How to be a Second Amendment Absolutist
If you're going to be, you have to pay attention to the whole Amendment
By: Noah Shusterman
Do you have what it takes to be a true Second Amendment Absolutist? To stand with the founding fathers and recreate the spirit which animated that Amendment that you hold so dear to your heart? The one that says:
“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.”
If you're going to be a Second Amendment Absolutist, you have to pay attention to the whole Amendment — all 27 words.
Don't worry, we won't change the last 14. Your right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. And you can be a halfway decent Second Amendment devotee if you just focus on those.
But to be a Second Amendment Absolutist, a Second Amendment Originalist, and to really follow it in the spirit of the Founding Fathers, no skipping over the first 13. (Twelve if you add a hyphen to "well-regulated," but that's neither here nor there.)
Now, 27 words — that's not much to work with. It's easy to understand the temptation to stick with the last 14 words, because those are much easier to understand. To be frank, that first clause — “a well regulated militia, being necessary for the security of a free state” — doesn't make much sense these days. But if you want to do this right, you’re going to have to figure out what that first part meant.
Luckily, it turns out that there are plenty of other texts out there that can help. Writings from the Founding Fathers, laws from the colonies, Bills of Rights from the different states — piece these all together and we can get a much better sense of what those Founding Fathers had in mind.
So consider this a guide, even a how-to for anyone who wants to be a true Second Amendment Absolutist. You don't have to have the latest weapons. They're fine, bring 'em if you got 'em. But if the old ones were good enough for the Founding Fathers, they're good enough for you. So just bring your AR-15, your musket, your "fuzee." Long guns are better, but it's not about what kind of gun you use, as long as you have something. And you don't have to have the latest in camouflage gear either. Actually, something brighter would be better.
So, first things first: What is a militia? Because the militias that show up on the evening news, whether they're from the Ukraine or Chechnya, or part of the Latin American drug trade, they don't sound like they're necessary for the security of a free state. And that would be correct.
When the men of the eighteenth century talked about militias, they meant something different. They meant an armed and organized group of men who filled the role that soldiers and police play in today's society, but who also — and this was the key — only did so part-time.
Eighteenth-century militiamen had other, full-time careers. So this means that anyone wanting to start their own militia can keep their current jobs. In fact, they should keep their jobs.
Ok so far. But what else? What made one of these armed groups “well regulated?” What regulations would it need?
First off, you can forget about all of that PC stuff. The Founding Fathers were clear about this. The militia was for men. Women had their ways to contribute, but serving in the militia wasn't one of them. All the colonial militia statutes said this. The militia was "all able-bodied men,” usually from 16 to 60, or 18 to 60, something along those lines. For folks concerned about access for the differently abled, they’re probably out of luck.
And, uh, no easy way to say this. The militia was a white guy thing. Northern colonies, southern colonies, didn't matter. Massachusetts left out the "Negroes, Indians, and Mullatoes." Virginia, the same. In New York, it was "any Negro, or any Indian Slave or Servant;" in New Jersey, "any Negro, Indian or Malatto Slave or Servant." Seems the colonial society didn't much want Black people or Native Americans in their militia.
They didn't even want them having weapons at all. Georgia decided it would be best if all the people they’d forced into slavery couldn't carry "fire arms or any offensive weapon" unless they were with the white folks who were keeping them in slavery.
Those colonial governments even set up patrols that could "search and examine all Negro-Houses" looking for weapons and ammunition." All the other colonies with a lot of enslaved people did the same thing, more or less, and that didn't change much once they became states.
Another thing to keep in mind, this militia, it wasn’t a choice. If you were eligible, you were in.
We can follow Thomas Jefferson on this one. "Every able-bodied freeman," he wrote, "between the ages of 16 and 50, is enrolled in the militia." When you get old enough, you find the local officer and you register. Move to a new town? You find the local officer and you register.
And set aside some of your Sundays because you're going to be spending them at training. Frequency varied. One of Virginia's statutes put it at once a month, or "oftener" if the chief officer decided. Georgia had it at six times per year. It won't make you overhaul your lifestyle, but you've got to show up when they tell you to.
Oh, and one more thing. What do you think about the United States Army? Pay attention to this one, because it's important. In fact, when it comes to proving you're a true Second Amendment Absolutist, this question matters more than all the others: Do you think that the United States Army should exist? And especially, do you think it should exist all the time? Even during peacetime, when Congress hasn't declared war? Do you think that having a large army is a good thing?
If you answered yes, well, then I'm sorry, but you are not a Second Amendment Absolutist.
Back when they wrote the Bill of Rights, people called an army like this a "standing army," and they didn't like it. This whole theory went back to the end of the seventeenth century, when British writers began claiming that one reason they were so much freer than their neighbors was because they did not need a standing army. Once a king had armies like that under his power, it was only a matter of time before he used it against his own people.
As the authors of one of the most influential books on the topic wrote, "It is the fashion of the French king to have a standing army, and it is the fashion of his subjects to be slaves under that standing army." That might have been fitting for French subjects, but it would not do for British citizens — and it certainly would not do for the colonists in the U.S., who considered themselves British up until the Revolution started.
The people in England got tired of those theories during the eighteenth century, but the colonists in North America didn’t.
George Washington himself — who didn’t even think militias could fight — thought that large professional armies had “subverted the liberties of almost all the Countries they have been raised to defend.” So of all the liberties in the Bill of Rights, it was the right to bear arms that guaranteed the others, because it was the only one that protected the citizens from relying on a standing army. Any standing army strong enough to repel the enemy would be strong enough to take down the population too.
Not having a large peacetime army was not part of the Second Amendment, it was why there was a Second Amendment in the first place.
After the Constitution was written, but before the Bill of Rights, no one was complaining that there was no Right to Bear Arms; but a lot of people were complaining that it didn’t say anything about the army or the militia. Even Jefferson, who was still in France, wrote to his friend Madison that he was worried about the Constitution’s “omission of a bill of rights providing clearly & without the aid of sophisms… protection against standing armies.”
So this is the one that you can't get out of. Some of the other parts turn out to be a bit… negotiable. Back in the eighteenth century they didn’t let women into the militias, but they didn't let women vote either. Now women can vote, and if they can vote, maybe they can be part of the militia. The same goes for African-Americans, and Native Americans, and everyone else.
The Founding Fathers wanted citizens to bear arms for the republic. Women and people of color, they were not citizens back then, but they are now. And if they are citizens, they should be ready to bear arms for the republic just like all the other citizens.
Even the part about having to show up on Sundays for training turns out to be negotiable. Most of those militia trainings weren’t that serious. Many citizens had exemptions, because they were in the government, or they were clergy, or students, professors, or something along those lines. Besides, there were a lot of Quakers back then, and Quakers did not believe in fighting, so they never went to the musters. In a lot of places, they were not required to.
For most of the colonial era — really, for most of the era in which the militia existed, and when all citizens were required to participate — it rarely functioned like it was supposed to.
There was really only one thing that everyone agreed on back then: no large standing army. The Federalists and the Anti-Federalists fought about a lot of things back when Americans were debating the Constitution, but neither side thought having a big standing army was a good idea.
The antis were willing to go a little farther on this one, but even the Federalists thought that a large standing army would be “dangerous to liberty” and “the means of overturning the best constitutions of government.”
This fear of standing armies was a cornerstone of American politics in the eighteenth century. A society needed to protect itself from its enemies, but there was no reason to do so if you just wound up being enslaved by the men you hired to protect you.
So if you want to be protected, but you don't want to hire people to do so, you need to have all of the citizens participate. And yes, they damn well better be armed. That's why that right can't be infringed. Once the army starts disarming the people, it's only a matter of time before they start marching on them.
So if you trust the U.S. Army and want it to stay strong, and trust it to not march on the people, then that means you support having a standing army, which today's U.S. Army most certainly is.
If that is indeed the case, then you might be a fine patriot, you might be a responsible gun owner, you might be a lot of laudable things. But you're not Second Amendment Absolutist.
Noah Shusterman is a historian of the eighteenth century, including the history of militias and of the path toward the Second Amendment. He is author of the book, Armed Citizens: The Road from Rome to the Second Amendment. He currently lives in Hong Kong and is an Associate Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay; image of Thomas Jefferson statue by Colleen Conger from Pixabay