(Article first published Jan. 14, 2013)
By Robert Parry
Special to Consortium News
Robert Parry exposed in this
Jan. 2013 article the dangerous & false idea that the Constitution Framers
wrote the 2nd Amendment so an armed population could fight the government the
Framers had just created.
The Right’s powerful
propaganda apparatus has sold millions of Americans on the dangerous and false
notion that the Framers of the U.S. Constitution incorporated the Second
Amendment in the Bill of Rights so an armed population could fight the
government that the Framers had just created.
As a result of that historical
lie, many right-wingers today appear to be heeding a call to arms by buying up
assault weapons at a frenetic pace. A “Gun Appreciation Day” is scheduled for
the Saturday before Barack Obama’s Second Inaugural, which coincidentally falls
on Martin Luther King Day. Thousands of gun owners are expected to turn out
waving flags and brandishing rifles.
The organizer of that effort,
right-wing activist Larry Ward, wrote that “the Obama administration has shown
that it is more than willing to trample the Constitution to impose its dictates
upon the American people.”
In recent weeks, this bogus
narrative of the Framers seeking to encourage violence to subvert the peaceful
and orderly process that they had painstakingly created in Philadelphia in 1787
also has been pushed by prominent right-wingers, such as radio host Rush
Limbaugh and Fox News personality Andrew Napolitano
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.”
The suggestion is 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) if he presses ahead seeking commonsense gun restrictions in the face of
the massacre of 20 schoolchildren in Newtown, Connecticut, and hundreds of
other horrendous incidents of gun violence.
These “revolutionary”
Americans have been persuaded that they are channeling the intent of the
Framers who supposedly saw armed uprisings against the legally constituted U.S.
government as an important element of “liberty.”
But that belief is not the
historical reality. Indeed, the reality is almost the opposite. 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 rebellions.
The Framers also made clear
what they thought should happen to people who took up arms against the
Republic. Article IV, Section 4 committed the federal government to
protect each state from not only invasion but “domestic Violence,” and
treason is defined in the Constitution as “levying war against” the United
States as well as giving “Aid and Comfort” to the enemy (Article III,
Section 3).
Second Amendment’s History
The historical context of the
Second Amendment also belies today’s right-wing mythology. At the time of
the Constitutional Convention, the young nation was experiencing violent
unrest, such as the Shays’ Rebellion in western Massachusetts. That armed
uprising was testing the ability of the newly independent nation to establish
order within the framework of a democratic Republic, a fairly untested idea at
the time. European monarchies were predicting chaos and collapse for
the United States.
Among the most concerned about
that possibility was General George Washington, who had sacrificed greatly for
the birth of the new nation. After the British surrender at Yorktown in 1781
and their acceptance of American independence in 1783, Washington fretted over
the inability of the states-rights-oriented Articles of Confederation, then
governing the country, to deal with its economic and security challenges.
Washington grew disgusted with
the Articles’ recognition of 13 “independent” and “sovereign” states and the
correspondingly weak central government, called not even a government, but a
“league of friendship.”
As Commander-in-Chief of the
Continental Army, Washington had watched his soldiers suffer when various
states reneged on their commitment to supply money and arms. After the war,
Washington retired but stayed active in seeking reforms that would strengthen
the central government’s ability to organize national commerce and to maintain
order.
His fears deepened in 1786
when Daniel Shays, a former Continental Army captain, led an uprising of other
veterans and farmers in western Massachusetts, taking up arms against the
government for failing to address their economic grievances.
Washington received reports on
the crisis from old Revolutionary War associates in Massachusetts, such as his
longtime logistical chief, Gen. Henry Knox, and Gen. Benjamin Lincoln, who
accepted the British surrender at Yorktown as Washington’s second in command.
They kept Washington apprised of the disorder, which he feared might encourage
renewed interference in American affairs by the British or other European
powers.
On Oct. 22, 1786, in a
letter seeking more information about the rebellion from a friend in
Connecticut, Washington wrote: “I am mortified beyond expression that in the
moment of our acknowledged independence we should by our conduct verify the
predictions of our transatlantic foe, and render ourselves ridiculous and
contemptible in the eyes of all Europe.”
In another letter on Nov. 7,
1786, Washington questioned Gen. Lincoln about the unrest: “What is the cause
of all these commotions? When and how will they end?” Washington was especially
concerned about the possibility of a hidden British hand.
Lincoln responded: “Many of
them [the rebels] appear to be absolutely so [mad] if an attempt to annihilate
our present constitution and dissolve the present government can be considered
as evidence of insanity.”
However, the U.S. government
under the Articles of Confederation lacked the means to restore order. So
wealthy Bostonians financed their own force under Gen. Lincoln to crush the
uprising in February 1787. Afterwards, Washington remained concerned the
rebellion might be a sign that European predictions about American chaos were
coming true.
“If three years ago [at the
end of the American Revolution] any person had told me that at this day, I
should see such a formidable rebellion against the laws & constitutions of
our own making as now appears I should have thought him a bedlamite a fit subject
for a mad house,” Washington wrote to
Knox on Feb. 3, 1787, adding that if the government “shrinks, or is unable to
enforce its laws anarchy & confusion must prevail.”
Just weeks later, Washington’s
alarm about Shays’ Rebellion was a key factor in his decision to take part in
and preside over the Constitutional Convention, which was supposed to offer revisions
to the Articles of Confederation but instead threw out the old structure
entirely and replaced it with the U.S. Constitution. The
Constitution shifted national sovereignty from the 13 states to “We the
People” and dramatically enhanced the power of the central government.
The key point of the
Constitution was to create a peaceful means for the United States to implement
policies favored by the people but within a structure of checks and balances to
prevent radical changes deemed too disruptive to the established
order. For instance, the two-year terms of the House of Representatives were
meant to reflect the popular will but the six-year terms of the Senate were
designed to temper the passions of the moment (and senators were initially
chosen by state legislatures, not the people).
Within this framework of a
democratic Republic where peaceful change was possible though intentionally
gradual the Framers criminalized taking up arms against the government.
But it was the Constitution’s drastic expansion of federal power
that prompted strong opposition from some Revolutionary War figures, such
as Virginia’s Patrick Henry who spearheaded the Anti-Federalist movement.
Prospects for the
Constitution’s ratification were in such doubt that its principal architect
James Madison joined in a sales campaign known as the Federalist Papers in
which he tried to play down how radical his changes actually were. To win over
other skeptics, Madison agreed to support a Bill of Rights, which would be
proposed as the first ten amendments to the Constitution. The Bill of Rights
was a mix of concessions, some substantive and some rhetorical, to both
individual citizens and the states.
The Second Amendment was
primarily a right granted to the states. It 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.”
Madison’s political
maneuvering narrowly secured approval of the Constitution in key states, such
as Virginia, New York and Massachusetts. The First Congress then approved the
Bill of Rights, which was ratified in 1791. [For more details on the
Constitution, see Robert Parry’s America’s
Stolen Narrative.]
Behind the Second Amendment
As the preface to the Second
Amendment makes clear, the concern was about enabling states to organize
militias that could maintain “security,” which fit with the Constitution’s goal
of “domestic Tranquility” within the framework of a Republic.
This concept was
amplified by the actions of the Second Congress amid another uprising which
erupted in 1791 in western Pennsylvania. This anti-tax revolt, known as the
Whiskey Rebellion, prompted Congress in 1792 to expand on the idea of “a
well-regulated militia” by passing the Militia Acts which required all
military-age white males to obtain their own muskets and equipment for service
in militias.
At the time, Madison was in
the U.S. Congress and Washington was in the presidency with both supporting the
new laws so the “original intent” of the Framers could not be easily
misunderstood.
The right “to keep and bear arms” was always within the context of participating in militias or today the National Guard not as the right of individuals to possess devastating weapons that could be used to violently overthrow the U.S. government or to kill its officials. (The recognition of a collective rather than individual right was only reversed in 2008 when right-wing ideologues had gained control of the U.S. Supreme Court and then overturned longstanding legal precedents.)
But if there was any doubt
about how the actual Framers saw the Second Amendment, it was answered in 1794
when President Washington led a combined force of state militias against the
Whiskey rebels in Pennsylvania. The revolt soon collapsed; many leaders fled;
and two participants were convicted of high treason and sentenced to hanging,
though Washington later pardoned them.
Beyond this clear historical
record that the Framers’ intent with the Second Amendment was to create
security for the new Republic, not promote armed rebellions there is also the
simple logic that the Framers represented the young nation’s aristocracy. Many,
like Washington, owned vast tracts of land and favored domestic tranquility to
promote economic development and growth.
So, it would be
counterintuitive as well as anti-historical to believe that Madison and
Washington wanted to arm the population so the discontented could resist the
constitutionally elected government. In reality, the Framers wanted to arm the
people at least the white males to repulse uprisings, whether economic clashes
like Shays’ Rebellion, anti-tax protests like the Whiskey Rebellion, attacks by
Native Americans or slave revolts.
Fabricated History
However, the Right has
invested heavily over the last several decades in fabricating a different
national narrative, one that ignores both logic and the historical record. In
this right-wing fantasy, the Framers wanted everyone to have a gun so they
could violently resist their own government.
To build that narrative, a few
incendiary quotes are cherry-picked, taken out of context or invented. [See,
for instance, Steven Krulik’s compilation of
such apocryphal references.]
This “history” has then
been amplified through the Right’s powerful propaganda apparatus Fox News, talk
radio, the Internet and ideological publications to persuade millions of
Americans that their possession of semi-automatic assault rifles and other powerful
firearms is what the Framers intended, that today’s gun owners are fulfilling
some centuries-old American duty.
It should be noted,
too, that Thomas Jefferson, one of the most radical-sounding (though
hypocritical) leaders of the Revolutionary War, was not a Framer of the
Constitution. In 1787, when the document was written, he was the U.S.
representative in France.
There is also the obvious
point that the Framers’ idea of a weapon was a single-shot musket that required
time-consuming reloading, not a powerful semi-automatic assault rifle that
could fire up to 100 bullets in a matter of seconds without the necessity to
reload.
However, people like Andrew
Napolitano on the Right as well as some dreamy revolutionaries on the Left
still suggest that the Framers enacted the Second Amendment so the firepower of
people trying to overthrow the U.S. government and kill its agents would be
equal to whatever weapons the government possessed.
This crazy notion would be
laughable if its consequences were not so horrible. The human price for this
phony concept of “liberty” and this bogus history is the horrendous death toll
that gun violence inflicts on American society, including the recent slaughter
of those children in Newtown.
Yet, instead of recognizing
the actual history and accepting that the Constitution was an attempt by the
Framers to create a democratic process for peaceful change, today’s advocates
of a violent revolution whether from the Right or the Left feed the paranoia
and the ignorance of their followers.
The late investigative
reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated
Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. He founded Consortium News in 1995,
considered the first online, independent news site.
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