late Eighteenth Century, the meaning of "bearing" arms also referred
to a citizen being part of a militia or army. It didn't mean that an
individual had the right to possess whatever number of high-capacity killing
machines that he or she might want. Indeed, the most lethal weapon that
early Americans owned was a slow-loading, single-fired musket or rifle.
No Anarchists
Yet, one of the false themes peddled by some on the Right and the Left is
that the Framers, having won a revolution against the British Crown, wanted
to arm the population so the people could rebel against the Republic created
by the U.S. Constitution. This vision of the Framers of the Constitution and
members of the First Congress as some anarchists wanting an armed population
to overthrow the government if the people weren't happy with something is
completely opposite of what was intended.
Whatever one thinks about the Federalists, who were the principal
constitutional Framers and the leaders of the First Congress, they
constituted the early national establishment - people like George
Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris. They
feared that their new creation, a constitutional republic in an age of
monarchies, was threatened by the potential for violent chaos, which is what
European aristocrats predicted.
According to the idea of a representative democracy, the Framers sought a
system that reflected the will of the citizens but within a framework that
constrained the passions of democracy. In other words, the Constitution
sought to channel political disputes into non-violent competition among
various interests. The Framers also recognized how fragile the nation's
independence was and how domestic rebellions could be exploited by European
powers.
Indeed, one of the crises that led to the Constitutional Convention in the
summer of 1787 was the inability of the old system under the Articles of
Confederation to put down Shays's Rebellion in western Massachusetts in
1786-87. So, the Federalists were seeking a system that would ensure
"domestic Tranquility," as they explained in the Constitution's Preamble.
They did not want endless civil strife.
The whole idea of the Constitution - with its mix of voting, elected and
appointed representatives, and checks and balances - was to create a
political structure that made violence unnecessary. In other words, the
Framers weren't encouraging violent uprisings against the Republic that they
were founding. To the contrary, they characterized violence against the
constitutional system as "treason" in Article III, Section 3. They also
committed the federal government to protect each state from "domestic
Violence," in Article IV, Section 4.
One of the first uses of the new state militias formed under the Second
Amendment and the Militia Acts, which required able-bodied men to report for
duty with their own muskets, was for President Washington to lead a
federalized force of militiamen against the Whiskey Rebellion, a tax revolt
in western Pennsylvania in 1794.
In the South, one of the principal reasons for a militia was to rally armed
whites to put down slave uprisings. Again, the Second Amendment was meant to
maintain public order - even an unjust order - rather than to empower the
oppressed to take up arms against the government. That latter idea was a
modern reinterpretation - or distortion - of the history.
The Constitution's Framers were not some early version of Leon Trotsky
favoring permanent revolution. The most radical-talking leader at the time,
Thomas Jefferson, had little to do with either the Constitution or the Bill
of Rights since he was serving as a diplomat in France at the time.
Yet, the revisionists who have transformed the meaning of the Second
Amendment love to cite provocative comments by Jefferson, such as a quote
from a 1787 letter criticizing the Constitution for its commander-in-chief
provisions. Jefferson argued that violence, like Shays's Rebellion, was to
be welcomed. He declared that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from
time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's [sic]
natural manure."
It is ironic, however, that Jefferson was never willing to risk his own
blood as that "natural manure." During the Revolutionary War when traitor
Benedict Arnold led a force of Loyalists against Richmond, Jefferson, who
was then Virginia's governor, declined to rally the state militia in defense
of the capital but rather fled for his life. Later, when British cavalry
approached Charlottesville and his home of Monticello, Gov. Jefferson again
took flight.
However, Jefferson was eager for Virginia to have a state militia of armed
whites to crush possible black slave rebellions, another prospect that
terrified him. As a slaveholder and a pseudo-scientific racist, Jefferson
surely did not envision blacks as having any individual right to own guns
themselves or to fight for their own liberty. Reflecting on blacks who
fought bravely in the Revolution, Jefferson concluded that their courage was
an illusion resulting from their intellectual inability to recognize danger.
Yet, whatever one thinks of Jefferson's racism and cowardice, it's a
historical error to cite Jefferson in any way as speaking definitively about
what the Framers intended with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He
was not directly involved in either.
A Collective Right
The real history of the Second Amendment was well understood both by
citizens and courts in the generations after the Constitution and Bill of
Rights were enacted. For most of the years of the Republic, the U.S. Supreme
Court interpreted the Second Amendment as a collective right, allowing
Americans to participate in a "well-regulated Militia," not an individual
right to buy the latest weaponry at a gun show or stockpile a military-style
arsenal in the basement.
It's true that many Americans owned a musket or rifle in those early years
especially on the frontier, but regulations on munitions were still common
in cities where storing of gunpowder, for instance, represented a threat to
the public safety. As the nation spread westward, so did common-sense
restrictions on gun violence. Sheriffs in some of the wildest of Wild West
towns enforced gun bans that today would prompt a recall election financed
by the National Rifle Association.
However, in recent decades - understanding the power of narrative on the
human imagination - a resurgent American Right (and some on the Left)
rewrote the history of the Founding era, dispatching "researchers" to
cherry-pick or fabricate quotes from Revolutionary War leaders to create
politically convenient illusions. [See, for instance, Steven Krulik's
compilation of apocryphal or out-of-context gun quotes.]
That bogus history gave rise to the image of the Framers being wild-eyed
radicals encouraging armed rebellion against the Republic. Rather than
people who believed in the rule of law and social order, the Framers were
contorted into crazies who wanted citizens to be empowered to shoot police,
soldiers, elected representatives and government officials.
This false history was advanced particularly by the American Right in the
last half of the Twentieth Century as a kind of neo-Confederate call to
arms, with the goal of rallying whites into a near-insurrectionary fury
particularly in the South but also in rural areas of the North and West.
Many fancied themselves an armed resistance against the tyrannical federal
government.
Southern whites brandished guns and engaged in violence to resist the civil
rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, when the federal government finally
stepped in to end Jim Crow laws and racial segregation. In the 1990s,
"citizens militias" began to pop up in reaction to the election of Democrat
Bill Clinton, culminating in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1994.
While designed primarily for the weak-minded, the Right's faux Founding
history also had an impact on right-wing "intellectuals" including
Republican lawyers who worked their way up through the federal judiciary
under Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.
By 2008, these right-wing jurists held a majority on the U.S. Supreme Court
and could thus overturn generations of legal precedents and declare that the
Second Amendment established an individual right for Americans to own guns.
Though even these five right-wing justices accepted society's right to
protect the general welfare of the population through some gun control, the
Supreme Court's ruling effectively "validated" the Right's made-up history.
The ruling created a political dynamic in which even liberals in national
politics, the likes of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, had to genuflect to the
supposed Second Amendment right of Americans to parade around in public with
guns on their hips and high-powered semi-automatic rifles slung over their
shoulders.
What the Framers Wanted?
As guns-right activists struck down gun regulations in Congress and in
statehouses across the nation, their dominant argument was that the Second
Amendment offered no leeway for restrictions on gun ownership; it's what the
Framers wanted.
So, pretty much any unstable person could load up with a vast killing
capacity and slouch off to a bar, a work place, a church or a school - even
an elementary school - and treat fellow Americans as targets in a violent
video game. Somehow, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
was overtaken by the "right" to own an AR-15 with a 30-or-100-bullet
magazine.
When right-wing politicians talk about the Second Amendment now, they don't
even bother to include the preamble that explains the point of the
amendment. The entire amendment is only 26 words. But the likes of Sen. Ted
Cruz, R-Texas, another Republican presidential candidate, find the preamble
inconvenient because it would undercut the false storyline. So they just lop
off the first 12 words.
Nor do they explain what the Framers meant by "bear arms." The phrase
reflected the reasoning in the Second Amendment's preamble that the whole
point was to create "well-regulated" state militias to maintain "security,"
not to free up anybody with a beef to kill government officials or citizens
of a disapproved race or creed. (The Oregon gunman targeted practicing
Christians; a previous gunman in South Carolina went after African-Americans
in a church.)
Yet, after the massacre of 20 first-graders and six educators in Newtown,
Connecticut, in December 2012, Fox News personality Andrew Napolitano
declared: "The historical reality of the Second Amendment's protection of
the right to keep and bear arms is not that it protects the right to shoot
deer. It protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to
shoot at them effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon
us."
At the time, the clear message from the Right was that armed Americans must
confront the "tyrannical" Barack Obama - the twice-elected President of the
United States (and the first African-American to hold that office) -
especially if he pressed ahead seeking commonsense gun restrictions.
But Napolitano is simply wrong on the history. The Second Amendment was
designed for states to maintain "security," whether that meant putting down
a tax rebellion in Pennsylvania, a slave revolt in the South or a Native
American uprising on the frontier. One can disagree about the rightness of
those actions by state or federal authorities, but the history is clear.
The Second Amendment was not designed to encourage violence against the
government or - for that matter - to enable troubled individuals to murder
large numbers of their fellow citizens.
________________________________________
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories
for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest
book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from
Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry's trilogy on
the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for
only $34. The trilogy includes America's Stolen Narrative. For details on
this offer, click here.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Doug Allen of Greenville, North Carolina, holds a pro-gun flag during a
protest near the White House. (photo: Larry Downing/Reuters)
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/10/07/the-second-amendments-fake-history/htt
ps://consortiumnews.com/2015/10/07/the-second-amendments-fake-history/
The Second Amendment's Fake History
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
08 October 15
A numbness followed the latest mass shooting - this time at a community
college in Oregon. Many Americans were frozen in futility as powerful
political forces asserted that the Second Amendment prohibits any gun laws.
But that claim is historically false, writes Robert Parry.
alse history continues to kill Americans, as we saw once again last week at
Umpqua Community College in Oregon where a disturbed young man whose mother
had loaded the house with loaded handguns and rifles executed nine people
and then committed suicide - one more mind-numbing slaughter made possible,
in part, by an erroneous understanding of the Second Amendment.
A key reason why the United States is frozen in political paralysis, unable
to protect its citizens from the next deranged gunman and the next massacre,
is that many on the American Right (and some on the Left) have sold much of
the country on a false history regarding the Second Amendment. Gun-rights
advocates insist that the carnage can't be stopped because it was part of
what the Constitution's Framers designed.
Republican presidential candidates have been among the leaders in promoting
this fake narrative, with surgeon Ben Carson saying the latest slaughter and
all the other thousands of shootings are just part of the price of freedom.
"I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking
the right to arm ourselves away," Carson said, noting that he had removed
bullets from a number of gunshot victims.
But the Constitution's Framers in 1787 and the authors of the Bill of Rights
in the First Congress in 1789 never intended the Second Amendment to be
construed as the right for individuals to take up arms against the Republic.
In fact, their intent was the opposite.
The actual goal of the Second Amendment was to promote state militias for
the maintenance of order in a time of political uprisings, potential slave
revolts and simmering hostilities with both European powers and Native
Americans on the frontiers. Indeed, its defined purpose was to achieve
"security" against disruptions to the country's republican form of
government. The Second Amendment read:
"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." In
other words, if read in context, it's clear that the Second Amendment was
enacted so each state would have the specific right to form "a
well-regulated militia" to maintain "security," i.e., to put down armed
disorder and protect its citizens.
In the late Eighteenth Century, the meaning of "bearing" arms also referred
to a citizen being part of a militia or army. It didn't mean that an
individual had the right to possess whatever number of high-capacity killing
machines that he or she might want. Indeed, the most lethal weapon that
early Americans owned was a slow-loading, single-fired musket or rifle.
No Anarchists
Yet, one of the false themes peddled by some on the Right and the Left is
that the Framers, having won a revolution against the British Crown, wanted
to arm the population so the people could rebel against the Republic created
by the U.S. Constitution. This vision of the Framers of the Constitution and
members of the First Congress as some anarchists wanting an armed population
to overthrow the government if the people weren't happy with something is
completely opposite of what was intended.
Whatever one thinks about the Federalists, who were the principal
constitutional Framers and the leaders of the First Congress, they
constituted the early national establishment - people like George
Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris. They
feared that their new creation, a constitutional republic in an age of
monarchies, was threatened by the potential for violent chaos, which is what
European aristocrats predicted.
According to the idea of a representative democracy, the Framers sought a
system that reflected the will of the citizens but within a framework that
constrained the passions of democracy. In other words, the Constitution
sought to channel political disputes into non-violent competition among
various interests. The Framers also recognized how fragile the nation's
independence was and how domestic rebellions could be exploited by European
powers.
Indeed, one of the crises that led to the Constitutional Convention in the
summer of 1787 was the inability of the old system under the Articles of
Confederation to put down Shays's Rebellion in western Massachusetts in
1786-87. So, the Federalists were seeking a system that would ensure
"domestic Tranquility," as they explained in the Constitution's Preamble.
They did not want endless civil strife.
The whole idea of the Constitution - with its mix of voting, elected and
appointed representatives, and checks and balances - was to create a
political structure that made violence unnecessary. In other words, the
Framers weren't encouraging violent uprisings against the Republic that they
were founding. To the contrary, they characterized violence against the
constitutional system as "treason" in Article III, Section 3. They also
committed the federal government to protect each state from "domestic
Violence," in Article IV, Section 4.
One of the first uses of the new state militias formed under the Second
Amendment and the Militia Acts, which required able-bodied men to report for
duty with their own muskets, was for President Washington to lead a
federalized force of militiamen against the Whiskey Rebellion, a tax revolt
in western Pennsylvania in 1794.
In the South, one of the principal reasons for a militia was to rally armed
whites to put down slave uprisings. Again, the Second Amendment was meant to
maintain public order - even an unjust order - rather than to empower the
oppressed to take up arms against the government. That latter idea was a
modern reinterpretation - or distortion - of the history.
The Constitution's Framers were not some early version of Leon Trotsky
favoring permanent revolution. The most radical-talking leader at the time,
Thomas Jefferson, had little to do with either the Constitution or the Bill
of Rights since he was serving as a diplomat in France at the time.
Yet, the revisionists who have transformed the meaning of the Second
Amendment love to cite provocative comments by Jefferson, such as a quote
from a 1787 letter criticizing the Constitution for its commander-in-chief
provisions. Jefferson argued that violence, like Shays's Rebellion, was to
be welcomed. He declared that "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from
time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's [sic]
natural manure."
It is ironic, however, that Jefferson was never willing to risk his own
blood as that "natural manure." During the Revolutionary War when traitor
Benedict Arnold led a force of Loyalists against Richmond, Jefferson, who
was then Virginia's governor, declined to rally the state militia in defense
of the capital but rather fled for his life. Later, when British cavalry
approached Charlottesville and his home of Monticello, Gov. Jefferson again
took flight.
However, Jefferson was eager for Virginia to have a state militia of armed
whites to crush possible black slave rebellions, another prospect that
terrified him. As a slaveholder and a pseudo-scientific racist, Jefferson
surely did not envision blacks as having any individual right to own guns
themselves or to fight for their own liberty. Reflecting on blacks who
fought bravely in the Revolution, Jefferson concluded that their courage was
an illusion resulting from their intellectual inability to recognize danger.
Yet, whatever one thinks of Jefferson's racism and cowardice, it's a
historical error to cite Jefferson in any way as speaking definitively about
what the Framers intended with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He
was not directly involved in either.
A Collective Right
The real history of the Second Amendment was well understood both by
citizens and courts in the generations after the Constitution and Bill of
Rights were enacted. For most of the years of the Republic, the U.S. Supreme
Court interpreted the Second Amendment as a collective right, allowing
Americans to participate in a "well-regulated Militia," not an individual
right to buy the latest weaponry at a gun show or stockpile a military-style
arsenal in the basement.
It's true that many Americans owned a musket or rifle in those early years
especially on the frontier, but regulations on munitions were still common
in cities where storing of gunpowder, for instance, represented a threat to
the public safety. As the nation spread westward, so did common-sense
restrictions on gun violence. Sheriffs in some of the wildest of Wild West
towns enforced gun bans that today would prompt a recall election financed
by the National Rifle Association.
However, in recent decades - understanding the power of narrative on the
human imagination - a resurgent American Right (and some on the Left)
rewrote the history of the Founding era, dispatching "researchers" to
cherry-pick or fabricate quotes from Revolutionary War leaders to create
politically convenient illusions. [See, for instance, Steven Krulik's
compilation of apocryphal or out-of-context gun quotes.]
That bogus history gave rise to the image of the Framers being wild-eyed
radicals encouraging armed rebellion against the Republic. Rather than
people who believed in the rule of law and social order, the Framers were
contorted into crazies who wanted citizens to be empowered to shoot police,
soldiers, elected representatives and government officials.
This false history was advanced particularly by the American Right in the
last half of the Twentieth Century as a kind of neo-Confederate call to
arms, with the goal of rallying whites into a near-insurrectionary fury
particularly in the South but also in rural areas of the North and West.
Many fancied themselves an armed resistance against the tyrannical federal
government.
Southern whites brandished guns and engaged in violence to resist the civil
rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, when the federal government finally
stepped in to end Jim Crow laws and racial segregation. In the 1990s,
"citizens militias" began to pop up in reaction to the election of Democrat
Bill Clinton, culminating in the Oklahoma City bombing of 1994.
While designed primarily for the weak-minded, the Right's faux Founding
history also had an impact on right-wing "intellectuals" including
Republican lawyers who worked their way up through the federal judiciary
under Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush.
By 2008, these right-wing jurists held a majority on the U.S. Supreme Court
and could thus overturn generations of legal precedents and declare that the
Second Amendment established an individual right for Americans to own guns.
Though even these five right-wing justices accepted society's right to
protect the general welfare of the population through some gun control, the
Supreme Court's ruling effectively "validated" the Right's made-up history.
The ruling created a political dynamic in which even liberals in national
politics, the likes of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, had to genuflect to the
supposed Second Amendment right of Americans to parade around in public with
guns on their hips and high-powered semi-automatic rifles slung over their
shoulders.
What the Framers Wanted?
As guns-right activists struck down gun regulations in Congress and in
statehouses across the nation, their dominant argument was that the Second
Amendment offered no leeway for restrictions on gun ownership; it's what the
Framers wanted.
So, pretty much any unstable person could load up with a vast killing
capacity and slouch off to a bar, a work place, a church or a school - even
an elementary school - and treat fellow Americans as targets in a violent
video game. Somehow, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
was overtaken by the "right" to own an AR-15 with a 30-or-100-bullet
magazine.
When right-wing politicians talk about the Second Amendment now, they don't
even bother to include the preamble that explains the point of the
amendment. The entire amendment is only 26 words. But the likes of Sen. Ted
Cruz, R-Texas, another Republican presidential candidate, find the preamble
inconvenient because it would undercut the false storyline. So they just lop
off the first 12 words.
Nor do they explain what the Framers meant by "bear arms." The phrase
reflected the reasoning in the Second Amendment's preamble that the whole
point was to create "well-regulated" state militias to maintain "security,"
not to free up anybody with a beef to kill government officials or citizens
of a disapproved race or creed. (The Oregon gunman targeted practicing
Christians; a previous gunman in South Carolina went after African-Americans
in a church.)
Yet, after the massacre of 20 first-graders and six educators in Newtown,
Connecticut, in December 2012, Fox News personality Andrew Napolitano
declared: "The historical reality of the Second Amendment's protection of
the right to keep and bear arms is not that it protects the right to shoot
deer. It protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to
shoot at them effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon
us."
At the time, the clear message from the Right was that armed Americans must
confront the "tyrannical" Barack Obama - the twice-elected President of the
United States (and the first African-American to hold that office) -
especially if he pressed ahead seeking commonsense gun restrictions.
But Napolitano is simply wrong on the history. The Second Amendment was
designed for states to maintain "security," whether that meant putting down
a tax rebellion in Pennsylvania, a slave revolt in the South or a Native
American uprising on the frontier. One can disagree about the rightness of
those actions by state or federal authorities, but the history is clear.
The Second Amendment was not designed to encourage violence against the
government or - for that matter - to enable troubled individuals to murder
large numbers of their fellow citizens.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories
for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest
book, America's Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from
Amazon and barnesandnoble.com). You also can order Robert Parry's trilogy on
the Bush Family and its connections to various right-wing operatives for
only $34. The trilogy includes America's Stolen Narrative. For details on
this offer, click here.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize