The Founding Fathers of the United States believed, and wrote, that the bearing of arms was essential to the character and dignity of a free people. For this reason, they wrote a Second Amendment in the Bill Of Rights which reads “the right to bear arms shall not be infringed”.
Whether one agrees or disagrees with it, the Second Amendment is usually interpreted in these latter days as an axiom of and about political character — an expression of republican political thought, a prescription for a equilibrium of power in which the armed people are at least equal in might to the organized forces of government.
It is all these things. But it is something more, because the Founders regarded political character and individual ethical character as inseparable. They had a clear notion of the individual virtues necessary collectively to a free people. They did not merely regard the habit of bearing arms as a political virtue, but as a direct promoter of personal virtue.
The Founders had been successful armed revolutionaries. Every one of them had had repeated confrontation with life-or-death choices, in grave knowledge of the consequences of failure. They desired that the people of their infant nation should always cultivate that kind of ethical maturity, the keen sense of individual moral responsibility that they had personally learned from using lethal force in defense of their liberty.
Accordingly, firearms were prohibited only to those intended to be kept powerless and infantilized. American gun prohibitions have their origins in racist legislation designed to disarm slaves and black freedmen. The wording of that legislation repays study; it was designed not merely to deny blacks the political power of arms but to prevent them from aspiring to the dignity of free men.
The dignity of free men (and, as we would properly add today, free women). That is a phrase that bears thinking on. As the twentieth century draws to a close, it sounds archaic. Our discourse has nearly lost the concept that the health of the res publica is founded on private virtue. Too many of us contemplate a president who preaches family values and responsibility to the nation while committing adultery and perjury, and don’t see a contradiction.
But Thomas Jefferson’s question, posed in his inaugural address of 1801, still stings. If a man cannot be trusted with the government of himself, how can he be trusted with the government of others? And this is where history and politics circle back to ethics and psychology: because “the dignity of a free (wo)man” consists in being competent to govern one’s self, and in knowing, down to the core of one’s self, that one is so competent
Eric S. Raymond, “Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun”.
October 30, 2024
QotD: The right to bear arms
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