"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."
This Amendment must have been important to the Founders for it is the second of the ten Bill of Rights and comes immediately after the First Amendment, which guarantees religious liberty and free speech. But why did they consider it so significant?
If we are going to understand the Second Amendment, we must get inside the thinking of the Founders who formulated it. After years of studying America’s origins, I am convinced that the following three factors were paramount in the thinking of the Founders and led them to institute the Second Amendment.
Factor #1
They Wanted Power in the Hands of the People
The U.S. Constitution begins with the words, We the people . . .. Abraham Lincoln described the U.S. government as being of the people, by the people and for the people. The Founders wanted governmental power to reside with the people, not with a few government elites in Washington D.C.
They considered the right of the people to bear arms and protect themselves to be a necessary component of a government that is truly of the people. Based on their own experience, they would consider the outlawing of private ownership of guns to be an act of tyranny by a power-hungry government bent on taking power from the people.
They had actually experienced this under the tyrannical rule of King George III. When the Colonists, especially in Boston, began publicly protesting the unfair and oppressive taxes and regulations being opposed upon them, the British responded by sending troops to occupy the city of Boston and close its seaport.
With foreign troops occupying one of their major cities, farmers and townspeople in different areas began forming militias to defend themselves and their families from the foreign invaders. They, of course, used their own weapons that they normally used for hunting and personal protection.
General Gage, who commanded the British troops, began confiscating the weapons of the citizens of Boston. As part of this campaign to disarm the Colonists, he sent troops to Lexington and Concord to destroy a cache of weapons and ammunition he heard that the Colonists there had collected to protect themselves from the foreign troops.
It was here on April 19, 1775 that the “shot heard round the world” was fired during the standoff between the Minutemen, composed of mostly farmers, and the British troops who had come to disarm them. This marked the beginning of the Revolutionary War.
The Americans would not have been able to defend themselves from the foreign invaders had it not been for the private ownership of guns throughout the Colonies. The War for Independence began with farmers and townspeople using their own personal weapons to protect themselves and their families from the British invaders.
In the thinking of the Founders, to disarm the population would be an act of government tyranny making good people vulnerable to hostile forces both at home and abroad. The Second Amendment made perfect sense to them, and in their thinking, was a valuable civil right that empowered the common people.
I recall hearing Condoleezza Rice defend the Second Amendment to the liberal women of The View. She told how, as a little girl growing up in Alabama, the KKK would come around at night seeking to intimidate the black neighborhoods. She remembered her father and other black men going out with their rifles and firing into the air and putting the KKK on notice not to try anything in their neighborhood. She expressed gratitude for the Second Amendment.
The Founders valued the Second Amendment because they saw it as a way to keep power in the hands of the people.
The Founders valued the Second Amendment because they saw it as a way to keep power in the hands of the people.
Factor #2
They Did Not Trust Civil Government
The Founders did not trust big government. For them, government represented power, control, and oppression. They, their parents, and grandparents had suffered under oppressive government regimes in Europe and they were determined to keep power away from a centralized government. They would agree with Sir John Acton who wrote, “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
This is why they divided the powers of government between the Senate and the House and the Judicial and Executive branches. It why they instituted checks and balances to keep power out of the hands of any one person or group of persons. It is why in Section 9 of the Constitution the Founders forbade the American government from granting honorific titles of nobility to anyone and forbade anyone holding a government office from accepting a title or office from a foreign king or state without the consent of Congress.
The Founders agreed with the statement of Thomas Paine in his immensely popular book, Common Sense, published in January of 1776. Arguing persuasively for independence from Great Britain and for creating an egalitarian society, Paine declared,
Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
The Founders distrusted human government because they distrusted human nature. They held the traditional Christian belief that humanity had been created a noble creature in the image and likeness of God, but that this image had become marred as a result of the Fall and sin (Genesis 1-3). In this fallen condition, human beings cannot be trusted with unlimited power.
James Madison said, “If men were angels no government would be necessary.” Men are not angels and the evil impulse in humanity must be restrained by civil government. Government, however, must be administered by imperfect human beings, so those who are governors must themselves be restrained by those who are being governed.
The Founders, therefore, not only divided the powers of government, but also put in place the Second Amendment. They did so because they did not trust civil government. They did this so that the American people could defend themselves from a tyrannical government regime that might arise at some future time.
The Founders valued the Second Amendment because they did not trust big governemnt .
The Founders valued the Second Amendment because they did not trust big governemnt .
Factor #3
They Envisioned a Self-Governing Moral Society
Many today argue that such a free and open attitude toward gun ownership is dangerous, and they are right if such freedom is applied within a secular or non-Christian society. We must remember, however, that the Founders clearly stated that the Constitution, including the Second Amendment, was made for a moral and religious [Christian] people. John Adams, Founding Father and the nation’s second president, declared,
We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . .. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other (Hyatt. 1726: The Year that Defined America, 169).
The Founders envisioned a free Republic in which people would be governed, not by a plethora of laws from Washington D.C., but by an inward law of Christian morality. People who are self-governed by Christian morality pose no threat to their neighbor or society, no matter how many guns they own.
The Founders saw Christian morality as the moral north star that would guide the American populace. It is why Thomas Jefferson ended all presidential documents with the words, “In the year of our Lord, Christ.” It is why he took money from the federal treasury to pay for a missionary to the Kaskaskia Indian tribe and why he once said, “Of all the systems of morality that have come under my observations, none appear to me so pure as that of Jesus” (Hyatt. 1726: The Year thatDefined America, 150).
George Washington made the same point in a letter he wrote to the governors of the various states at the end of the War. The letter included his “earnest prayer” for them and the citizens of their state that they would make Jesus their role model for life and morality. He wrote,
I now make it my earnest prayer that God would have you, and the State over which you preside, in his holy protection; that he would incline the hearts of the citizens . . . to entertain a brotherly affection and love for one another . . . and to demean ourselves with that charity, humility, and pacific temper of mind, which were the characteristics of the Divine Author of our blessed religion, and without a humble imitation of His example in these things, we can never hope to be a happy nation (Hyatt, 1726: The Year that Defined America, 120).
The Catholic scholar, William Novak is thus correct in saying,
Far from having a hostility toward religion, the Founders counted on religion [Christianity] for the underlying philosophy of the republic, its supporting ethic, and its reliable source of rejuvenation (Hyatt, 1726:The Year that Defined America, 172).
Guns in the hands of good, moral people are a blessing, not a curse. This was made clear just recently at the West Freeway Church of Christ near Fort Worth, TX when a gunman came into the Sunday morning service and began firing and killed two people.
However, within six seconds he was engaged by a church member who was authorized to carry a weapon. The church member shot and killed the intruder and what could have been a horrible massacre was stopped by a good person with a gun.
The Founders valued the Second Amendment because they saw it as a blessing to a religious and moral people.
The Founders valued the Second Amendment because they saw it as a blessing to a religious and moral people.
The Way Forward for this Generation
The Founders believed that only a moral and virtuous people could handle the sort of freedom that is guranteed in the Second Amendment. This is why Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician and signer of the Declaration of Independence, said,
The only foundation for a republic is to be laid in Religion [Christianity]. Without this there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments (Hyatt, 1726: The Year that Defined America, 163).
The Founders would agree that an amoral people without internal moral convictions must be controlled by outward laws and regulations. This is what William Penn was referring to when he wrote, “He who will not be governed by God must be ruled by tyrants.” The Founders would say that a society that refuses to be governed by God cannot be trusted with the Second Amendment.
That being said, it is obvious that the violence in our society is not because of guns per se, but becasue of the loss of morality and civility in our culture. What would do more to curb violence in our nation than a host of new gun laws, would be a national return to the vision of America's founders--the vision of a moral and religious people who are governed from within and who cling to their God even more than to their guns.
That being said, it is obvious that the violence in our society is not because of guns per se, but becasue of the loss of morality and civility in our culture. What would do more to curb violence in our nation than a host of new gun laws, would be a national return to the vision of America's founders--the vision of a moral and religious people who are governed from within and who cling to their God even more than to their guns.
This article is derived from Dr. Eddie Hyatt's latest book, 1726, available from Amazon and his website at www.eddiehyatt.com. He is also the founder of the "1726 Project" whose goal is to spread the message of America's birth out of the First Great Awakening and call on believers everywhere to pray for another Great Awakening across the land.
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