Lethal Laws' thesis that the ultimate purpose of gun ownership is for citizens to shoot government troops (or simply to possess arms, thereby deterring governmental violence) will offend many persons, including many gun owners, who like to consider gun ownership in the pleasant, bucolic context of hunting. [147] But the authors' viewpoint is precisely the viewpoint of the intellectual world from which the Second Amendment sprang.
The framers of the American Constitution were strongly of the opinion that "it could happen here." They drafted the Constitution as a counterpoint to the abuses of government which they had endured themselves and which they knew about from history. Not the least of these abuses were the French government's mass persecutions of the disarmed Huguenots in the previous century. Indeed, a sizeable number of Huguenots fled to the United States. [148]
After the English Civil War, the Glorious Revolution, and religious persecutions in 17th-century Great Britain, William Blackstone in the eighteenth century described the right to arms as the fifth and last "auxiliary right" of the subject, meant to protect all other rights. The right "of having arms for their defence" was "a public allowance under restrictions, of the natural right of resistance and self preservation, when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression." [149] Sir Walter Raleigh was simply repeating the conventional wisdom of his age when he noted that a tyrant will seek "to unarm his people of weapons, money, and all means whereby they resist his power." [150]
The drafters of the American Constitution trusted the people more than the government, intended the armed populace to be the ultimate check in the system of checks and balances, and meant to reserve to the American people the right affirmed in the Declaration of Independence to "alter or abolish" a tyrannical government. James Madison's friend Tench Coxe explained that
[T]he powers of the sword are in the hands of the yeomanry of America from sixteen to sixty. The militia of these free commonwealths, entitled and accustomed to their arms, when compared with any possible army, must be tremendous and irresistible. Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves. . . . Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American. . . . [T]he unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people. [151]
Tench Coxe's words from across the centuries are not very different from those of the late Vice President Hubert Humphrey: "The right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible." [152] Consistent with these quotations, virtually every scholar in the last 15 years who has studied the history of the Second Amendment finds that it was intended to recognize, not create, a fundamental human right to possess weapons, a right whose primary purpose was to facilitate resistance to a tyrannical government. [153]
Although the Bible was less influential in the political theory of the early American republic than the histories of Great Britain, Greece, and Rome were, all of the people who shaped the Constitution and the Bill of Rights (including Deists such as Jefferson and Franklin) knew the Bible well and took its history lessons seriously. The Book of Esther is set in the period of the Babylonian captivity and stands as a counterpoint to Jeremiah, which is set in the period leading up to the conquest of Judea by Babylon. Babylonian King Ahasuerus, influenced by a malicious advisor, orders the extermination of all Jews. The King's wife, Queen Esther, is secretly a Jew and risks her life by telling the King and convincing him to execute the malicious advisor. Unfortunately, the King's order to execute and plunder the Jews has already gone out and cannot legally be rescinded. But the King can send out a second decree, so he sends a decree telling
the Jews which were in every city to gather themselves together, and to stand for their life, to destroy and slay, and to cause to perish, all the power of the people and provinces that would assault them . . . . Thus the Jews smote all their enemies with the stroke of the sword . . . . [T]he other Jews that were in the king's provinces gathered themselves together, and stood for their lives, and had rest from their enemies, and slew of their foes seventy and five thousand . . . . [154]
Although the authors focus primarily on the physical implications of gun controls--of genocide victims being deprived of tools which would facilitate resistance--the classical ideologists of the right to bear arms would have agreed with them. However, they might have added another point which they thought even more important: disarmament upsets the proper relationship between the master (the people) and the servant (the government) by making the people accustomed to dependence on the government. Machiavelli observed that
[A]mong other ills which ensue from being disarmed is contempt . . . . There can be no proper relation between one who is armed and one who is not; nor is it reasonable to expect that one who is armed will voluntarily obey one who is not, or that the latter will feel secure among servants who are armed. [155]
Joel Barlow observed that
[it] palsies the hand and brutalizes the mind: an habitual disuse of physical force totally destroys the moral; and men lose at once the power of protecting themselves, and of discerning the cause of their oppression. [156]
To the generation that drafted the Second Amendment, possessing arms to deter a government (or a mob which might be inspired by the government) that might contemplate mass murder was an uncontroversial moral imperative. The fact that the same message in the 20th-century book Lethal Laws may be considered so radical as to be not even worth discussing is perhaps one reason why genocide has become the great pandemic of the twentieth century.
