History: All Guns to the People

[WAGCEVP]

History: All Guns to the People


Liberty Magazine
September/October 2003
Page 23

History

All Guns to the People
by William R. Tonso

Next year, the "assault gun" ban will sunset, and new
high-capacity magazines and scary-looking rifles will be
available once again. The Founding Fathers would applaud.


Imagine, if you will, what would have happened if last
fall's sniper rampage in the D.C. area had occurred with
Bill Clinton or Al Gore occupying the White House. Add a
House and Senate controlled by the Democrats. To put it
mildly, the mainstream-media-assisted drumbeat for more
draconian gun controls would have been loud and continuous,
and the controls likely would have been enacted. As it was,
even the push for keeping a fired slug and cartridge on
record as a "fingerprint" for each new gun as a means (that
wouldn't work) of tracing guns used in crimes didn't get
very far. Why?

The Bush administration has thus far been much more
supportive of the Second Amendment than any recent
administration and has given the media nothing to run with.
After the gun issue played a significant role in the
Republican takeover of both houses of Congress in 1994, and
because of Al Gore's loss of states, such as his own
Tennessee, that could have put him in the White House in
2000, many Democratic strategists see gun control as a
losing proposition. The Sept. 11 terrorist attack drove
home the point to many people that the government can't
necessarily be relied upon to protect them, and inclined
them not to support more restrictions on the acquisition of
guns with which they could protect themselves.

But the gun issue is now back in the news because in
September 2004 the bans passed in 1994 on "assault weapons"
and large-capacity magazines will sunset. That means that
the bans will expire unless Congress takes action to extend
them or make them permanent. And the usual suspects are
already back pushing for this to happen — Calif. Democratic
senator Dianne Feinstein, the Senate sponsor of the original
ban, and N. Y. Democratic senator Charles Schumer, who
sponsored the ban when he was a member of the House. But
they have apparently been joined by, of all people,
President George W. Bush. Whether Bush, whose attorney
general, John Ashcroft, has taken a strong pro-Second
Amendment stand, actually supports the ban or is simply
trying to keep the gun prohibitionists off of his back while
he depends on the Republican Congress to keep the ban
extension from getting to his desk, is not clear.

So here we go again! The same tired old arguments will be
trotted out and uncritically passed on to the public by the
mainstream media, entertainment as well as news, and they
will all be grounded in the enlightened conventional wisdom
on guns in establishment media, academic, and political
circles. This conventional wisdom assumes (1) that sporting
guns are less powerful than military firearms, and (2) that
while civilians may have legitimate reasons for owning the
former, they have none for owning the latter.

Conventional wisdom is wrong on both counts.

For most of our history, American civilians owned not only
military small arms, but also sporting and defensive guns
that were more powerful than the guns the military used at
the time. And they did so with the unquestioned full
blessing of the Second Amendment.

When Attorney General Ashcroft acknowledged that the Second
Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms, the
mainstream press treated his position as a conservative one,
when in fact, as David Kopel has noted, he was “simply
returning to a position held by United States attorneys
general before the administration of Lyndon Johnson.†And
the paper trail left by the Founders clearly indicates that
the militia of the Second Amendment was grounded in a
citizenry made up of individuals exercising what they
considered to be their pre-constitutional, natural right to
keep and bear arms. Richard Henry Lee wrote, “A militia,
when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves, and
include all men capable of bearing arms.†And this from
George Mason: “Who are the militia? They consist now of
the whole people, except a few public Officers.†Patrick
Henry believed that “the great object is that every man be
armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun.†The Militia
Act of 1792 considered all free white males of military age
to be militiamen, and required them to own militarily useful
firearms — a requirement not always met. It should be noted
that according to U.S. Code Title 10, section 311(a), all
able-bodied males between the ages of 17 and 45 who are
citizens or have declared that they intend to become
citizens are still members of the militia. The United
States Supreme Court acknowledged all of this about the
Founders’ conception of the militia in United States v.
Miller (1939), and stated “that ordinarily when called for
service these men were expected to appear bearing arms
supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the
time†(emphasis added).

And statements by prominent Americans from the founding
generation to the recent past make it clear why such a
militia has long been considered necessary. Tench Coxe, a
friend of Bill of Rights author James Madison, wrote: “As
civil rulers, not having their duty to the people before
them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces
which must be occasionally raised to defend our country,
might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow
citizens, the people are confirmed by the next article in
their right to keep and bear their private arms†(emphasis
added). Richard Henry Lee agreed: “To preserve liberty it
is essential that the whole body of the people always
possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how
to use them.†So did Noah Webster: “Before a standing army
can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost
every Kingdom of Europe. The supreme power in America
cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword because the whole
body of the people are armed.†Also Elbridge Gerry: “What,
sir, is the use of militia? It is to prevent the
establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty.†And
Joseph Story, Associate Justice of the United States from
1811 to 1845: “The right of the citizens to keep and bear
arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the
liberties of the republic; since it offers a strong moral
check against usurpation and arbitrary power of the rulers;
and will generally, even if these are successful in the
first instance; enable the people to resist and triumph over
them.†Even the late Hubert H. Humphrey, the liberal
Democrat senator and vice president, issued the following
statement in 1959: “The right of citizens to bear arms is
just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one
more safe-guard against tyranny which now appears remote in
America, but which historically has proved to be always
possible.†And this from Judge Ronald M. Gould of the
ultra-liberal 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in his
recent rebuff of a fellow judge’s “December dicta remarks
about the meaning of the Second Amendmentâ€: “[T]he Second
Amendment was designed by the Framers of our Constitution to
safeguard our Nation not only in times of good government,
such as we have enjoyed for generations, but also in the
event, however unlikely, that our government or leaders
would go bad. And it was designed to provide national
security not only when our country is strong but also if it
were to become weakened or otherwise subject to attack.â€

Judge Gould’s comments are very timely, because the liberal
Left, particularly since the Oklahoma City terrorist bombing
and all the attention it brought to the militia movement,
has demagogued against this “insurrectionist†interpretation
of the amendment. How dare anyone suggest that American
citizens would ever have to take up arms against their own
government! And the American talk-radio Right, particularly
since the terrorism of Sept. 11, is so enamored of our
military and police forces that it apparently can’t conceive
of them ever being used to establish a tyranny. But as
Gould implies, the amendment’s purpose is to provide a means
for the citizenry to protect itself when things have gone
very wrong. While our government is not now tyrannical, is
it really less likely to become so at some future date than
it was in the early days of the republic? And can today’s
large professional military be trusted with advanced
firearms, while civilians can’t be trusted with them? What
reason would we have to answer “yes†to either of these
questions? The liberal establishment has long viewed the
Constitution as an obstacle to its social engineering
efforts. We now have exactly the kind of large professional
military the Founders feared, and no one knows what impact
the War on Terrorism will have on our civil liberties. In
fact, even to voice such concerns since 9/11 is to risk
earning the suspicion of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task
Force which reportedly has been cautioning law enforcement
to look out for “defenders of the U.S. Constitution against
the federal government and the UN.†That’s scary!

Those opponents of widespread gun ownership who acknowledge
that the Founders did indeed intend that the citizenry be
armed respond that what was acceptable and needed in the
late 18th century is no longer acceptable or needed. The
rapid-fire guns of today, they claim, are capable of doing
far more damage than the single-shot muzzle-loading muskets,
rifles, and pistols used by both soldiers and civilians two
centuries ago. They claim that civilians can’t be trusted
with these advanced guns, but that the armed agents of the
government can be trusted with them. There are two glaring
problems with this argument. The first problem is that it
disregards the Founders’ desire that the citizenry be armed
as a check against the tyrannical tendencies of government
and standing military forces.

The second problem with the argument is that it is grounded
in phenomenal ignorance of the types of guns to which
American citizens had easy access until recently. It’s true
that when the Second Amendment was written, the guns
available to both soldiers and civilians were (with the
exceptions of a few multi-barreled guns and a few guns that
loaded from the breach) muzzle-loading single shots. But
even then, the Pennsylvania/Kentucky rifles favored by
civilian frontiersmen were far more accurate over far
greater ranges than were the smoothbore muskets used by the
military. Muskets, which could also be owned by civilians,
were cheaper to make and faster to load than rifles,
however, and better fitted the battle tactics of the day.
Those tactics had opposing armies march up to each other,
fire several volleys at each other at close range, and then
charge each other with bayonets. Rifles, however, were
quite useful to the guerrilla fighters, snipers, and
skirmishers who avoided head-on confrontations with troops
set up in battle formations.

But while the guns known to the Founders were slow-loading
devices, between the late 1830s and 1900, all of the
technologies making rapid fire possible had been invented
and made reasonably practical and convenient — revolvers,
self-contained metallic cartridges, lever actions, pump
actions, semiautomatics (one shot per trigger pull), and
automatics (machine guns, which fire as long as the trigger
is held back). Civilians who desired them and could afford
them had access to guns using these technologies from the
time their production began.

According to Wayne van Zwoll, of the 22,000 powerful
.44-caliber Dragoon model revolvers produced by Colt between
1847 and 1861, only 9,380 were purchased by the government.
From the late 1860s to the early 1890s, when most American
soldiers were issued cartridge-firing but single-shot
rifles, civilians had access not only to similar rifles but
to rapid-fire, lever-action rifles with magazine capacities
up to, in the case of the rare Evans, a staggering 34
rounds, though most capacities were in the middle teens.
Army officers on the frontier often purchased these civilian
“sporting†repeating rifles to carry on military campaigns.
By the turn of the century, civilians could purchase several
models of semiautomatic pistols manufactured by foreign and
domestic companies, but our military didn’t adopt a
semiautomatic pistol until 1911. And our military didn’t
adopt a semiautomatic rifle until some 30 years after
semiautomatic “sporting†rifles were introduced. Pump and
semiautomatic shotguns used by the police for riot control
and by the military for trench and jungle warfare are
adaptations of civilian sporting guns. The cartridges for
which practically all of our military rifles, shotguns, and
pistols have been chambered have also been favorites for
hunting, target shooting, and self defense, and none of them
even approach the power of the most powerful cartridges
available for hunting the largest and most dangerous game —
elephants, cape buffalo, lions, tigers, and grizzly bears,
among others.

 

[WAGCEVP]

continued ................

After our major wars, from the Civil War through Korea, and
after our military’s adoption of new service firearms,
surplus military small arms have been sold off to the public
at bargain prices. In the late 1940s, 5-shot, bolt-action,
.30-06 1917 Enfields, our main battle rifle during World War
I, could be purchased through the Army’s Office of the
Director of Civilian Marksmanship (DCM) for about $7.00
each. As late as the middle 1960s, World War II
semiautomatic .30-caliber carbines, equipped with 15-round
magazines but capable of using the fully automatic M-2
carbine’s 30-round magazines, and semiautomatic .45-caliber
pistols could be purchased from the DCM for about $20.00
each. Until passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968, surplus
military rifles and pistols from around the world, even 20mm
semiautomatic anti-tank rifles, as well as sporting guns of
all types, could be purchased throughout most of America
with no background checks or age restrictions.

Americans have long had easy and even government-encouraged
access not only to modern military small arms, but to
civilian guns with as much power as, or more power than,
military firearms. In fact, until passage of the National
Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934, the only things that restricted
civilian access to machine guns were desire and cost. But
it was the 1934 Act, the constitutionality of which is
questionable since it restricts civilian access to guns with
obvious militia utility, that would eventually lead to
American infantrymen being issued guns with greater
firepower than American civilians are allowed to possess.
The NFA didn’t ban the civilian possession of machine guns
and other weapons (such as sawed-off rifles and shotguns)
covered by the act. It did require owners of such guns to
be cleared by local police chiefs or sheriffs after a
background check, registration of the guns, payment of a
$200 transfer tax to the federal government (a significant
sum to everyone but the rich in 1934), and so forth.

When the NFA was passed, ordinary infantrymen carried
5-shot, bolt-action, .30-06 rifles (1903 Springfields),
while officers and others carried 1911 .45-caliber
semiautomatic pistols. The 1911 .45 was sold to civilians,
who could also buy bolt action rifles comparable to the
military rifle as well as faster firing lever-action, pump,
and semiautomatic sporting rifles. Portable automatic
weapons, like the Thompson submachine gun and the Browning
Automatic Rifle (BAR), had been developed, but weren’t used
by the military in large numbers until World War II. Even
in that war, most American infantrymen were still issued
rifles, by then the semiautomatic 8-shot M-l Garand. So even
with the federal restrictions placed on the civilian
possession of fully automatic firearms, weaponry allowed the
citizenry and its militia was still comparable to that
issued to most individual infantrymen until 1957.

In 1957, our military adopted the 7.62x51mm M-14 rifle which
has a 20-round magazine and can be fired selectively —
automatically (as a machine gun) as well as
semiautomatically — though the automatic feature was blocked
on most M-14s because recoil made them difficult to control
when so fired. Another selective-fire rifle, the milder
recoiling 5.56x45mm M-16, which also uses a 20-round
magazine, was adopted by our services in 1963 and finally
replaced the M14 in 1970. Many of the semiautomatic M-1
rifles replaced in service by these selective-fire rifles
have been sold to civilians by the DCM or otherwise, as has
been common practice throughout our national history when
our military has adopted new guns. But surplus M-14s and
M-16s, once the latter rifle is replaced, won’t be sold to
the public, because some M-14s and all M-16s can be fired
not only semiautomatically but automatically, or in the case
of later M-16s, burst fire (three shots per trigger pull)..
Civilian acquisition of such guns, therefore, is restricted
not only by the 1934 NFA, but by 1986 federal legislation
that put a halt to machine guns legally entering civilian
circulation, and also by bans on the ownership of machine
guns that several states have enacted. The soon-to-sunset
1994 legislation even banned the further civilian
acquisition of civilian semiautomatic-only variations of
automatic military firearms and detachable box magazines
capable of holding more than ten rounds.

All of these restrictions, plus those on handgun ammunition
that can penetrate body armor worn by the police (but in
three decades has yet to kill a cop), fly in the face of the
Second Amendment and American tradition. All these
restrictions trust government over the citizenry. The paper
trail they left makes clear that the Founders considered
government to be a necessary evil, distrusted its armed
agents, and saw an armed citizenry as a check against its
tyrannical tendencies. During the 20th century alone,
governments around the world have massacred at least 170
million of their own people, not counting war casualties,
and the actions of our federal police at Ruby Ridge, Ida..
and Waco, Tex., though small scale, indicate that such
things can happen here. Yet in not only ignoring the
intentions of the Founders and our firearms tradition, but
denying their existence, the gun prohibitionists in
politics, academia, and the mainstream media would have us
believe that we can trust only government, not ourselves, to
protect us (whether from common criminals or terrorists),
that only its agents have a right to arms, and that the
citizenry has no need to possess the means of opposing
government’s armed agents or protecting itself from
criminals or terrorists. And note that not even talk-radio
conservatives, let alone conservatives in government, have
suggested that armed civilians, the real constitutional
militia, be properly trained, organized, and enlisted in the
war against terrorism as guards at bridges, water supplies,
the borders, etc. Ordinary Americans are encouraged to
fight terrorism by continuing to travel and consume — and to
stock up on duct tape and plastic sheeting.

So as the expirations of the bans on “assault weapons†and
detachable magazines holding more than ten rounds approach,
the gun prohibitionists will be out in full force using the
sniper rampage, the terrorist threat, and any other tragic,
gun-related event between now and then to push for making
the bans permanent, or even expanding their scope. Those
who support the expiration of the ban will be labeled
extremists and, if not terrorists themselves, enablers of
terrorists. The mainstream media, of course, will assist
this demonization of those who dare to point out that the
Second Amendment was intended to be the teeth of the Bill of
Rights — a defense against tyranny.

It remains to be seen whether the Bush administration and
the Republican-controlled Congress will continue to support
the Second Amendment or cave in as they did on the
“campaign-finance reform†that flew in the face of the First
Amendment. The administration has its share of anti-Second
Amendment types like Homeland Security head Tom Ridge (who
opposed the arming of airline pilots), and they surely will
oppose letting the bans expire. Even many who claim to
support the Second Amendment tend to qualify that support by
claiming that the amendment doesn’t preclude “reasonable
restrictions†on private gun ownership. Solicitor General
Theodore Olson has acknowledged the administration’s
recognition of the individual’s right to keep and bear arms,
even apart from militia membership, but claims that right is
“subject to ‘reasonable restrictions’ to prevent ‘unfit
persons’ from obtaining firearms and to limit the
possessions of some types of weapons that are ‘particularly
suited to criminal misuse “ (emphasis added).

Americans, until recent decades, commonly owned guns with as
much firepower as, or more firepower than, those issued to
soldiers. Because most people are unaware of this, it may
be easy to convince members of this administration and the
Republican-controlled Congress that the “assault weapon†and
magazine bans are reasonable. Even conservative talk
radio’s Second Amendment supporters are often ignorant
concerning guns. Rush Limbaugh once told a caller that
there’s no such thing as a semiautomatic — guns are either
automatic or they aren’t. So in order to, say, buy liberal
support for a Bush-nominated federal judge, it might seem
desirable to give in to an extension on these bans or make
them permanent. On the other hand, the bans expire just
before the 2004 election, and Democrats as well as
Republicans know that anti-gun positions have been hurting
politicians while pro-gun positions have been helping them.

William R. Tonso is a professor emeritus of sociology at the
University of Evansville, Indiana.

 

[AZTOY]

 

[geekWithA.45]

Concentrated Truth.

Ya gotta love it.