What the Second Amendment Really Says

The American 2nd Constitutional Amendment: “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."

Notice that the Second Amendment has absolutely nothing to say about any individual right to bear arms. Yet, every time we hear some Right Wing spokesman talking to the press on this particular point, they are emphatic about presenting the 2nd Amendment as guarantee for every individual to bear arms. The logic behind this is the logic of repetitive propaganda, that if it is said often enough, and not really countered by anybody, then everyone will assume it is true. And thus far the strategy seems to have worked, for, whenever the Media speaks of the 2nd Amendment, it seems to be in the context of supposing that they are speaking of an absolute right for each citizen to bear arms.

But the Second Amendment only speaks of the Right for a Militia to bear arms. Even then there are two provisos. The first stipulation is that the Militia must be well regulated. The second stipulation was that the primary focus was to be the maintenance of the Free State, which we can take to mean the duly constituted Government.

In the 18th Century the word ‘regulated’ meant ‘disciplined’. Any reasonable Court could render the reasonable opinion that a Militia could be considered as “well regulated” only if it were officially constituted under Government Control. If this was not clear when the Constitution was written, it has ever been made clear since, as there have been so many instances where not well regulated private militias did so much more harm than good concerning the security of free states. We only have to consider that almost every terrible revolution and dictatorial regime was put in place by gun toting Militia groups.

Indeed, America’s own Civil War was a product of what could be described as out of control and undisciplined Militias. What else can you call it when half of a Nation’s Army takes up arms against the other half. Certainly somebody is not obeying orders.

Then we need to wonder about how Might of Arms figures in a Free State where one would expect the Power of the Vote to be the all powerful arbiter of the Free State. Yet, it is more likely that Militias take up their arms when they are not pleased with how the voting had gone. The South rose up in violent rebellion because they lost an Election. Is that really how the American Constitution was designed to work?

It perhaps would not be so bad if Militias were the expression of Individual Liberty, that is, of each of its members well held political convictions. But again History shows us a darker seamier side about Militias. The truth is that whenever unemployment among young men becomes significant, then Militias become hotbeds for easy recruitment. If young men have a choice of sitting around going hungry and doing nothing, or getting one meal and a free drink with the chance of carrying a gun, then he will chose the one meal, the free drink and the gun, that is, he will join a Militia, and often enough the first Militia that will take him.

So, how are we to interpret the Second Amendment? Well, what it says is that the States and the Municipalities have the right to arm their Police Forces, just as long as these police forces recognize the ascendancy of a Chain of Command going up to the Federal Government. They may have guns to fight FOR the Free State, but not against it. Discipline must be maintained.

Yes, the second clause of the Amendment, after the two stipulations concerning Militias and the Free State, says that the rights of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed. Well, we have only to refer to the Second Amendment as a product of Political Compromise to see how we can reconcile such contradictions. We always need to remember that the 2nd Amendment does not come to us from the Bible, written down by Saints and Prophets. Instead the 2nd Amendment comes to us from committees of divided politicians, even then split in party faction, with the distinction that every single one of them acted to murder British Peacekeepers employed only to protect property and the Public Safety. These Founding Fathers would only be Terrorists if we could see them only in the contemporary light. But even then the 2nd Amendment was not an unqualified right to wield weapons for the purposes of Sedition and Treason, as they had wielded them, using the euphemism “freedom” to justify the slaughters they committed, but obviously a sizeable delegation of cooler heads were able to hold out for those stipulations concerning well regulated Militias and the service to the State. Even in the earliest most naïve days of the American Experiment in Democracy, it was realized that there was a danger in allowing the broad and unqualified distribution of weapons to unauthorized and unaccountable individuals who could be expected to sometimes use them to defy the appointments and decisions of duly appointed Government. Guns could not be permitted to become the effective veto against the Vote. There is no unqualified right for any individual to engage in Political Murder, no matter how much money his lobbyist is able to funnel online.

Yet, if one is to believe most arguments made for the 2nd Amendment, we would have to believe that these people assume that Political Murder, decided merely in terms of individual conscience, is perfectly justified and constitutionally condoned. One has to wonder why any murderer is in jail, when all they would have to plead is that they killed for purely political considerations, exercising their 2nd Amendment rights to carve out the Free State according to their own idiosyncratic reasons. After all, if we are free to bear arms, does it not follow that we are free to use them as we see fit? Yes, we hardly ever hear the argument taken this far, though that is exactly where it goes, but there are enough people living by such logic to keep us all dismayed and appalled. One might not have overly loved the Kennedy’s or Dr. King, but their murder should hardly have been equated with Free Speech as the 2nd Amendment is supposed to so construe it.

What is really bothersome is that Second Amendment cases have gone to the Supreme Court on several occasions before, and everything was decided exactly on political grounds, kowtowing to the gun toting Special Interests. Even the liberal judges shied away from discussing and then implementing the actual wording of the Amendment. You see, the National Rifle Association funds almost a greater proportion of election campaigns, of both parties, than even the Zionist and Health Care Lobbies put together, and so everybody in Washington, to keep the money flowing, pretends to a greater or lesser extent that the Individual Right to bear arms is absolutely guaranteed. And yet after a careful reading of the Amendment a Judge with any real balls could order the disarming of every private citizen in America without un-dotting a single ‘I’ or uncrossing a single ‘t’ of the 2nd Amendment.