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.
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Hi, I’m Tristan Johnson, and this is Step Back History.
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I think out of all the amendments to the constitution of the United States, none garners as much
controversy as the second amendment.
Its interpretation has been up for much debate, and today it’s basically what keeps Americans
the most armed people on earth.
So lets for the sake of this video go over it again.
A well regulated militia, comma, being necessary to the security of a free state, comma, the
right of the people to keep and bear arms, comma, shall not be infringed.
Trust me, the commas are important.
So many believe the idea behind this amendment is actually much older than the US constitution.
After some minor disagreements between the British people and King James II, a document
surfaced in 1689 called the English Bill of Rights.
This paper went through a lot of the bones the people had to pick with James II, but
one of them was that they didn’t like that once the very Catholic king tried to take
away all the guns from English Protestants.
So this bill tried to solidify the right for Protestants to have arms, and that the king
wasn’t allowed to just snatch them away.
The Supreme court even says that this is where the second amendment comes from.
Now in case you didn’t know, the United States was once a British colony.
British colonists saw the right to have guns and to make militia groups as necessary.
They had constant worries about invasions by indigenous people (wait is it an invasion
if they're taking land you, in turn, stole from them?) law enforcement before police
officers per se, self-defense, deterring a tyrannical government just like the British
did against James II, and the always charming in American history need to suppress slave
revolts…
Often today the political contention is over which of these reasons is why the second amendment
exists in the Bill of Rights.
Why?
Well because if their reasoning is today outdated, then it kinda makes the amendment anachronistic.
Militias were an important aspect of the way America became independent.
They came from all over the 13 colonies, and along with the continental army and the French
army and navy pushed the British to accept American independence.
In early America, factions called federalists and anti-federalists fought over how centralised
the country should be.
This included debates over having a permanent capital, or how decisions would be made between
smaller and bigger states.
One of the points of contention was whether the Us should have a dedicated military or
a collection of state militias that could be rallied whenever someone attacked.
The constitution was a very difficult project attempting to marry both of these two factions
into something they could both agree with.
Many historians believe the second amendment was an attempt at compromise.
To get a unifying federal document sold to people who didn’t want unifying anything,
preserving their ability to keep state militias was a fig leaf to get them to sign on.
This sort of make sense too when you think about the ideology of most of the people who
made this thing.
They wanted a liberal republic, but they didn’t want too much democracy.
Many founding fathers believed in a “natural aristocracy” and that the anti-democratic
measures the constitution is rife with are to keep the country safe from the mindless
crowd.
In such a situation, I imagine they didn’t want that mindless rabble being well-armed
unless organised… by them.
I mean, the nail in the coffin for the concept that the 2nd amendment as a way to resist
tyranny came when they actually tried it.
It was a protest against a tax on whiskey, and President Washington put that rebellion
down hard.
Yeah, a sitting president leading an army, I believe that’s the only time this happened.
Ever since the amendment passed, there has been a ton of analysis and commentary on what
every word and comma really means.
It’s come to the supreme court many times.
That being said, for most of the 19th century, the federal government didn’t really do
much about gun law.
They mostly just let states manage it themselves.
There was one case we should mention, where the second amendment was cited as a reason
they should not extend citizenship rights to black people because then they’d have
the right to have guns.
Today, the interpretation of the second amendment comes down to two major camps.
There is the individual right camp who believe that the second amendment strictly says that
anybody in America has the right to own firearms.
This is the model that most courts have gone with over the years.
However, a tiny camp has followed the collective right model which argues that gun ownership
should be limited to those who are part of a militia, due to the first clause of the
sentence.
And so like many things in American law.
There are two camps of definitions, and each side of them believe in it to a hyperbolic
degree.
In the meantime, the US leads the world in gun ownership, gun suicides, and mass shootings.
From an outsider’s perspective, it seems to be a war between what Americans always
fight over, dealing with practical problems versus clinging to the ideals of slave owners
over two centuries ago.
But maybe I can only say that because our constitution was made in the 1980s.
But seriously, I want to hear from you.
What does the second amendment mean to you?
What is the benefit or peril it poses to you?
Let’s talk about it in the comments.
Until something happens, I guess I’ll just always be nervous when I’m south of the
border.
I only briefly talked about the actually deep and intense supreme court debates on this
subject.
If you go to the channel Conjecture, Matt from the Roanoke video is going to have a
video up about the second amendment’s history in the judicial branch.
He’ll talk through how those legal minds have debated this oddly worded amendment over
the years.
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