AMAC Magazine Exclusive – By Robert B. Charles
The right protected by the Second Amendment is not passing or incidental. Rather, it is at the heart of preserving all other rights. No free nation can live without “the right to keep and bear arms” to guard constitutional liberties, keep government power in check, and protect persons and property. It is a critical reason America is free.
Understanding the origins of the Second Amendment reminds us of our nation’s roots, helping persuade those who do not understand its value to recognize how vital it is for freedom.
Our Founding Fathers, the original “patriots” who delivered—at great cost—freedom to this country, felt that a standing army in peacetime was dangerous to civil liberties, as this was exactly what European tyrants used to stay in power. The Founders also understood the need for citizens to be armed. In the grievances recited in the Declaration of Independence, it is noted that King George “affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power” and “kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.”
Thus, from the beginning, Anti-Federalists believed a centralized government with an unconstrained standing army was dangerous—since that army could be used to suppress individual liberties. They promoted a more balanced approach, letting citizens remain fully armed for mobilization into militias as and when needed.
James Madison, who drafted the Second Amendment, wrote in The Federalist that “the advantage of being armed” together with “the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government … can admit of.”
In other words, even at the outset— having seen what an armed, centralized federal government could do—the Founders were on guard against a strong federal government and the abuse that it could, in future generations, inflict on individual liberties.
In essence, the Colonists trusted each other implicitly, or up to a point, and were unified in fear of an all-powerful government, which could use its unlimited power to remain in control and deploy forces against citizens who formed a standing army.
The deterrent to such abuses was a ready militia and well-armed citizenry, to the extent that a military was needed, equipped to protect themselves against tyranny. An armed, educated, freedom-loving citizenry—self-trained in firearms and prepared to defend themselves and the Republic—was necessary. Therefore, the Founders ensured that we would forever maintain the right to “keep and bear arms” and the readiness to defend liberty at home and abroad.
They did not anticipate a civil war or the need to defend against a representative, accountable, well-ordered, and highly responsive government. However, they were on guard against the natural tendency of power to concentrate and then be abused.
They believed—even at an early period in our nation’s history—in deterrence rather than wishes, hopes, and trust that those in power would remain forever incorruptible. Little opposition was heard.
The first note of opposition was a defense of states’ rights, which, rather ironically, occurred after the Civil War. After that gut-wrenching, family-splitting war that spanned four years, arguments were lofted that states should be able to hold order by restricting militia activities.
In a seminal—if controversial—1886 Supreme Court case, Presser v. Illinois, the Court declared that the Second Amendment could be eclipsed by states to stop unauthorized “formation, drilling and parading” of military groups.
This was a post-war tip to states’ rights, giving state legislatures an opening to regulate any self-formed, unlicensed, non-federally authorized militia groups. This was the beginning of the long creep toward limiting the Second Amendment.
Still, the creep started slowly. Except in 1930s laws for targeting violent organized crime, the Second Amendment received little notice until the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963—an event that rebooted arguments for regulating gun owners.
Forgotten is the fact that crime was lower when gun ownership was higher, and roughly two-thirds of Americans owned guns from WWII through the early 1970s.
Throughout most of our history, gun ownership has been not just a theoretical right but one used by the vast majority of Americans, primarily for private reasons but always with a second purpose in mind: deterring tyranny.
From the founding of our nation through its pioneer days and across the last century, Americans of all stripes owned guns, trained on them, knew how to use them, and did so regularly from hunting and target shooting to self-defense, from Boy Scouts and 4-H to Izaak Walton, and at local gun clubs. Guns are as American as apple pie and motherhood.
So, how did we get to this crazy point, where Democrat-led states and federal Democrat politicians want to take away guns, pass “red flag laws” that permit gun confiscation, and upend our traditions, history, knowledge, confidence, and ownership of guns? And why do they want that?
Whatever the stated reasons— shootings, suicides, or fraying civil order, which is an argument for gun ownership and not against it—the shadow creeps. It is a way to disarm the people and concentrate power, exactly as our Founders feared.
The truth is, this single right is vital and should be uncompromised because it ensures all the others, plus personal safety and that of families, communities, and the nation. This was the Founders’ insurance for the liberties they fought to give us.
To not see this is to not know our history, or not want to know it, or perhaps to be an active promotor of ignorance in the service of power concentration.
On the positive side, while some wish to think the world safe, filled with butterflies and invisible unicorns, others know reality. While many on the left hate guns, more Americans buy them every year now.
We are rediscovering truths of the past, even as some wish we did not know them. Female gun ownership has jumped by 177 percent since 1980, as overall gun ownership rises again. Between 2020 and 2023, 21 million Americans stepped back into the nation’s safer, stronger past by purchasing their first gun. May the trend continue, and may more and more people learn and appreciate what history teaches us: Guns are our protection.
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