Right to keep and bear arms?

Economics Political Theory
1

The second amendment state:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a , the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

I don’t understand, why people think that this amendment gives the people the right to keep and bear arms? This amendment actually FORBID the government to infringe upon that right. A right which is here without the government and its make sure that we the people don’t give the government the power to infringe upon this right, not by majority not by any means, we don’t have the right to infringe upon any other man the right to keep and bear arms (or any other right we are endowed - NOT BY THE STATE, NOT BY THE GOVERNMENT) so we can’t give this power to the government either. I believe the upside-down explanation of this amendment make further confusion and try to implant in the mind of the people that the government is the one who grant rights instead of the truth.

“We are a nation that has a government**-not the other way around**” - Ronald Reagan

2

The problem in my mind lies the principle that not knowing the legislation doesn’t excuse one from breaking the law. Since people are not crazy enough to learn it all by heart there are some points that get stressed ‘they are allowed’ and this is where the illusion is created that the rights are granted privileges by the government. Although people know that the government is supposed to serve them they very rarely seem grasp the idea that the government is not some abstract object and is in fact created by them selves.

That’s a nice one! There is also another quote that always gets me worked up when it is ran on TV. “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” - JFK

3

I like to reply to that one with: Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what your country can do to you!

4

A country can’t do anything not “for” you and not “to” you. People in the government can do something “to” you. The Constitution together with the Declaration of Independence tried to limit the things government can do, tried to establish an order where We the People tell the government what are the power of the government and where We the People can’t give any power to the government we don’t have.

About the JFK quote, I believe JFK wanted to tell us, that the government is not here to run out life but that we are here to run the government. Unfortunately it was biased by the overwhelmingly collectivist mindset of that era, where the world was divided to “we” (USA and the western allies) and “them” (SU and other communists). I believe the right quotation would be “ask not what other people can do for you, ask what you can do for other people.” and this would illustrate both the economic activity (when you do something other people need and they pay you because of that) and the “help other people” activity (when you do something other people need as a charity in order to help other people to become active participants in the first and very important circle of economic activity).

5

Of course - rights pre-exist governments, and government’s only legitimate purpose is to protect those rights, according to the DoI. BUT - many things have happened since then. First, the Constitution was created and implemented, which effectuated a coup d’etat in this country and overthrew the legitimate government created by the Articles of Confederation and established an unworkable ‘Republic’ - unworkable because, in a nation this size, this inevitably morphed into a ‘democracy’ (see http://www.lewrockwell.com/ostrowski/ostrowski72.html for a good [if exceedingly lengthy] discussion on the difference between the two). This is what Franklin meant when he said, in response to the question about what form of government the Convention had come up with, ‘A Republic - if you can keep it.’

Well, kept it we have not. Instead, the government (which performs negative interventions only) quickly grew into a State (which primarily performs positive interventions). This is not a recent phenomenon - Thomas Jefferson even noted this in his later days:

“Our government is taking so steady a course as to show by what course it will come to destruction, to wit by consolidation first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence. The engine of consolidation will be the federal judiciary; the other two branches the corrupting and corrupted instruments.”

So as a natural part of this process, the State has convinced people (who runs our public schools again? oh yeah…) that there is such a thing as ‘Constitutional Rights’ - rather than the very different ‘Constitutionally guaranteed rights’ - and at the same time they have chipped away at those rights (once Marshall embedded the power of judicial review into the SC, this was inevitable), and so over time, the State has created a situation wherein the average citizen has not been taught to distinguish between a ‘right’ and a ‘State granted privilege’.

Perhaps Higgs (damn, I’m quoting a lot of Higgs lately) says it best, in Against Leviathan:

“…the US government is growing stronger, not weaker, all things considered. Perhaps the most important reason for this ongoing growth of government is ideological; it is that so few people in the United States today really give a damn about living as free men and women. After a century of fighting a losing battle against their own governments, the American people have finally accepted that the best course open to them is simply to label their servitude as freedom and to concentrate on enjoying the creature comforts that the government still permits them to possess. They may be slaves, but they are affluent slaves, and that condition is good enough for them.”

Or to go back a few more years, Shaw nailed it:

“Liberty means responsibility - that is why most men dread it.”

6

This is the common wisdom, but as with much of this sort of ‘wisdom’, it is false. It would be more accurate to say “The Articles of Confederation together with the DoI…” - but even that would not quite beaccurate. I do not think you understand that the Constitution waswritten and implemented illegally, by Hamilton and his Federalist buddies, who were the speculator and moneyed class, at the expense of the debtor/artisan class who preferred the AoC. In essence, the Constitution represented an overthrow of the existing government of the US. Course, you won’t learn about that in government (or even most private) schools. You will need to educate yourself on the subject. I strongly suggest you start with Nock’s ‘Our Enemy the State’:

Can also be downloaded from mises.org - literature - authors - Albert Jay Nock

This section in particular is relevant:

The sum of the matter is that while the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty [ozzy43: i.e. twin doctrines at the heart of the Declaration of Independence] the afforded a set of principles upon which all interests could unite, and practically all did unite, with the aim of securing political independence, it did not afford a satisfactory set of principles on which to found the new American State. When political independence was secured, the stark doctrine of the Declaration went into abeyance, with only a distorted simulacrum of its principles surviving. The rights of life and liberty were recognized by a mere constitutional formality left open to eviscerating interpretations, or, where these were for any reason deemed superfluous, to simple executive disregard; and all consideration of the rights attending “the pursuit of happiness” was narrowed down to a plenary acceptance of Locke’s doctrine of the preeminent rights of property, with law-made property on an equal footing with labour-made property. As for popular sovereignty, the new State had to be republican in form, for no other would suit the general temper of the people; and hence its peculiar task was to preserve the appearance of actual republicanism without the reality. To do this, it took over the apparatus which we have seen the English merchant-State adopting when confronted with a like task – the apparatus of a representative or parliamentary system. Moreover, it improved upon the British model of this apparatus by adding three auxiliary devices which time has proved most effective. These were, first, the device of the fixed term, which regulates the administration of our system by astronomical rather than political considerations – by the motion of the earth around the sun rather than by political exigency; second, the device of judicial review and interpretation, which, as we have already observed, is a process whereby anything may be made to mean anything; third, the device of requiring legislators to reside in the district they represent, which puts the highest conceivable premium upon pliancy and venality, and is therefore the best mechanism for rapidly building up an immense body of patronage. It may be perceived at once that all these devices tend of themselves to work smoothly and harmoniously towards a great centralization of State power, and that their working in this direction may be indefinitely accelerated with the utmost economy of effort.

7

I have read ‘Our Enemy the State’ and I understand and completely agree with you about this, but even in this current Constitution the words you will find are:

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a , the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

and this by no means can be interpreted as something the government grant to the people, but quite the other way around.

So even in the current constitution there is a strong element (although not nearly as strong as in the AoC) which actually make this document the defender of pre-existed rights and not the document of granting rights. The real problem is not in the Constitution; the real problem is that the people weren’t being able to keep even the Republic established by the current Constitution.

8

That principle is fine within customary and common law legal systems, but in today’s day and age it has no place and is pernicious: there are far too many legislative laws and executive-bureaucratic regulations for it to be deemed reasonable for the average person to be expected to know them anymore.

9

I think it was more of an altruistic call to service.

10

No he wanted to encourage people to sacrifice for the government, not run the government. JFK was himself a collectivist.

11

In A Constitutional History of Secession John Remington Graham places the origin of the second amendment in the Glorious Revolution. He argues that the purpose of popular firearm ownership was to deny the sovereign the ability to claim that a standing army is necessary.

Well it occurs to me that when 17th century Englishmen worried about a standing army it wasn’t because they thought the king might start a war - the English were quite warlike. It was because they knew that a standing army would enable the king to enforce unpopular policies. In other words they were opposed to what we would today call a police force.

12

This part of the constitution implies that people are allowed to walk around carrying guns, swords, and even atom bombs in plain sight.

Alas, judges don’t respect the the law.

13

Cool - sorry for drawing the wrong conclusion. :wink:

You are right that there are at least apparent attempts in the Constitution to limit governmental powers, and that is it the people - both the general citizenry and the politicos - who have abandoned the notion of a limited government of enumerated powers in favor of democracy and positivism.

And in fact, this is precisely why I lean more anarchist than minarchist. Tried the minarchy thing - didn’t work. Might be workable on a smaller scale, but not here. Doesn’t mean I won’t support folks like Ron Paul who want to move us in the right direction, of course. Anything toward less government is a step in the right direction, and that includes the Constitutionalist position.

14

Well, I am still a minarchist :slight_smile: because I think it is achievable if we limit the government to police and judicial action. So what we need is a Constitution which clearly enumerates only police and judicial powers to the government and forbid any other activity for them. Of course there would be some question about why would such a Constitution be a bounding document to people who never signed it or to the heirs of the people who signed it (as Lysander Spooner ask in his ‘No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority’) but hey there is no such thing as a perfect world.

15

Minarchy is certainly superior to what we’ve got going in this country - and in most - currently, so no problem supporting your proposal at this time. :slight_smile:

BTW, I assume you mean limit the federal (or national) govt to police and judicial action? If so, why not limit police action to localities and, to a lesser degree, states - that’s where the crime is committed, after all. Same for judiciary. And allow for only a skeletal structure to exist at the national level for coordination purposes, and ensure ALL taxation authority can go no higher than township/county level. This means states and fed have to beg counties/townships for funds, which will obviously keep the national level quite lean. The Feds should be on a perpetual starvation diet. In other words, something similar to the Articles of Confederation, only even more locally devolved. If you do not - from the outset - create a structure that intentionally and forcibly devolves power and keeps it away from the higher levels of hierarchy, it’s pretty easy to see how we could wind up right back where we are.

16

I could probably agree. I believe that Frank Chodorov said that the income tax is the road to socialism, unlimited government. Well not just the income tax, the fiat money is also. So no income tax, no fiat money (back to real gold standard), and I am pretty much sure that a minimalist limited government with enumerated powers is possible. And of course income tax and money control is not among police and judicial activity…

17

I’m not sure even a minarchist type of government would be safe. Politicos have been able to twist the Constitiution around, so what would keep them from twisting any new agreement around? Second the Constitution, as noted earlier, did not enable people to decline participation. That fact, I think, lies at the center of they problems we have with governments. Even if you’re called a citizen, you’re still a subject to a higher authority. Even in a mincharchist style of government, people will still sign their lives away for security. Much the same thing happened at the disolution of the Western Roman Empire. People were willing to bind themselves as slaves, in addition, they were willing to bind their children and children’s children to involuntary servitude; a practice that went on for centuries. The only solution to that corundrum is the proposition that only voluntary contracts are enforceable.

18

But didn’t we start from that point and grow into what we are now? I would add to your list the right to secede. I don’t think the central government can ever be controllable otherwise.

19

You see, that’s the problem I am talking about, the upside down Constitution where you think that the government gives you the right and not the other way around. You don’t have to write rights in the Constitution, you just have to write in what you can’t do (can’t steal, can’t kill - can’t jeopardize other individual’s life and property), and what the government can and actually must do (help you to defend your life and property - police and judiciary activity). That’s it. The right to secede is pre-existing, the government can’t give you that right nor can it take away from you, just as any other right under the Sun. In short you don’t need to deal with government ever, unless you broke the law and the law is very simple, don’t steal (fraud is also theft), don’t kill, and don’t jeopardize other people life and property. I believe in that kind of environment secession won’t be an issue at all, it would be one of the rights you never need to use, except if the government don’t do his job (don’t help you to protect your life and property). Secession is necessary only in an environment where someone take away your property or/and your life and of course if someone stay on your way of your pursuit of happiness. As Frederic Bastiat told us… “If goods can’t cross borders, armies will”. Borders in this case are not only country borders.

20

Exactly my point - been there, done that, look how it worked out. I see no reason why the same would not repeat, especially given that 90+% of the citizenry does not even grasp this fact. Wasn’t it Einstein who said doing something over and over and expecting a different result was one definition of insanity?