Republicanism and the Second Amendment

I started this blog at the beginning of graduate school when I was first recognizing my interest, and I dare say talent, for intellectual history. Specifically trying to grasp the thinking of people in the past and understanding the primary sources within the context of the time. Empathy is the historian's friend, one must be able to put yourself there and try to imagine facing life without the benefit of hindsight. In other words, tell the story without letting on that you already know the ending; how we also approach life in the present. Maybe that is obvious, maybe it is intuitive, but many people I know fall into the trap of automatically thinking that they are superior to people living in the past because we know what happened next. Our country has often approached problems and choices with one eye on the past and one eye to the future.

In the wake of the latest headline-grabbing school shooting in Oregon, we Americans find ourselves once again deep in debate about guns. It has mostly been two main sides talking past each other, those on the left side pleading to no one in particular that the country needs stronger regulations and background checks on who can purchase firearms, and those on the right furiously fighting any of these proposals. While when pressed, gun enthusiasts fall back on the fallacy of tradition, that the second amendment guarantees their right as individuals to own as many firearms as they want. Pressed further, their utilitarian argument is that people need to be armed in order to overthrow the government if it turns tyrannical. At its heart this is a simple appeal to authority, 'the founders said I can have guns, who are you to question them?' This does not hold any logical weight, as Australian comedian Jim Jeffries argues during his now-famous stand up routine, the only reason people have guns is that they like guns. That is the only defense that is valid, every other reason is rationalization for simply liking guns. Some rationalizations come out of fear, fear of crime in particular, but also fear that the system does not work, that you need to defend yourself because the police and justice system are unreliable. The fear that stems from insecurity is real and comes from many more areas than the simple belief that evil exists. Economic security for the vast majority of Americans is slipping away and simply gone in many cases, many people are afraid that the other people victimized by the travails of free-market capitalism are out to get them.

Robert Parry recently wrote an excellent examination of the other, darker side of gun rights activists' argument, that of overthrowing the government. That somehow the founders' imagined that the future would necessarily be one of barely-constrained anarchy with a population everready to the founders' creation were it to get out of line. Parry demonstrates that this line of thinking is the exact opposite of the founders' intent, the second amendment was designed to "ensure domestic tranquility" and maintain the rule of law and order in case of populist uprisings, slave revolts, or attacks by Native American tribes or other foreign nations. He notes that it was not until 2008 that the Supreme Court finally interpreted the second amendment as guaranteeing an individual right to own firearms.

“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.”

There, it is one sentence. Simply liking guns does not give anyone license to ignore that the subject of that sentence is the "well-regulated militia" and that "the people" that the amendment describes is singular, not plural. But to understand why that is we need to look at the foundations of our republic through the eyes of the founders.

In his excellent book, Empires of Trust, Thomas F. Madden describes the similarities between the fledgling American republic and that of the ancient Romans. Each society had a revolution in which they threw off the rule of a foreign monarch and built a system of government centered around the people of the nation as sovereign. The people, as a singular concept, held all of the theoretical power and delegated it to various offices filled by representatives of the people. The trouble is that after the revolution was consolidated in each case, leaders did not want to make big changes. Madden points out that the Romans were a rather conservative people in the republican period, they rather liked the system they had built and did not want to change it. This is a dictionary use of the word conservative, the Romans wanted to conserve and maintain their status quo. Even when the dangerous world they lived in led to expansion, as Madden put it "to push danger over the horizon", the Romans were unable to make the changes necessary for a large empire. Instead they tweaked their republican system, adding offices like the ones that existed in the city of Rome to govern the provinces. This led to a shift of the power away from the people of Rome and into the hands of the army and the leaders who could command the respect of the legions.

One thing that did not change in ancient Rome was technology. From republic to principate, to dominate, to the fall of empire in the west people lived in the bronze age. Armies fought with sword and spear, there was no analog for the industrial and technological changes of American history. The founders of the American republic were extremely cognizant of what went wrong in Roman one, and were determined to sculpt our constitution and republic to prevent them. The "Roman" state lasted for two millennia to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 in the face of Turkish cannonfire. Not a bad run. The world is so incredibly different today from when the United States was founded just two and a half centuries ago. Are we following in the Romans' footsteps by not allowing a practical and sincere reexamination of the right to bear arms?

Bob Cesca and Chez Pazienza often remark on their show that the founders could not have imagined the state of technology in the twenty-first century, much less of weaponry. Imagine what one platoon of M1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks with ample stocks of fuel and ammunition could have done on the side of the American Patriots during the Revolutionary War. Recall the plot of The Final Countdown where the USS Nimitz somehow traveled back to the eve of Pearl Harbor, and that was only a forty year span. Futurists like H.G. Wells could imagine a world of future technology in part by living through the industrial revolution, but how could colonists? No matter how well educated and brilliant the founders were, they still lived in a rural agrarian society that moved quite slowly. The founders would find our society marvelous and shocking, so many of us packed into huge cities, so few of us actually farming the land, physicians who can treat many afflictions, information travelling at the speed of light around the globe, and the sheer scale of consumer goods available, to say nothing of bombs capable of rendering those cities into dust in the blink of an eye. Imagine their laughter at finding out that there are extremists today who insist on owning firearms capable of murdering hundreds with absolutely no accountability... and that they openly state the reason for demanding the right to these weapons is to overthrow the very government set up by our constitution.