Regulating the Militia
By
Kevin D. Williamson
NationalReview.com
My friend Brett Joshpe
has published an
uncharacteristically
soft-headed piece
in the San
Francisco Chronicle arguing that in the wake of
the massacre at Sandy Hook, conservatives and
Republicans should support what he calls “sensible”
gun-control laws. It begins with a subtext of
self-congratulation (“As a conservative and a
Republican, I can no longer remain silent . . . Some
will consider it heresy,” etc.), casts aspersions of
intellectual dishonesty (arguments for preserving
our traditional rights are “disingenuous”), advances
into ex homine (noting he has family in Sandy
Hook, as though that confers special status on his
preferences), fundamentally misunderstands the
argument for the right to keep and bear arms,
deputizes the electorate, and cites the presence of
teddy bears as evidence for his case.
Brett, like practically
every other person seeking to diminish our
constitutional rights, either does not understand
the purpose of the Second Amendment or refuses to
address it, writing, “Gun advocates will be
hard-pressed to explain why the average American
citizen needs an assault weapon with a high-capacity
magazine other than for recreational purposes.” The
answer to this question is straightforward:
The purpose of having citizens armed with
paramilitary weapons is to allow them to engage in
paramilitary actions. The Second Amendment is not
about Bambi and burglars — whatever a well-regulated
militia is, it is not a hunting party or a
sport-clays club. It is remarkable to me that any
educated person — let alone a Harvard Law graduate —
believes that the second item on the Bill of Rights
is a constitutional guarantee of enjoying a
recreational activity.
There is no legitimate exception to the Second
Amendment for military-style weapons, because
military-style weapons are precisely what the Second
Amendment guarantees our right to keep and bear.
The purpose of the Second Amendment is to secure our
ability to oppose enemies foreign and domestic, a
guarantee against disorder and tyranny. Consider the
words of Supreme Court justice Joseph Story — who
was, it bears noting, appointed to the Court by the
guy who wrote the Constitution:
The importance of this
article will scarcely be doubted by any persons, who
have duly reflected upon the subject. The militia is
the natural defence of a free country against sudden
foreign invasions, domestic insurrections, and
domestic usurpations of power by rulers. It is
against sound policy for a free people to keep up
large military establishments and standing armies in
time of peace, both from the enormous expenses, with
which they are attended, and the facile means, which
they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers, to
subvert the government, or trample upon the rights
of the people. The right of the citizens to keep and
bear arms has justly been considered, as the
palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it
offers a strong moral check against the usurpation
and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally,
even if these are successful in the first instance,
enable the people to resist and triumph over them.
“Usurpation and
arbitrary power of the rulers” — not Bambi, not
burglars. While your granddad’s .30-06 is a good
deal more powerful than the .223 rifles that give
blue-state types the howling fantods, that is not
what we have a constitutional provision to protect.
Liberals are forever asking: “Why would anybody need
a gun like that?” And the answer is: because we are
not serfs. We are a free people living under a
republic of our own construction. We may consent to
be governed, but we will not be ruled.
The right to keep and
bear arms is a civil right. If you doubt that,
consider the history of arms control in England,
where members of the Catholic minority (and
non-Protestants generally) were prohibited from
bearing arms as part of the campaign of general
political oppression against them. The Act of
Disenfranchisement was still in effect when our
Constitution was being written, a fact that surely
was on the mind of such Founding Fathers as Daniel
Carroll, to say nothing of his brother, Archbishop
John Carroll.
The Second Amendment
speaks to the nature of the relationship between
citizen and state. Brett may think that such a
notion is an antiquated relic of the 18th century,
but then he should be arguing for wholesale repeal
of the Second Amendment rather than presenting —
what’s the word? — disingenuous arguments about what
it means and the purpose behind it.
If we want to reduce
the level of criminal violence in our society, we
should start by demanding that the police and
criminal-justice bureaucracies do their job.
Massacres such as Sandy Hook catch our attention
because they are so unusual. But a great deal of the
commonplace violence in our society is preventable.
Brett here might look to his hometown: There were
1,662 murders in New York City from 2003 to 2005,
and a New York Times analysis of the data
found that in 90 percent of the cases, the killer
had a prior criminal record. (About half the victims
did, too.) Events such as Sandy Hook may come out of
nowhere, but the great majority of murders do not.
The police function in essence as a janitorial
service, cleaning up the mess created in part by our
dysfunctional criminal-justice system.
We probably would get
more out of our criminal-justice system if it were
not so heavily populated by criminals. As I note in
my
upcoming book, The End Is Near and It’s Going to
Be Awesome,
it can be hard to tell the good guys from the bad
guys:
The Department of
Homeland Security has existed for only a few years
but it already has been partly transformed into an
organized-crime syndicate. According to a federal
report, in 2011 alone more than 300 DHS employees
and contractors were charged with crimes ranging
from smuggling drugs and child pornography to
selling sensitive intelligence to drug cartels.
That’s not a few bad apples — that’s an arrest every
weekday and many weekends. Given the usual low ratio
of arrests to crimes committed, it is probable that
DHS employees are responsible for not hundreds but
thousands of crimes. And these are not minor
infractions: Agents in the department’s immigration
division were caught selling forged immigrant
documents, and DHS vehicles have been used to
transport hundreds (and possibly thousands) of
pounds of illegal drugs. A “standover” crew — that
is, a criminal enterprise that specializes in
robbing other criminals — was found being run by a
DHS agent in Arizona, who was apprehended while
hijacking a truckload of cocaine.
Power corrupts. Madison
knew that, and the other Founders did, too, which is
why we have a Second Amendment.