America is almost unique among the nations of the world in that its Constitution, by virtue of the Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights, provides that the government must trust an armed populace, rather than the reverse.

It is the fact that the government is subject to the people which makes us a free nation.

The late Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Warren Burger, detested the Second Amendment. In a TV interview which I happened to watch, several years ago, Burger fairly spat out the words in referring to "that Second Amendment". He pronounced the word "that" in the sense of the Latin "iste". In the course of the interview, he quoted the full text of the amendment, but, astonishingly, left out the word "free". (At the time, I could scarcely believe my ears – this was, after all, the former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court –, but shortly thereafter, in a published essay, he again left it out, so I knew I had not mis-heard..) But his slipshod reference was instructive, not just about his state of mind, but about the meaning of the amendment. Read without the word "free", it makes no sense. Try it:

"A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a state . . .". It is obviously false. The security of an unfree state can be maintained by a standing army, or by mercenaries. But for the Founders, with the memory of British troops quartered among them, the security of a free people, with a distrust of a standing army and a too-strong central government, would have to rest on an armed and ready citizenry.

In considering the meaning of the Amendment in the case now before the Court, the Justices might also look to the constitutions of the various States written in the same period in which the U.S. Constitution was adopted, as well as the States’ ratifying commentaries on the Constitution.

Vermont: Constitution Article XVI: "That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the State."

North Carolina: "17th. That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well regulated militia composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural and safe defence of a free state."

Not all the States were as meticulous as Vermont and North Carolina in spelling out the individual right. Virginia, whose Revolutionary leaders were famous for their assertions of the individual’s right to possess and use guns, said only "That a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state . . ." And Massachusetts’ Constitution, Article XVI, says. " The people have a right to keep and to bear arms for the common defence."

Though there isn’t time (for me) and space enough to present a thorough examination here of all of the original 13 States’ original provisions and/or later amendments on the subject, I believe that a fair argument can be made that even in the case of those States whose constitutions said nothing about the subject, there was an assumption of both the right and the fact of their citizens bearing arms. The Minutemen of Massachusetts and my Virginia ancestors who routed the British at King’s Mountain, did it, after all, with their own guns.

– J. Griffin Crump