Sense and nonsense on the Second Amendment
I
There are two subjects on which I am afraid to write: homosexuality, and the Second Amendment. And the reason is simple: these are areas in which people cannot be reasoned with. The extraordinary contortions and the plainly absurd statements into which people throw themselves in order to defend these passions would be evidence enough, but they are actually less diagnostic than the rage with which any opposing viewpoint is encountered. “Batshit insane” is the constant, indeed clich, response with which even otherwise sane people encounter any questioning of the complete moral and sexual validity of homosexual practice; “you will take my gun from my cold dead hands” is the level of reasoning which meets any challenge to the notion that an implement to kill people is an essential part of citizenship. Faced with such attitudes, people who disagree may well find it more comfortable to fall silent.
(I am not saying that every person who holds such views is necessarily unreasonable in this fashion; indeed, the hope that my friends may not be is the one thing that keeps me writing this article. I am, however, saying that this aggressive-defensive attitude is so widespread as to be characteristic, and that the possibility rather than certainty of encountering it is enough to discourage argument.)
Some readers may find the very comparison between these two groups bizarre, or incoherent, or at the very least paradoxical; but I do not think it is. I think that they are brought together by a common feature: the aggressive-defensive reaction, behind which lurks a sense that the whole world is out to get you, and that if you give in on anything in these matters, the next thing that will happen is that you will be brutalized, possibly murdered, and helpless with it. If any questioning of the validity of homosexual sex is allowed, the next thing is that homosexuals will be beaten in the streets and rounded up for the concentration camps; I have heard it said to my face - by someone who immediately after banned me from replying - that any such arguments, in whatever spirit they may be posed, are simply and solely “hate speech” and cannot be tolerated. Let alone, of course, answered. By the same token, the Second-Amendment theorist cannot be cured of the paranoid vision of a world in which only his piece of metal stands between him and an oceanic wave of monsters, rapists, robbers, murderers. Anyone who questions the sense of having more guns in America than citizens is as good as charged with being on the side of criminals - who, of course, always will have guns, so we all have to have them, right? I have seriously heard the argument made, by otherwise adult people, that college shooting sprees would not happen if more people in colleges had guns, because they would shoot the shooters first. Yes, of course, they would be able to read their murderous intentions in their minds before they started shooting. And of course, the all-American fashion for murdering people in large numbers and then committing suicide any time you are feeling anti-social, instead of taking some Prozac, has nothing to do with the ready availability of guns. Guns are like Communism: they haven’t failed, comrades. They just haven’t been tried enough.
In the last analysis, these so-called arguments are not really there to be answered rationally; and the evidence is the violence with which the response often arrives. The response is to suppress debate; and that shows that opposing arguments are not experienced as arguments, but as threats. The homosexual activist feels threatened by any challenge to his sexual activity, however theoretical, because there is something there that he simply does not want to hear; and the Second-Amendment theorist reacts the same way to attempts to read this outdated piece of eighteenth-century legislation rationally. The homosexual activist does not want to hear that the sex he practices, whether or not accepted, tolerated or ignored, is not comparable to normal sex; he experiences this as an aggression on his own self comparable to assault or murder. Likewise, the Second-Amendment theorist experiences any attempt to remove his ability to kill people easily as a violent and personal assault, on the same level as a criminal assault. He does not want to accept that he has demanded, as part of his supposed political freedom, the ability to behave like the Texas Tower sniper or like Booth, Czolgosz or Lee Harvey Oswald (all people who really did believe that they were taking the part of the “armed citizenry” defending freedom - remember what Booth shouted after murdering Lincoln?). He does not want to accept that killing is what he is speaking of.
There is, of course, such a thing as crime. And there is such a thing as violent, criminal homophobia; I can bear witness to it, having seen two homosexual friends of mine come back bleeding from a vicious assault. What is wrong is to imagine that the only way to deal with the latter is to shut down free speech and forbid the expression of certain universal feelings; and that the only way to deal with the former is to arm everyone, as if every person you are going to meet were a potential deadly enemy.
Even more ridiculous - and I am sorry to have to say it, because the person who has said it most frequently is (thus far) a friend of mine: sorry, johncwright - is the argument that “an armed citizenry is a defence against tyranny.” This would mean that, given that gun ownership is far more widespread in Muslim and especially Arab countries than in western Europe, Europeans are less free than Arabs. At which point, since prejudice reinforces prejudice, I can imagine that a certain kind of American will be willing to argue that the Europeans, under their terrible Socialist tyrannies, are, if not less free, certainly no more free than the citizens of Lybia or Syria. I find this attitude no different (having experienced both) from that of those people in Italy who seriously believe that there is no important difference between Obama, Rodham Clinton and McCain, and that American freedom is merely superficial. In both cases, ridiculous media-driven distortions and exaggerations, driven by national and party-political prejudice, have made it impossible for allies to know the truth about each other.
It is, of course, not only possible but easy to point out to any amount of conditionings, creeping influences, menaces of every kind, that threaten freedom here and there; and so it has always been. Freedom is conditioned and threatened, in America and in Europe, because so it has always been and so, please God, it always will be - for the alternative is to have no freedom at all. Freedom is always and everywhere under threat, and its price certainly is eternal vigilance. And even that can sometimes fail. Freedom did not collapse in Italy and Germany because of insufficient vigilance: its guardians and partisans certainly raised the alarm in time. Freedom is never safe. But freedom, however imperilled, is still the norm both in north America and in most of Europe. Some free societies have limitations on weapons; one has a surfeit of them. Many of the most unfree societies on Earth have a surfeit of weapons, so that the usual way of celebrating a perfectly peaceful event such as a soccer victory is to shoot one’s guns in the air. In other words, the availability or otherwise of guns is at best irrelevant to the existence or otherwise of political freedom.
Indeed, if the evidence leans one way, it leans against the theory that “an armed citizenry is a bulwark of freedom”. What did more than anything else to destroy freedom in Russia, Italy and Germany, was the wide, indeed universal, availability of war-grade weapons and trained men in the wake of a gigantic war. This allowed criminalized political parties to lay hands both on vast depots of weapons and large numbers of trained and armed civilians; and this turned party politics into a battlefield for armed paramilitary groups. And it seems all too clear to me that what keeps America from a similar fate is not any availability of killing implements, but the basic civic education of the mass of American citizens, their knowledge of ways other than the gun to promote their views and advance their causes, their acceptance of and respect for the law. It was when a certain number of Russians, Italians, or Germans, ceased to have any respect for state law, that tyranny started rumbling in on truckfuls of armed civilians - swiftly followed by artillery, tanks, aircraft.
Nor should we forget that those civilians were in fact freshly dismissed soldiers from some of the finest armies in the world. World War One was a quite extraordinary phenomenon; at no point before had so many millions of people been trained to the highest pitch of military skill and kept at it for years, till they came home not as relieved bourgeois former conscripts, but as people whose identity was largely defined by the army units they had fought in. An ordinary citizen would have stood no chance against a veteran of four years of fighting on the Isonzo or the Somme. (I would not normally use a movie as a document for anything, but the point is made quite credibly in the great Spencer Tracy movie Bad Day at Black Rock, where the violent and corrupt “armed citizens” of Black Rock prove no match for the aging and one-armed but experienced former soldier Tracy. That is what would happen in real life.) And that is actually what johncwright imagines: an ordinary citizen - with a gun. In today’s world, the idea that even a hundred thousand such could do anything to stop any kind of tyranny, if the government and the armed forces were otherwise resolved, is a bad joke. A civilian can kill fifty other civilians from the top of a Texas Tower; against the kind of power available even to the poorest African state - tanks and helicopters, RPGs and heavy artillery, rockets and land-mines - he would stand less than no chance.
Johncwright is being, literally, romantic; he is somehow living in the Romantic age. Two centuries ago there was a comparatively brief period in which revolted citizenries were able, by holding cities against regular armies and arming insurgent corps, to defeat tyrannical governments - sometimes. It was the period in which what is called romantic poetry - Wordsworth, Keats, Lamartine, Manzoni, Heine, Novalis - and music - Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Verdi, Wagner - flourished; and, as everyone knows, the two phenomena were related. It began in 1776 and had its last success - Garibaldi’s campaign, the most Romantic of all - in 1860. Even in this period, the budget was mostly negative. The success of revolution in the USA, in France, later in Greece, then in Belgium, finally in Italy, must be compared with its repeated failure in Ireland (1798), Poland (three times - 1798, 1830, 1863), Spain, Germany, Italy before 1859, Austria, Hungary, the Turkish Empire, Russia, and, in 1848, the whole of Europe. The rare cases of successful insurrectional war were nearly always backed by the intervention of major powers: the USA were helped by France, Greece by the mighty coalition of France, Britain and Russia, Belgium by France, Italy by France. Only in 1860, Garibaldi’s great campaign, was there no overt support by a great power; and even so, the British fleet and the armies of Savoy/Sardinia/Italy were practically on the rebels’ side. There is not a single case in which an insurrection by an angry citizenry, however powerful, succeeded alone, save for the French Revolution; and there it succeeded because France itself was by far the strongest power in Europe, and once its own government had been taken over by the revolutionary National Assembly, no power in Europe could do a thing about it.
(That is not to say that the many failed insurrections from Spain to Poland and from Ireland to Bulgaria had no value. Individually and collectively, they signalled to the powers that the absolutist and unconstitutional “paternal” rule encouraged by the Romanovs, the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns, was intolerable and could not be supported. In all of Europe except Russia, the demands of the rebels were eventually peacefully granted by the very powers that had originally suppressed them. Austria-Hungary, the heartland of reaction, received a constitution and an elected government in 1867, and the very Emperor who had come to the throne to crush the revolts of 1848, Franz Joseph, quickly learned to live as a Constitutional monarch who “reigns but does not govern” in the best British manner. But what made the difference was not the frequency of revolt so much as the growing realization that a parliamentary constitution needed be neither unstable nor incompatible with law and order. It was the view of orderly, successful parliamentary government in Britain and America - and, most of the time, in France - that removed the worst fears of central European rulers. Hegel, the state philosopher of Prussia, quoted France in particular as an example of a country where freedom of debate did not impede the national government from having a coherent and successful policy.)
By the same token, it was in France that the end of the age of insurrection was consumed - in 1871, when even the rags of the defeated national Army were enough to destroy the Parisian rebels by force. The coming of the machine-gun had done it: the single-shot muskets and hunting rifles that had shaken Europe from one end to the other in 1848 could no longer match the weapons of an organized Army, even from behind the barricades of a revolted great city - even when the city in question was the largest in Europe (as Paris then was). Since then, the amount of force available to the state has been multiplied by technology, far beyond what remains available to the imagined “armed citizenry”. The nineteenth century has been over for a while now. Even if every member of the “armed citizenry” were armed with an Uzi, they could do nothing against the tanks and the helicopters of any regular army. The defence of freedom is not in force of arms; it is in having a state structure that accepts its dependence on the popular will and on democratic laws. And that, more than anything else, is why it is wholesome - however corrupt and mendacious the protagonists - to force politicians to compete for office every few years.
II
An excusable but intellectually sloppy bolster to Second-Amendment theorizing is the feeling that “this is the way it has always been”, that the “right to bear arms” as understood today has been part of the US landscape from the beginning and that it is its opponents who are the innovators. This contention, however, will not stand up to serious scrutiny, both in relative and in absolute terms. And if Second-Amendment theorists managed to appoint Supreme Court justices who were really, on principle, and across the board, “strict constructionists”, they would be apt to receive a nasty surprise - more than one, since the correct interpretation of the Second Amendment would make the whole current structure of the US armed forces, and possibly a great deal of its law enforcement, quite unconstitutional.
Before I analyze the Second Amendment itself, one or two words on historical change would not be out of place. The Constitution of the USA was written for a Republic of three million farmers and merchants, mostly neither very rich nor very poor, scattered across an already enormous territory (the original Thirteen Colonies amount to at least five times the total land mass of Italy or Britain, the vast majority arable land). It is common, and deserved, to praise its writers for creating an instrument of extraordinary conciseness and flexibility, which has survived the most monumental change and gone on to serve a country which has almost nothing in common with the experience of its founders. (And if this seems exaggerated, consider: the vast majority of Americans are now town-dwellers; the leading churches of the country were Episcopalians and Presbyterians at the foundation, Catholics and Baptists now; far from being neither very rich nor very poor, Americans now range across a gamut from imperial and monstrously wasteful wealth to roofless and starved poverty; far from having to fend off the predatory interests of European colonial powers, America is itself now an empire which has for decades exercised a protectorate of sorts over much of Europe; etc.) But there is no need to ascribe the gift of prophecy to them (let alone imagine that they would like what they saw, if so!). Simple commonsense tells us that men who knew nothing better than single-shot muskets with long bayonets, whose killing power was as much in the bayonet blade as in the bullet, could not possibly have imagined they would legislate for ages in which a single human being can carry a gun that can spray hundreds of bullets and strike further than the finest artillery piece could in their time. And the people who like to cradle themselves in the belief that things have always been the same should reflect upon a particularly unpleasant and recent development. Texas Tower snipers and Columbine mass killers have not always been there. They began to occur in the sixties. A lot of theories as to why have been proposed - cultural changes, deracination, etc. My idea is simpler. They are here now, and not before, because they can. This is the first time in history in which ordinary people can access sniper-quality rifles, capable of long and accurate shot. The reason why such mass killers, though rarer, have also happened in Europe - especially, so far as I can see, in Germany - is that such weapons are easily available to sports shooters and hunters. Of course, the vast majority of these - and there are millions in continental Europe, Germany, France, Italy - are perfectly ordinary citizens. But the odd lunatic or desperate individual now has a weapon at hand he did not have before. It is, after all, only a sub-case of the well-known law: if something can go wrong (such as a gun owner going nuts, or a nut getting hold of a gun), it will. And this is only one of the ways in which technological advance has radically altered the position of weapons in society.
That being the case, it is perfect nonsense to imagine that the Second Amendment can fit into the modern world. Technology has outpaced it. Most of the provisions of the Constitution are proof against any technology except for something (today, alas, more easily imagined than ever before) which alters the very nature of human beings. There is no reason why electoral votes, the powers of the vice-president, or the provisions for a Supreme Court, should need alteration in view of technological progress or social change; but the Second Amendment can and does. And that not only, as I said, because of the changing power and nature of weapons, but also because of the assumptions it makes about armed force and society; assumptions that had existed in European societies for three or four centuries when it was written, but which were to become extinct, for reasons the Founders could not possibly foresee, within ten years of its signing, and that are so alien to us now, that its very language is incomprehensible.
The Constitution, after all, is an eighteenth-century document. It is steeped in ideas that have had its day and assumptions that now can no longer be made. Look, for instance, at the trouble it takes to forbid billeting - the forced quartering of professional soldiers in civilian households. In a world pock-marked with barracks and military areas, where it is taken for granted that soldiers will have their own quarters, this is hardly an issue any more. But anyone who ever watched either Beaumarchais’ Le Barbier de Seville or Rossini’s brilliant opera drawn from it must realize that it was one heck of an issue in the seventeen hundreds. Beaumarchais and Rossini make a roaring farce out of the sudden arrival of a (pretended) drunken soldier into a civilian household with some pretensions to gentility; but it is easy to see that in real life there might be very little to laugh about, and much to grind one’s teeth. It had been an issue at the beginning of the Revolution, and the Founders thought it important enough to deserve a clear ruling even in a document as economical and basic as the Constitution.
This is not only interesting in itself, but symptomatic of the world of ideas in which the Founders moved. It has been said that the Constitution does not give any detailed account of how the USA were to be defended in time of war. That is grossly wrong and indeed an insult to the responsible and practical men who, presided over by the country’s first-ever wartime Commander-in-Chief, were working to make provisions for a safe and prosperous future for their country in a world where enemies loomed over every border and every coastline. The Constitution states exactly and with great clarity the kind of armed force it expects to defend the land: it does so in the Second Amendment. The land is to be defended by a “militia”, because “a well regulated militia” is indispensable, in the Founder’s views, to a republican order. This is a clear statement of what they expected the country to establish in order to defend itself; and if they did not expand on its form and duties, it is because they did not need - to the ears of their contemporaries - to say anything more than, for instance, they needed to define the role, procedures and powers of a judge. Everyone knew what a judge was and what he did; and everyone knew what a militia was. Poets made jokes about it. In eighteenth-century usage, and indeed at least two centuries before, “militia” stood for a definite kind of military organization involving a whole country. Its best account is given in that most widely exploited and least widely read of all classics, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations; but it must be remembered that, however revolutionary Smith may have been in other areas, his treatment of war and armies does nothing more than repeat and discuss the normal ideas of his time.
Smith, then, distinguishes two kinds of land army: the militia, and the standing army. The militia is the descendant of the ancient feudal levy: peasant and townsmen called to arms whenever there was need, under local officials, and meanwhile expected to perform certain traditional exercises in order to remain at a minimum level of efficiency. Several English laws, for instance, punished those yeomen who wasted their time on football or other sports instead of practising archery or other armed competitions. A standing army, on the other hand, was wholly professional; it was entered on one’s sixteenth year or so, like any other profession, and one spent one’s life in it, retiring when too old to do any more fighting or even instructing new recruits. Soldiers of fifty or more were not uncommon. England had never had a standing army at all till Cromwell invented one, and even afterwards, in spite of its proven utility, it was frequently threatened with disbandment as being a tyrannical and alien idea.
The Founders, then, took a side in a debate that had raged in England - but almost nowhere else - for over a century; and took it on a clear and decided side. A militia, in their view, was absolutely indispensable to a republic; and, in eighteenth-century English, this meant that a standing army was - as opposition theorists had been arguing ever since Charles II allowed the regiments raised by Cromwell to continue to exist - an instrument of tyranny, innately royalist and absolutist. Cobbett, who had had the pleasure of being a professional soldier himself, was still repeating the same arguments into the early nineteenth century.
This was, however, an unfashionable view even in England, and wholly so on the Continent. The historical process had been for centuries towards the marginalization and even extinction of militiae. They were regarded as sloppy amateurs, as dangerous to their own side as to the enemy, barely good enough when it came to defending their own household, completely useless in long campaigns. The poet Dryden used them for comic effect, as indeed had Shakespeare before him (think of Sir John Falstaff’s efforts - so to call them - at raising a troop). Frederick II of Prussia, the greatest general of the century, who raised his small kingdom to world power by force of arms, had outright abolished them. He forbade the bourgeois class in Prussia to enter the army altogether: he wanted them, he said, to produce wealth and pay tax, even in wartime, so that the professional soldiers could be paid, clothed, and supplied. Meanwhile, his enormous and fully professional army - some 200,000 men for a kingdom of five million people! - spent their time becoming proficient at their job, till they proved equal to facing down Europe’s three largest armies, those of France, Austria and Russia, at one and the same time, for seven years.
Something like the innovations of Frederick II, with the creation of a fully professional and mercenary army and a positive prohibition on ordinary citizens to become soldiers, are in my view what the Second Amendment had in mind. The very expression “to bear arms” does not mean anything like its modern theorists suppose it to mean; and here I am pained that someone like johncwright, a professional writer and a critic of no small acumen and with some considerable knowledge of literature, should not notice the idiom. It just goes to show to what an extent personal politics can warp understanding. In the eighteenth century, the expression “to bear arms” did not mean simply to own or use a weapon. In that sense, everyone “bore arms”, and Frederick II himself, tyrant though he was, would not have thought of preventing his townsmen or his peasants from carrying a knife, a pistol, or a hunting rifle, than he would have prevented them from owning a dog. “To bear arms” means to be a member, in some sense, of the military profession, and goes with the other kind of “bearing arms” - that is, armorial bearings. When we say that the family of Washington was armigerous, that it bore arms, we do not mean that it owned guns or swords; we mean that it had a hereditary family device and that it was qualified to enter the military profession - something on which the General himself always lay great stress.
This usage, I must underline, did not stand by itself: it was part of that complex of ideas that also involved the distinction between militia and standing army, that had stood for centuries, and that went straight back to the medieval roots of Western civilization. And when we find the expression “to bear arms” in close contact with the need for a republic to have a well-regulated militia, then we have to understand that it refers not to the individual ownership of weapons, but to the right - and duty - of the male citizen to take part in the armed and organized defence of his country. One European country has kept the tradition of militia enlistment to this day. In Switzerland, adult men all spend three weeks a year doing military training, and they are issued with weapons, which they keep at home, for this purpose. The weapons are given purely for military purposes. The parallel with the wording of the Second Amendment is clear: and it is hardly a coincidence that Switzerland is proud of being the most ancient surviving republic in Europe.
In other words, the Founders were concerned that some future bright spark might do a Frederick II, forbid the citizens from joining the army, and form a professional army from the leavings of society and the scum of the Earth. (More than half of Frederick II’s soldiers were not born in Prussia, and many were not German at all.) Of course, the Americans had had the pleasure of the acquaintance of such professional German soldiers during their war of independence - Hessians, Brunswickers, etc. - and so had the more reason to regard a standing army as a typical tool of oppression. “A well regulated militia being necessary to a republic, the right of the people to be part of the military defence of the country rather than leave it to hired professionals shall not be abolished. Because if we allow the bastards to do it, then we risk having an army that will answer only to a king or to a military tyrant like Cromwell.”
Of course, there will be plenty of clever arguments against this interpretation; I hardly expect anyone who actually believes in the modern interpretation of the Second Amendment to be convinced. Well, I say that my interpretation is an eighteenth-century interpretation; yours is one that presupposes that nothing changed between then and now. However, it must be clear that if my interpretation is correct (and I would hardly have set it down in writing if I did not think so), then it has nothing to say about the individual possession and use of any weapon. Not in favour, not against, nothing at all. The people have the right to form into well-regulated territorial militia for the defence of the country. Anyone who uses this to advocate unregulated individual possession and free use of deadly weapons behaves, in my view, like someone who, having been allowed to sign cheques for his company, should start drawing them for his own purposes.
However, the complex of ideas and experiences that went into the definitions of such terms as “militia”, “standing army” and “to bear arms”, and that made them unconsciously and universally understood across Europe from Lisbon to Moscow and from Palermo to Stockholm, had no future. Within ten years, it was to become obsolete. Already in the year 1800, the great Neapolitan economist and priest Giannone, with seven decades of wisdom and experience on his back, remarked that the new French conscript army would probably be regarded, in the future, as the most important single innovation to have been introduced in recent years. He was right, and the next fifteen years - with Napoleon’s conscript armies mauling every standing army in Europe at their pleasure, until Prussia introduced its own version of conscription - were only to prove just how right.
It must be underlined that the modern conscript army is something totally different from a militia. It amounts to pouring the substance of a country’s male youth into the mold of a standing army. A conscript is not asked to train for a given number of weeks a year, but to spend from one to three years in a wholly military environment, learning to be, if not a professional soldier, then the next best thing. The conscript army is designed not for territorial defence, but for campaigning in every kind of area and condition; in the first or second world wars, conscripts from both sides could as well find themselves fighting in Africa, in the Caucasus, or in Oceania, as on any domestic European front. However, in ordinary periods the conscript army tends to leave campaigns and dangerous duties to the fully professional units which are always a part of it. The conscript army comes wholly into its own, with vast swathes of the population being “recalled to arms”, when great and deadly wars with opposing great powers threaten the country; and the reason why it has practically been abolished across Europe, where it was invented, in the last few decades, is that nobody, these days, envisages a war of great powers.
Until the twentieth century, England and the United States were at best on the edge of the military mainstream, which developed on the European continent. Bismarck said that if the British Army dared make a landing during the Danish war of 1864, he would have it arrested by the local police, and the witticism gave a fairly accurate picture of the disproportion of forces between the English and any Continental power. England was protected by its great fleet, America by its remoteness - and by the impressive examples it had given in 1848 and 1860-1865, of being able to build up a formidable armed force in a comparatively brief time. But neither country had any interest in keeping up with the fearsome rate of growth of the armies of France, Prussia/Germany, Russia, Austria, and Italy. In 1892, Italy and the USA came to the edge of war - and the Americans backed down, because they knew that their Navy at the time had only four battle-ready ships of the line, and the Italians had 73.
However, provincial or not, they still were part of the same culture, and specifically the same military culture. Each country made as thorough a study as it could, not only of the immediate means of war of the others, but of their organizations, culture, experience, and activities. When, for instance, Spain went to war in Cuba, a number of officers from other European countries followed the Spanish army (one of them was the young Winston S. Churchill). When two Russian generals came to blows during the Russian-Japanese war (1905), this happened in plain view of observers from Germany, France, Italy, Britain and the USA (the American observer was a certain Colonel Pershing). The new profession of war correspondent, invented by Russell of the Times in Crimea in 1853, added to the wide and swift spread of military ideas and experiences. When Lincoln had to face a mortal danger to the unity of his country, he brought in conscription on the best French and Prussian models, and did so, in spite of its inevitable immense unpopularity, with impressive speed and success.
Being, therefore, part of the Europe-wide flow of ideas and well acquainted with recent military development, the Americans learned, like all other Westerners, to think of war in the new categories of conscript army and warfare. Within a generation of the writing of the Constitution, nobody spoke of militiae any more, and a standing army was in general usage the professional stiffening of a conscript army - the professionals among the conscripts. And in fact, the development of the US Army was exactly opposite to what the Founders had envisaged. To the best of my knowledge, no militia-like organization endured in any State, but whether or not it did, the heart of American defence lay in the professional standing US Army. I would be interested to see whether anyone, in the early days of the Republic, ever complained about the existence of this body. The Constitution does not exactly forbid a standing army, but I feel certain that the Founders would not have appreciated having it as the sole official armed force of the nation. The closest one gets to the Founders’ ideal are the sheriff’s posses in Western movies, whose very name - posse comitatus - comes from the ancient medieval law for raising feudal levies.
Conclusion: if we really were to adopt a “strict constructionist” approach to the Second Amendment, we would find that there is no foundation in law, one way or another, for unlimited individual ownership and use of deadly weapons. The Amendment simply has nothing to say about it. And on Constitutional principle, any powers that are not specifically reserved for the federal government belong to the States and the people at large. In which case, it is the States that ought to be allowed to legislate on this matter; which also seems to me more sensible, since both needs and sensitivities are apt to be different in, say, a rural state with a large hunting population and widely scattered population, than in a city with millions of people living cheek by jowl. Not that I expect any such thing to happen, of course.
There are two subjects on which I am afraid to write: homosexuality, and the Second Amendment. And the reason is simple: these are areas in which people cannot be reasoned with. The extraordinary contortions and the plainly absurd statements into which people throw themselves in order to defend these passions would be evidence enough, but they are actually less diagnostic than the rage with which any opposing viewpoint is encountered. “Batshit insane” is the constant, indeed clich, response with which even otherwise sane people encounter any questioning of the complete moral and sexual validity of homosexual practice; “you will take my gun from my cold dead hands” is the level of reasoning which meets any challenge to the notion that an implement to kill people is an essential part of citizenship. Faced with such attitudes, people who disagree may well find it more comfortable to fall silent.
(I am not saying that every person who holds such views is necessarily unreasonable in this fashion; indeed, the hope that my friends may not be is the one thing that keeps me writing this article. I am, however, saying that this aggressive-defensive attitude is so widespread as to be characteristic, and that the possibility rather than certainty of encountering it is enough to discourage argument.)
Some readers may find the very comparison between these two groups bizarre, or incoherent, or at the very least paradoxical; but I do not think it is. I think that they are brought together by a common feature: the aggressive-defensive reaction, behind which lurks a sense that the whole world is out to get you, and that if you give in on anything in these matters, the next thing that will happen is that you will be brutalized, possibly murdered, and helpless with it. If any questioning of the validity of homosexual sex is allowed, the next thing is that homosexuals will be beaten in the streets and rounded up for the concentration camps; I have heard it said to my face - by someone who immediately after banned me from replying - that any such arguments, in whatever spirit they may be posed, are simply and solely “hate speech” and cannot be tolerated. Let alone, of course, answered. By the same token, the Second-Amendment theorist cannot be cured of the paranoid vision of a world in which only his piece of metal stands between him and an oceanic wave of monsters, rapists, robbers, murderers. Anyone who questions the sense of having more guns in America than citizens is as good as charged with being on the side of criminals - who, of course, always will have guns, so we all have to have them, right? I have seriously heard the argument made, by otherwise adult people, that college shooting sprees would not happen if more people in colleges had guns, because they would shoot the shooters first. Yes, of course, they would be able to read their murderous intentions in their minds before they started shooting. And of course, the all-American fashion for murdering people in large numbers and then committing suicide any time you are feeling anti-social, instead of taking some Prozac, has nothing to do with the ready availability of guns. Guns are like Communism: they haven’t failed, comrades. They just haven’t been tried enough.
In the last analysis, these so-called arguments are not really there to be answered rationally; and the evidence is the violence with which the response often arrives. The response is to suppress debate; and that shows that opposing arguments are not experienced as arguments, but as threats. The homosexual activist feels threatened by any challenge to his sexual activity, however theoretical, because there is something there that he simply does not want to hear; and the Second-Amendment theorist reacts the same way to attempts to read this outdated piece of eighteenth-century legislation rationally. The homosexual activist does not want to hear that the sex he practices, whether or not accepted, tolerated or ignored, is not comparable to normal sex; he experiences this as an aggression on his own self comparable to assault or murder. Likewise, the Second-Amendment theorist experiences any attempt to remove his ability to kill people easily as a violent and personal assault, on the same level as a criminal assault. He does not want to accept that he has demanded, as part of his supposed political freedom, the ability to behave like the Texas Tower sniper or like Booth, Czolgosz or Lee Harvey Oswald (all people who really did believe that they were taking the part of the “armed citizenry” defending freedom - remember what Booth shouted after murdering Lincoln?). He does not want to accept that killing is what he is speaking of.
There is, of course, such a thing as crime. And there is such a thing as violent, criminal homophobia; I can bear witness to it, having seen two homosexual friends of mine come back bleeding from a vicious assault. What is wrong is to imagine that the only way to deal with the latter is to shut down free speech and forbid the expression of certain universal feelings; and that the only way to deal with the former is to arm everyone, as if every person you are going to meet were a potential deadly enemy.
Even more ridiculous - and I am sorry to have to say it, because the person who has said it most frequently is (thus far) a friend of mine: sorry, johncwright - is the argument that “an armed citizenry is a defence against tyranny.” This would mean that, given that gun ownership is far more widespread in Muslim and especially Arab countries than in western Europe, Europeans are less free than Arabs. At which point, since prejudice reinforces prejudice, I can imagine that a certain kind of American will be willing to argue that the Europeans, under their terrible Socialist tyrannies, are, if not less free, certainly no more free than the citizens of Lybia or Syria. I find this attitude no different (having experienced both) from that of those people in Italy who seriously believe that there is no important difference between Obama, Rodham Clinton and McCain, and that American freedom is merely superficial. In both cases, ridiculous media-driven distortions and exaggerations, driven by national and party-political prejudice, have made it impossible for allies to know the truth about each other.
It is, of course, not only possible but easy to point out to any amount of conditionings, creeping influences, menaces of every kind, that threaten freedom here and there; and so it has always been. Freedom is conditioned and threatened, in America and in Europe, because so it has always been and so, please God, it always will be - for the alternative is to have no freedom at all. Freedom is always and everywhere under threat, and its price certainly is eternal vigilance. And even that can sometimes fail. Freedom did not collapse in Italy and Germany because of insufficient vigilance: its guardians and partisans certainly raised the alarm in time. Freedom is never safe. But freedom, however imperilled, is still the norm both in north America and in most of Europe. Some free societies have limitations on weapons; one has a surfeit of them. Many of the most unfree societies on Earth have a surfeit of weapons, so that the usual way of celebrating a perfectly peaceful event such as a soccer victory is to shoot one’s guns in the air. In other words, the availability or otherwise of guns is at best irrelevant to the existence or otherwise of political freedom.
Indeed, if the evidence leans one way, it leans against the theory that “an armed citizenry is a bulwark of freedom”. What did more than anything else to destroy freedom in Russia, Italy and Germany, was the wide, indeed universal, availability of war-grade weapons and trained men in the wake of a gigantic war. This allowed criminalized political parties to lay hands both on vast depots of weapons and large numbers of trained and armed civilians; and this turned party politics into a battlefield for armed paramilitary groups. And it seems all too clear to me that what keeps America from a similar fate is not any availability of killing implements, but the basic civic education of the mass of American citizens, their knowledge of ways other than the gun to promote their views and advance their causes, their acceptance of and respect for the law. It was when a certain number of Russians, Italians, or Germans, ceased to have any respect for state law, that tyranny started rumbling in on truckfuls of armed civilians - swiftly followed by artillery, tanks, aircraft.
Nor should we forget that those civilians were in fact freshly dismissed soldiers from some of the finest armies in the world. World War One was a quite extraordinary phenomenon; at no point before had so many millions of people been trained to the highest pitch of military skill and kept at it for years, till they came home not as relieved bourgeois former conscripts, but as people whose identity was largely defined by the army units they had fought in. An ordinary citizen would have stood no chance against a veteran of four years of fighting on the Isonzo or the Somme. (I would not normally use a movie as a document for anything, but the point is made quite credibly in the great Spencer Tracy movie Bad Day at Black Rock, where the violent and corrupt “armed citizens” of Black Rock prove no match for the aging and one-armed but experienced former soldier Tracy. That is what would happen in real life.) And that is actually what johncwright imagines: an ordinary citizen - with a gun. In today’s world, the idea that even a hundred thousand such could do anything to stop any kind of tyranny, if the government and the armed forces were otherwise resolved, is a bad joke. A civilian can kill fifty other civilians from the top of a Texas Tower; against the kind of power available even to the poorest African state - tanks and helicopters, RPGs and heavy artillery, rockets and land-mines - he would stand less than no chance.
Johncwright is being, literally, romantic; he is somehow living in the Romantic age. Two centuries ago there was a comparatively brief period in which revolted citizenries were able, by holding cities against regular armies and arming insurgent corps, to defeat tyrannical governments - sometimes. It was the period in which what is called romantic poetry - Wordsworth, Keats, Lamartine, Manzoni, Heine, Novalis - and music - Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Verdi, Wagner - flourished; and, as everyone knows, the two phenomena were related. It began in 1776 and had its last success - Garibaldi’s campaign, the most Romantic of all - in 1860. Even in this period, the budget was mostly negative. The success of revolution in the USA, in France, later in Greece, then in Belgium, finally in Italy, must be compared with its repeated failure in Ireland (1798), Poland (three times - 1798, 1830, 1863), Spain, Germany, Italy before 1859, Austria, Hungary, the Turkish Empire, Russia, and, in 1848, the whole of Europe. The rare cases of successful insurrectional war were nearly always backed by the intervention of major powers: the USA were helped by France, Greece by the mighty coalition of France, Britain and Russia, Belgium by France, Italy by France. Only in 1860, Garibaldi’s great campaign, was there no overt support by a great power; and even so, the British fleet and the armies of Savoy/Sardinia/Italy were practically on the rebels’ side. There is not a single case in which an insurrection by an angry citizenry, however powerful, succeeded alone, save for the French Revolution; and there it succeeded because France itself was by far the strongest power in Europe, and once its own government had been taken over by the revolutionary National Assembly, no power in Europe could do a thing about it.
(That is not to say that the many failed insurrections from Spain to Poland and from Ireland to Bulgaria had no value. Individually and collectively, they signalled to the powers that the absolutist and unconstitutional “paternal” rule encouraged by the Romanovs, the Habsburgs and the Hohenzollerns, was intolerable and could not be supported. In all of Europe except Russia, the demands of the rebels were eventually peacefully granted by the very powers that had originally suppressed them. Austria-Hungary, the heartland of reaction, received a constitution and an elected government in 1867, and the very Emperor who had come to the throne to crush the revolts of 1848, Franz Joseph, quickly learned to live as a Constitutional monarch who “reigns but does not govern” in the best British manner. But what made the difference was not the frequency of revolt so much as the growing realization that a parliamentary constitution needed be neither unstable nor incompatible with law and order. It was the view of orderly, successful parliamentary government in Britain and America - and, most of the time, in France - that removed the worst fears of central European rulers. Hegel, the state philosopher of Prussia, quoted France in particular as an example of a country where freedom of debate did not impede the national government from having a coherent and successful policy.)
By the same token, it was in France that the end of the age of insurrection was consumed - in 1871, when even the rags of the defeated national Army were enough to destroy the Parisian rebels by force. The coming of the machine-gun had done it: the single-shot muskets and hunting rifles that had shaken Europe from one end to the other in 1848 could no longer match the weapons of an organized Army, even from behind the barricades of a revolted great city - even when the city in question was the largest in Europe (as Paris then was). Since then, the amount of force available to the state has been multiplied by technology, far beyond what remains available to the imagined “armed citizenry”. The nineteenth century has been over for a while now. Even if every member of the “armed citizenry” were armed with an Uzi, they could do nothing against the tanks and the helicopters of any regular army. The defence of freedom is not in force of arms; it is in having a state structure that accepts its dependence on the popular will and on democratic laws. And that, more than anything else, is why it is wholesome - however corrupt and mendacious the protagonists - to force politicians to compete for office every few years.
II
An excusable but intellectually sloppy bolster to Second-Amendment theorizing is the feeling that “this is the way it has always been”, that the “right to bear arms” as understood today has been part of the US landscape from the beginning and that it is its opponents who are the innovators. This contention, however, will not stand up to serious scrutiny, both in relative and in absolute terms. And if Second-Amendment theorists managed to appoint Supreme Court justices who were really, on principle, and across the board, “strict constructionists”, they would be apt to receive a nasty surprise - more than one, since the correct interpretation of the Second Amendment would make the whole current structure of the US armed forces, and possibly a great deal of its law enforcement, quite unconstitutional.
Before I analyze the Second Amendment itself, one or two words on historical change would not be out of place. The Constitution of the USA was written for a Republic of three million farmers and merchants, mostly neither very rich nor very poor, scattered across an already enormous territory (the original Thirteen Colonies amount to at least five times the total land mass of Italy or Britain, the vast majority arable land). It is common, and deserved, to praise its writers for creating an instrument of extraordinary conciseness and flexibility, which has survived the most monumental change and gone on to serve a country which has almost nothing in common with the experience of its founders. (And if this seems exaggerated, consider: the vast majority of Americans are now town-dwellers; the leading churches of the country were Episcopalians and Presbyterians at the foundation, Catholics and Baptists now; far from being neither very rich nor very poor, Americans now range across a gamut from imperial and monstrously wasteful wealth to roofless and starved poverty; far from having to fend off the predatory interests of European colonial powers, America is itself now an empire which has for decades exercised a protectorate of sorts over much of Europe; etc.) But there is no need to ascribe the gift of prophecy to them (let alone imagine that they would like what they saw, if so!). Simple commonsense tells us that men who knew nothing better than single-shot muskets with long bayonets, whose killing power was as much in the bayonet blade as in the bullet, could not possibly have imagined they would legislate for ages in which a single human being can carry a gun that can spray hundreds of bullets and strike further than the finest artillery piece could in their time. And the people who like to cradle themselves in the belief that things have always been the same should reflect upon a particularly unpleasant and recent development. Texas Tower snipers and Columbine mass killers have not always been there. They began to occur in the sixties. A lot of theories as to why have been proposed - cultural changes, deracination, etc. My idea is simpler. They are here now, and not before, because they can. This is the first time in history in which ordinary people can access sniper-quality rifles, capable of long and accurate shot. The reason why such mass killers, though rarer, have also happened in Europe - especially, so far as I can see, in Germany - is that such weapons are easily available to sports shooters and hunters. Of course, the vast majority of these - and there are millions in continental Europe, Germany, France, Italy - are perfectly ordinary citizens. But the odd lunatic or desperate individual now has a weapon at hand he did not have before. It is, after all, only a sub-case of the well-known law: if something can go wrong (such as a gun owner going nuts, or a nut getting hold of a gun), it will. And this is only one of the ways in which technological advance has radically altered the position of weapons in society.
That being the case, it is perfect nonsense to imagine that the Second Amendment can fit into the modern world. Technology has outpaced it. Most of the provisions of the Constitution are proof against any technology except for something (today, alas, more easily imagined than ever before) which alters the very nature of human beings. There is no reason why electoral votes, the powers of the vice-president, or the provisions for a Supreme Court, should need alteration in view of technological progress or social change; but the Second Amendment can and does. And that not only, as I said, because of the changing power and nature of weapons, but also because of the assumptions it makes about armed force and society; assumptions that had existed in European societies for three or four centuries when it was written, but which were to become extinct, for reasons the Founders could not possibly foresee, within ten years of its signing, and that are so alien to us now, that its very language is incomprehensible.
The Constitution, after all, is an eighteenth-century document. It is steeped in ideas that have had its day and assumptions that now can no longer be made. Look, for instance, at the trouble it takes to forbid billeting - the forced quartering of professional soldiers in civilian households. In a world pock-marked with barracks and military areas, where it is taken for granted that soldiers will have their own quarters, this is hardly an issue any more. But anyone who ever watched either Beaumarchais’ Le Barbier de Seville or Rossini’s brilliant opera drawn from it must realize that it was one heck of an issue in the seventeen hundreds. Beaumarchais and Rossini make a roaring farce out of the sudden arrival of a (pretended) drunken soldier into a civilian household with some pretensions to gentility; but it is easy to see that in real life there might be very little to laugh about, and much to grind one’s teeth. It had been an issue at the beginning of the Revolution, and the Founders thought it important enough to deserve a clear ruling even in a document as economical and basic as the Constitution.
This is not only interesting in itself, but symptomatic of the world of ideas in which the Founders moved. It has been said that the Constitution does not give any detailed account of how the USA were to be defended in time of war. That is grossly wrong and indeed an insult to the responsible and practical men who, presided over by the country’s first-ever wartime Commander-in-Chief, were working to make provisions for a safe and prosperous future for their country in a world where enemies loomed over every border and every coastline. The Constitution states exactly and with great clarity the kind of armed force it expects to defend the land: it does so in the Second Amendment. The land is to be defended by a “militia”, because “a well regulated militia” is indispensable, in the Founder’s views, to a republican order. This is a clear statement of what they expected the country to establish in order to defend itself; and if they did not expand on its form and duties, it is because they did not need - to the ears of their contemporaries - to say anything more than, for instance, they needed to define the role, procedures and powers of a judge. Everyone knew what a judge was and what he did; and everyone knew what a militia was. Poets made jokes about it. In eighteenth-century usage, and indeed at least two centuries before, “militia” stood for a definite kind of military organization involving a whole country. Its best account is given in that most widely exploited and least widely read of all classics, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations; but it must be remembered that, however revolutionary Smith may have been in other areas, his treatment of war and armies does nothing more than repeat and discuss the normal ideas of his time.
Smith, then, distinguishes two kinds of land army: the militia, and the standing army. The militia is the descendant of the ancient feudal levy: peasant and townsmen called to arms whenever there was need, under local officials, and meanwhile expected to perform certain traditional exercises in order to remain at a minimum level of efficiency. Several English laws, for instance, punished those yeomen who wasted their time on football or other sports instead of practising archery or other armed competitions. A standing army, on the other hand, was wholly professional; it was entered on one’s sixteenth year or so, like any other profession, and one spent one’s life in it, retiring when too old to do any more fighting or even instructing new recruits. Soldiers of fifty or more were not uncommon. England had never had a standing army at all till Cromwell invented one, and even afterwards, in spite of its proven utility, it was frequently threatened with disbandment as being a tyrannical and alien idea.
The Founders, then, took a side in a debate that had raged in England - but almost nowhere else - for over a century; and took it on a clear and decided side. A militia, in their view, was absolutely indispensable to a republic; and, in eighteenth-century English, this meant that a standing army was - as opposition theorists had been arguing ever since Charles II allowed the regiments raised by Cromwell to continue to exist - an instrument of tyranny, innately royalist and absolutist. Cobbett, who had had the pleasure of being a professional soldier himself, was still repeating the same arguments into the early nineteenth century.
This was, however, an unfashionable view even in England, and wholly so on the Continent. The historical process had been for centuries towards the marginalization and even extinction of militiae. They were regarded as sloppy amateurs, as dangerous to their own side as to the enemy, barely good enough when it came to defending their own household, completely useless in long campaigns. The poet Dryden used them for comic effect, as indeed had Shakespeare before him (think of Sir John Falstaff’s efforts - so to call them - at raising a troop). Frederick II of Prussia, the greatest general of the century, who raised his small kingdom to world power by force of arms, had outright abolished them. He forbade the bourgeois class in Prussia to enter the army altogether: he wanted them, he said, to produce wealth and pay tax, even in wartime, so that the professional soldiers could be paid, clothed, and supplied. Meanwhile, his enormous and fully professional army - some 200,000 men for a kingdom of five million people! - spent their time becoming proficient at their job, till they proved equal to facing down Europe’s three largest armies, those of France, Austria and Russia, at one and the same time, for seven years.
Something like the innovations of Frederick II, with the creation of a fully professional and mercenary army and a positive prohibition on ordinary citizens to become soldiers, are in my view what the Second Amendment had in mind. The very expression “to bear arms” does not mean anything like its modern theorists suppose it to mean; and here I am pained that someone like johncwright, a professional writer and a critic of no small acumen and with some considerable knowledge of literature, should not notice the idiom. It just goes to show to what an extent personal politics can warp understanding. In the eighteenth century, the expression “to bear arms” did not mean simply to own or use a weapon. In that sense, everyone “bore arms”, and Frederick II himself, tyrant though he was, would not have thought of preventing his townsmen or his peasants from carrying a knife, a pistol, or a hunting rifle, than he would have prevented them from owning a dog. “To bear arms” means to be a member, in some sense, of the military profession, and goes with the other kind of “bearing arms” - that is, armorial bearings. When we say that the family of Washington was armigerous, that it bore arms, we do not mean that it owned guns or swords; we mean that it had a hereditary family device and that it was qualified to enter the military profession - something on which the General himself always lay great stress.
This usage, I must underline, did not stand by itself: it was part of that complex of ideas that also involved the distinction between militia and standing army, that had stood for centuries, and that went straight back to the medieval roots of Western civilization. And when we find the expression “to bear arms” in close contact with the need for a republic to have a well-regulated militia, then we have to understand that it refers not to the individual ownership of weapons, but to the right - and duty - of the male citizen to take part in the armed and organized defence of his country. One European country has kept the tradition of militia enlistment to this day. In Switzerland, adult men all spend three weeks a year doing military training, and they are issued with weapons, which they keep at home, for this purpose. The weapons are given purely for military purposes. The parallel with the wording of the Second Amendment is clear: and it is hardly a coincidence that Switzerland is proud of being the most ancient surviving republic in Europe.
In other words, the Founders were concerned that some future bright spark might do a Frederick II, forbid the citizens from joining the army, and form a professional army from the leavings of society and the scum of the Earth. (More than half of Frederick II’s soldiers were not born in Prussia, and many were not German at all.) Of course, the Americans had had the pleasure of the acquaintance of such professional German soldiers during their war of independence - Hessians, Brunswickers, etc. - and so had the more reason to regard a standing army as a typical tool of oppression. “A well regulated militia being necessary to a republic, the right of the people to be part of the military defence of the country rather than leave it to hired professionals shall not be abolished. Because if we allow the bastards to do it, then we risk having an army that will answer only to a king or to a military tyrant like Cromwell.”
Of course, there will be plenty of clever arguments against this interpretation; I hardly expect anyone who actually believes in the modern interpretation of the Second Amendment to be convinced. Well, I say that my interpretation is an eighteenth-century interpretation; yours is one that presupposes that nothing changed between then and now. However, it must be clear that if my interpretation is correct (and I would hardly have set it down in writing if I did not think so), then it has nothing to say about the individual possession and use of any weapon. Not in favour, not against, nothing at all. The people have the right to form into well-regulated territorial militia for the defence of the country. Anyone who uses this to advocate unregulated individual possession and free use of deadly weapons behaves, in my view, like someone who, having been allowed to sign cheques for his company, should start drawing them for his own purposes.
However, the complex of ideas and experiences that went into the definitions of such terms as “militia”, “standing army” and “to bear arms”, and that made them unconsciously and universally understood across Europe from Lisbon to Moscow and from Palermo to Stockholm, had no future. Within ten years, it was to become obsolete. Already in the year 1800, the great Neapolitan economist and priest Giannone, with seven decades of wisdom and experience on his back, remarked that the new French conscript army would probably be regarded, in the future, as the most important single innovation to have been introduced in recent years. He was right, and the next fifteen years - with Napoleon’s conscript armies mauling every standing army in Europe at their pleasure, until Prussia introduced its own version of conscription - were only to prove just how right.
It must be underlined that the modern conscript army is something totally different from a militia. It amounts to pouring the substance of a country’s male youth into the mold of a standing army. A conscript is not asked to train for a given number of weeks a year, but to spend from one to three years in a wholly military environment, learning to be, if not a professional soldier, then the next best thing. The conscript army is designed not for territorial defence, but for campaigning in every kind of area and condition; in the first or second world wars, conscripts from both sides could as well find themselves fighting in Africa, in the Caucasus, or in Oceania, as on any domestic European front. However, in ordinary periods the conscript army tends to leave campaigns and dangerous duties to the fully professional units which are always a part of it. The conscript army comes wholly into its own, with vast swathes of the population being “recalled to arms”, when great and deadly wars with opposing great powers threaten the country; and the reason why it has practically been abolished across Europe, where it was invented, in the last few decades, is that nobody, these days, envisages a war of great powers.
Until the twentieth century, England and the United States were at best on the edge of the military mainstream, which developed on the European continent. Bismarck said that if the British Army dared make a landing during the Danish war of 1864, he would have it arrested by the local police, and the witticism gave a fairly accurate picture of the disproportion of forces between the English and any Continental power. England was protected by its great fleet, America by its remoteness - and by the impressive examples it had given in 1848 and 1860-1865, of being able to build up a formidable armed force in a comparatively brief time. But neither country had any interest in keeping up with the fearsome rate of growth of the armies of France, Prussia/Germany, Russia, Austria, and Italy. In 1892, Italy and the USA came to the edge of war - and the Americans backed down, because they knew that their Navy at the time had only four battle-ready ships of the line, and the Italians had 73.
However, provincial or not, they still were part of the same culture, and specifically the same military culture. Each country made as thorough a study as it could, not only of the immediate means of war of the others, but of their organizations, culture, experience, and activities. When, for instance, Spain went to war in Cuba, a number of officers from other European countries followed the Spanish army (one of them was the young Winston S. Churchill). When two Russian generals came to blows during the Russian-Japanese war (1905), this happened in plain view of observers from Germany, France, Italy, Britain and the USA (the American observer was a certain Colonel Pershing). The new profession of war correspondent, invented by Russell of the Times in Crimea in 1853, added to the wide and swift spread of military ideas and experiences. When Lincoln had to face a mortal danger to the unity of his country, he brought in conscription on the best French and Prussian models, and did so, in spite of its inevitable immense unpopularity, with impressive speed and success.
Being, therefore, part of the Europe-wide flow of ideas and well acquainted with recent military development, the Americans learned, like all other Westerners, to think of war in the new categories of conscript army and warfare. Within a generation of the writing of the Constitution, nobody spoke of militiae any more, and a standing army was in general usage the professional stiffening of a conscript army - the professionals among the conscripts. And in fact, the development of the US Army was exactly opposite to what the Founders had envisaged. To the best of my knowledge, no militia-like organization endured in any State, but whether or not it did, the heart of American defence lay in the professional standing US Army. I would be interested to see whether anyone, in the early days of the Republic, ever complained about the existence of this body. The Constitution does not exactly forbid a standing army, but I feel certain that the Founders would not have appreciated having it as the sole official armed force of the nation. The closest one gets to the Founders’ ideal are the sheriff’s posses in Western movies, whose very name - posse comitatus - comes from the ancient medieval law for raising feudal levies.
Conclusion: if we really were to adopt a “strict constructionist” approach to the Second Amendment, we would find that there is no foundation in law, one way or another, for unlimited individual ownership and use of deadly weapons. The Amendment simply has nothing to say about it. And on Constitutional principle, any powers that are not specifically reserved for the federal government belong to the States and the people at large. In which case, it is the States that ought to be allowed to legislate on this matter; which also seems to me more sensible, since both needs and sensitivities are apt to be different in, say, a rural state with a large hunting population and widely scattered population, than in a city with millions of people living cheek by jowl. Not that I expect any such thing to happen, of course.