Letters

From the January 1995 issue

(Page 3 of 3)

The Bill of Rights clearly was passed to protect citizens and states from federal power, and not to restrain state powers. Thus the Second Amendment did not prevent state or local governments from disarming individuals--e.g., no one ever suggested that Wyatt Earp and other local lawmen who disarmed people in Dodge City and other western towns were violating the Second Amendment--because everyone understood that it only created a right against the federal government. Its purpose was to maintain the local means to resist potential tyranny by the federal government.

In light of this underlying broad purpose, it is difficult to discern the relevance of the Second Amendment today. State laws that attempt to disarm individuals as a way of reducing violent crime seem to have little to do with resisting the tyranny of the national government, and seem more analogous to the sort of disarming that western sheriffs imposed on townspeople without anyone seeing a Second Amendment violation.

The strongest civil libertarian reason for opposing gun control laws is the same that motivated the original drafters of the Second Amendment: to maintain the ability to resist armed tyranny by the government. But if armed tyranny comes from Washington, it will not come armed with pistols. In the modern world, no citizenry can effectively resist an armed government with handguns alone. So to achieve the desired purpose, one would have to argue that in the modern world, the Second Amendment confers the right of individuals to own tanks, bazookas, anti-
aircraft missiles, jet fighters, attack helicopters, and even tactical nuclear weapons. I know of no Second Amendment advocate who takes that position, but without it, the civil liberties underpinning of the argument collapses. Once all this heavier weaponry is banned, the ability to resist a standing professional military is practically non-existent.

Moreover, since the Second Amendment refers only to "arms" and does not distinguish among types of arms, any concession that the Second Amendment does not protect an individual's right to own a tank or nuclear weapon introduces a "rule of reason" not explicitly present in the Amendment's language. If such a "rule of reason" can be invoked to justify banning individual ownership of tanks and nuclear arms, why can't it also be used to ban, say assault rifles or to require registration while permitting ownership?

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