Alan Keyes on the 2nd Amendment
Educating the defenders
of liberty
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The Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms is in jeopardy these
days -- dangerously so. The purpose of the Second Amendment is to ensure
that we will remain an armed people, able to defend our liberty. In our
defense of firearm rights, we must emphasize this fundamental purpose of
the amendment. If we leave the impression that we think that the right to
keep and bear arms concerns hunting and sports shooting, and making sure
Americans have the right to entertain themselves with guns, we will actually
contribute to the false view that the Second Amendment is an historical
curiosity, hardly deserving the effort it would take to officially remove it from
the Constitution.
The right to keep and bear arms derives from our duty to retain the basic
means necessary to defend our country and our liberty. Certainly it is true
that the actual defense of our national borders is normally delegated to the
professional military. But we must never think that this revocable delegation
of responsibility for national defense is a transfer of ultimate responsibility.
We, the people, are responsible for the defense of country and liberty, and
the Second Amendment is crucial to our performance of that duty.
The presence of the Second Amendment in our Constitution reflects the
history of the emergence of self-government in the modern world. One key
impediment to the assertion of the political rights of the common man
throughout much of history was that military conflict was usually left to a
professional elite. Until common people were able to get on battlefields and
defend themselves, they left that defense to professional classes of
warriors. Inevitably, or at least naturally, such warriors became the rulers of
the people whose country they defended.
Our Founders understood that leaving matters of defense entirely in the
hands of a professional military class was inconsistent with self-government.
The American Founding was a decisive break with the old European order in
many ways, but the care our Founders took to ensure an armed citizenry is
one of the most striking. Indeed, the formal Constitutional guarantee that
the sovereignty of the people would be defended by that people
themselves, and with their own weapons, is a kind of condensed summary of
the entire doctrine of self-government on which the nation is founded.
For this reason, it is a matter of clear national interest that we make sure
that our citizens understand the meaning of their Second Amendment rights
-- indeed, their Second Amendment duties. It is difficult to see how any
citizen could have a clear understanding of his general civic responsibilities if
he does not understand the fundamental duty he bears to join with his fellow
citizens at all times in remaining vigilant to any threats to liberty. And it is
difficult to see how he could understand this if he is allowed to come of age
with a hostile or trivial view of the Second Amendment.
Accordingly, I propose that we add a serious and mature formation in
America's Second Amendment heritage to the basic civics education that all
our young people receive. We must teach our children about the
Constitution, its heritage and background, and its ultimate dependence on
the principles of the Declaration of Independence. But we should also, as an
ordinary part of their education, teach them about the relation of arms to
liberty.
We must teach our children that the preservation of liberty, and of an order
of society conducive to human dignity, requires that a free people retain the
moral and material means to discipline its own government, should the
temptation to tyranny take root. We must read the Founders' own
explanations of the purpose of the Second Amendment, and see the great
care with which they discussed the basis on which any use of the militia
against government might be contemplated, much less determined upon.
Indeed, any study of the Founders is a study of prudence in action, and this
is particularly true in the matter of the decision to take up arms in defense
of liberty.
But the perennial awareness that such citizen defense against domestic
tyranny is the ultimate material defense of our liberty is a crucial component
of civic formation. Conveying to our young citizens a mature understanding
of the prudential judgments required of them as members of the American
sovereign will be difficult, no doubt. But it was done in the past, and it can
be done again, if only we cease shying away from a clear acknowledgment of
the real anatomy of our political order.
Being an American citizen is a weighty responsibility. We must again convey
a sense of that weight to a generation of young people that is tempted,
watching the floating superficialities of our current crop of political leaders, to
think that freedom is a breezy and simple affair, with no deep consequences
beyond the constant pursuit of pleasure.
If we are serious about conveying a sense of the weight of civic
responsibility, we will not shrink from giving our students the experience of
feeling a gun in their hand as well. And so, in addition to the theoretical
component of a Second Amendment civics class, we should require of every
American student, in the senior year of high school, a practical civics course
in the basics of firearms familiarity and safety, and of self-defense.
And really, the practical side of Second Amendment education is not
optional. We cannot allow ourselves to become habitually afraid of the
instruments that must be used to defend our liberties and our country. The
Second Amendment civics course I am proposing must include the holding
and firing of basic weapons. We need to demythologize guns before the
liberal attempt to create a totemic fear of them succeeds. If the gun control
mentality promoting fear of guns themselves becomes our national
mentality, we would turn the clock back to the days when a warrior class ruled
over the people because only they had the confidence and expertise to
deploy the means of defense and coercion. The gun control agenda will turn
us into a people too timid to defend themselves from our would-be masters.
We must give our young people a reasonable and responsible confidence in
their ability to defend themselves and their liberties. We need to make sure
that these weapons are demystified, and that people understand their
responsible use, and see in themselves the capacity to handle them
responsibly.
Some will say that recent, highly-publicized incidents of violence show that
high school is precisely the wrong time to offer "hands on" training in
firearms. But the fact that such episodes occur simply emphasizes that we
need to educate young citizens to distinguish between the right and the
wrong uses of the means of self-defense. We do not conclude from the
carnage on the highways that we shouldn't teach our kids how to drive, even
though it is true that adolescents tend to look first on cars as toys or
symbols or emotional outlets. But through education we are able to turn
most of them into responsible drivers. The same would be true with respect
to firearms, so that the country will in fact be safer, and less prone to
violence, as a result of such education.
The course should include the sort of weapons that people would use for
personal defense. But it should also include introducing them to the
weapons they might be called upon to use to defend their country. The
Founders intended that American citizens would be familiar with the basic
weapon of the infantry of the day. Today it would be an M-16. Tomorrow it
may be a laser weapon, or something else.
Such a course would be, in effect, a preparation for a basic education in the
nature of military activity. And this was what the Founders intended to be the
role of the militia. The universal preparation of our young people to receive
such education would represent a partial return to the right concept of
"militia." The Founders intended that the militia would include every
able-bodied person who was capable of defending the community. One goal
of civic education in our secondary schools should be to prepare future
members of the militia so that they can be called upon as necessary to
participate in that effort.
Through negligence and a failure to think clearly about the implications of
citizenship we are in danger of allowing the liberal elite in America to turn the
essential weapons of self-defense into mythologized totems. Firearms
education is necessary to prevent a national return to the pre-republican
mentality of docility to whichever experts in contemporary techniques of
violence happen to be in a position to intimidate us. Let's pay serious
attention to what it will take to educate our children in the material, as well
as the moral, foundations of our liberty.
Gordon Langston |
