The second amendment has nothing to do with guns

Archaic phrases are just wonderful for justifying stupid behavior. Some people like to pick out obscure lines from Leviticus to bring damnation upon homosexuals. And yet they sure love a good pig roast. Our selective myopia goes in search of some vague “truth”. But, the truth that is found in the justifying text seldom strays much from the pre-held judgments of the truth-re-teller. If it sounds like something I agree with, it must, then, be true.

Here’s another dusty sentence that’s got people lining up to point fingers and play judge:

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.

And so steps the Bill of Rights into misty, murky territory of historic misunderstanding. As fast as I heard news about people being shot on Valentine’s day the spin about “not infringing upon second amendment rights” began to whirl on the airwaves. EXCUSE ME? What about the right of those 6 students who were murdered to live out the rest of their lives? What about the students at Virginia Tech who most certainly had the right to a full life? What about the lives of people living in our cities and gang infested communities to live in safety? Do people who demand their “second amendment rights” simply find it a sad inconvenience that bodies have a way of dying when you point a gun and pull the trigger?

The second amendment really, in spirit, has nothing to do with guns. It has to do with a citizen’s ability to have a voice.

Our country’s Constitution has its roots in English law. We certainly didn’t like what George III was doing and the way English politics exploited the natural resources North America whilst pissing on the colonists. But, they had a Parliament. They had the Magna Carta. They had a House of Commons. They had in place those things our system would react to and improve upon. Our founding emulators indeed did a good job considering the extent of what they could envision at that time.

English freemen (property owners) were obliged to supply their own arms (which, over a period of history that would have been the recent past to our founding fathers, meant ARMOR). Such arms were to be used when freemen were impressed into Military service. However in the late 17th century the crown began raising the quota of land ownership needed to qualify for owning arms. So only the very wealthy (those who would be least interested in harming the king) could own “arms”. Under King James II being a protestant was added to the list of prohibitions for arms ownership.

America in 1783 was a very different place filled with very different types of people than one might suspect considering what it’s like today. Many had come here as indentured servants, a sort of temporary slavery. Many came on the run from religious persecution. Whole areas were penal colonies. So, with the exception of the few wealthy landowners, the people of the North American colonies were Europe’s poor, heretical, criminal rejects. Even today we do not give incarcerated people the right to vote. They pretty much thought of the colonists in that same light. So think of the American Revolution as more of a prison uprising that worked. And it was indeed the prisoners that rose up because most wealthy Tory landowners continued to support the crown through the Revolution.

We see ourselves as one nation today. Back then, not so much. The new government was extremely weak and unable to mount a defense against uprisings. It was also a government that intended to serve only those male citizens who owned land. This was not an everyman’s place. The social stratifications of Europe would retain a deep foot hold in the American mindset until well into the 20th century.

Adding the provision of arms-ownership was an equalizing factor for the freeman citizens of the new country. It meant that you didn’t have to be rich to have some power. It was a provision to insure that states would be able to contain a power sufficient to the power of the Federal Government (which wanted to maintain a standing army after the Shay’s rebellion in Massachusetts) in order to prevent tyranny. It was also a way for the federal government to insure that there would be an armed body of the willing should the need for a national defense arise.

It was never meant to be a provision in the name of self-defense. That protection is afforded elsewhere in the law. If the founding fathers had gotten even a wee glimpse into a future where semi-automatic weapons are regularly used to hold students or poor people as terrorized hostages I’d bet my last dollar that they would have ripped #2 right off the fuckin’ page before the ink was dry.

What #2 guarantees us is not “arms” as much as an equalizing factor that allows individual citizens the right to a voice in a way that our contemporaries understand and respect. It is a weapon not against another person but against tyranny. I have such a weapon. You’re reading it.

In the past 7 years we have seen our constitution shredded and disfigured not by guns but by words. If you want to fight for your right to own a gun, go ahead. But, please do get your head out of your ass for long enough to realize that you may have no other rights left. Was it worth it?

I truly believe that the collage artists who appropriated English law, the Magna Carta, and the Enlightenment philosophies of Voltaire to craft our Constitution knew on a deep level that more would be revealed. They knew they could only create the framework upon which we would grow. We have added branches; some good, some bad. In 1793 the Supreme Court realized that a nation filled with people who escaped religious persecution to be here should not have an official religion. And we became the only country of that time to not have any state sanctioned creed (so there, we were NOT founded as a Christian nation). We realized that it no longer served us to hold another person as a slave and deny them the right to dignity. We realized that a vagina was no reason to not possess equal voting rights. Maybe soon we will realize that what we must aim is our reason and our words. Maybe we will put down the toys and pick up the tools to fight back a tyranny of ignorance.