In a word, Yes.
The idea was straightforward. 130 years before a national guard was even contemplated, and several generations before an organized police force emerged, the Militia was the force which protected every farm and family. The beauty of the Militia then and now was and is that the person who had the most to lose, the farmer and private land owner, had at hand a weapon which was battery ready. This was because there simply was no one else. Today, there is also no one else.
This is one of several understated truths of freedom in America for the non-gun owner households to understand. There is no one else, not really.
In those days, there was no government idea of trying to dislocate this safeguard of our freedoms either, because everyone was more or less in the same situation: Freedom. Even the government protected your freedom by recognizing that you are the supreme authority in our way of life and that government is servant to the sovereign.
The right to bear the arms we keep exists as a safeguard of the nation such that public servants cannot imagine and impose some other plan in our place. How they attempt this is to ban guns first.
The concept of such a national safeguard involved largely the idea of the ubiquitous armed citizen. Where nearly everyone had the means and the spirit of protecting what they had - and law to back them instead of opposing them - the country could thrive and make it into the 1800's. In the next century, not everyone carried quite as much, and the concept of the Wild West was largely legend and not as volatile as some have thought. We had law, and we also still had support from our government on who was the sovereign.
Little has really changed in why one is armed, and why we would prefer to see armed citizens everywhere in larger numbers. To bear arms means to carry them on the person. Today, with more than 300 million guns in the hands of some 90 million adults, the concept of a ‘ubiquitous armed citizen' doesn't quite yet apply as much as I'd like, but the concept on which it rests will endure in every generation. There is no one else, really.
This is why I urge the repeal of all gun laws, including just how citizens might choose to bear them. For the purpose of the armed citizen, there simply is no one else.
The purpose of the second amendment of the framing era was that the ubiquitous armed citizen would show beyond question that certain types of government programs would look silly as unneeded, and therefore could not boondoggle the electorate. Truly, there is no one else and never was.
The Founders knew at the nation's inception that the sovereignty of the citizen would later be threatened more by the public servants than by any other entity in the world. This would come under the illusion that there is someone else.
There isn't.
America needs to see this November 2010 as an opportunity to re-affirm our personal independence from our own public servants for many things, and bearing arms is one of those because, in fact, for some specific things, there is no one else.
John Longenecker is an author of Safe Streets In The Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns – Meeting Dependency And Violent Crime With American Spirit, Independence, And Citizen Authority [CONTRAST MEDIA PRESS]. Safer Streets Newsletter.
