Hey, Palin-What Did The Declaration Say About Gun Rights?

06/10/11 · 11:08 am :: posted by Richard  

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,
the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
-Amendment II, Constitution of the United States.

The GOP's leading Presidential pretender, Gunpowder Puff Sarah Palin, has been flitting about lately, parroting the gun-rights drivel  she gets from right-wing media outlets and blog sites.  Her latest pronouncement was how Paul Revere's ride from Boston into Middlesex County was really all about asserting the colonist's right to own guns by telling the British troops that his fellow rebel patriots had lots of guns.  That, supposedly, was gonna scare the bejeezus out of the highly regimented and heavily armed redcoats according to Ms. Palin -you betcha!

Never mind the inconvenient fact that Revere told the Brits that the colonists were armed only after he had completed his part of the real  mission carried out by some forty or so rebels -to warn their comrades that an armed British invasion was underway.  Never mind that Revere told the Brits that his comrades were armed at gunpoint, only after he had been captured by the them. Never mind the fact that giving such information about your comrades to the enemy, if done before your mission has been completed, would be tantamount to betrayal -no different from a captured G.I. in Afghanistan today telling the Taliban all about American troop strength and weaponry.

No, those are all just historical facts, and to Palin "facts are stupid things" just like the Gipper said.  What's really important to Palin and her Teabagger cohorts is ideology, and that ideology demands that history be revised to make Revere's ride all about gun rights under the Second Amendment, as if the American Revolution stood for nothing else.

Well, despite Ms. Palin's narrow-minded ideological slant, let's take a look at what the American Revolution was really all about, as clearly stated at length in the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration, remember, is not the founding document of our democratic government -the Constitution is.  But the Declaration gives us a crystal clear insight into the ideals, ideas and purposes of the founders which they then incorporated into the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

The Declaration was drafted by a committee of the Continental Congress that included Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Roger Sherman and Robert Livingston, all of them what Palin and her fellow Teabaggers would today call intellectual "elitists."  They were in fact adherents of the European Enlightenment which was the "liberalism" of the late Eighteenth Century and abhorrent to those who would be called conservatives today, including the Americans  known as Tories who remained loyal to the British crown.  Many of the founders, including Jefferson and Franklin were decidedly men of faith who believed in a God as creator, but  were Deists and  not "Christians" in any doctrinal sense.
 
That group of Eighteenth Century liberals drew up the Declaration of Independence, declaring that "all men are created equal," and  endowed by the Creator with "certain inalienable rights" such as "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" -truly radical liberal notions for an era of monarchical rule that defined the politics of the time.  They declared that governments are instituted, not by divine right but by deriving their powers from the consent of the government, for the sole purpose of securing such basic rights to the people.  They did not list gun ownership as one of those inalienable rights, however.

That group of Eighteenth Century liberal radicals took great pains, out of a "decent respect to the opinions of mankind," to explain in very specific and detailed  terms why the American colonies must secede from British rule,  i.e. "the causes which impel them to the separation." That  lengthy list of grievances against the King of England, taken verbatim from the text of the Declaration, is as follows:

 He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

 For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they  should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing   therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

 He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury.
A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

That's it folks, nothing about a sacred right to own guns or the "right to bear arms."  In fact, one of the specific grievances against the Crown was that Americans were being impressed into military service and required "to bear arms" against their fellow countrymen.  It was sort of like the military draft that Cheney dodged back in the 'sixties -you know, the one the SDS and other "traitors" took to the streets against, but without a draft board or exemptions for chicken hawk "patriots" like Cheney and Teabagger guru Rush Limbaugh.

 So, to Ms. Palin and her fellow historically challenged comrades on the right, I must ask where exactly does the Declaration  provide any support for your inane notion that advocating for  gun-rights was one of the purposes for which Revere and his comrades made their ride throughout Suffolk,  Middlesex, Essex and other Massachusetts Counties?   Revere, surely,  knew what the Revolution was about, and if it had been about gun rights that concern most certainly would be stated  among the comprehensive list of grievances set out in the Declaration.

Don't bother looking , because I'll answer the question for you.  There's not  one word about gun rights in the Declaration of Independence -nothing, nada, zilch.   The Declaration provides, out of the founders' respect for the opinions of mankind, a comprehensive and exhaustive list of the causes for the American Revolution, and  gun rights didn't make the list -period!


The Second Amendment states that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed," but it also states a significant qualification that Ms. Palin and fellow right-wing ideologues like Justice Antonin Scalia  must   read out of the text in order to find that gun ownership is an individual right under the Constitution, which is the "importance of a well-regulated Militia," as being  necessary to the security of a Free State.  Scalia's opinion in U.S. v. Heller,   replete with convoluted rationales as to why the Militia clause should not be a read as a qualification of the Second Amendment right to bear arms, though correct in result, is purely an exercise in right wing  judicial activism, in marked contrast with his prior "conservative" jurisprudence, such as  his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas, for example.  (For a more detailed analysis on this point click on the link to my prior post on Scalia's judicial activism in Heller.  http://www.capecodtoday.com/blogs/index.php/2009/06/07/title-250?blog=214#comments ).

Scalia's  reasoning in Heller focuses on selective historical factoids  in an activist attempt to contradict or render meaningless the actual purpose  for which the founders ratified the Second Amendment, which was to protect their freedom through "well regulated" militias against a tyrannical government that separated the military from civilian control.  That purpose was expressly stated in the Declaration as one of several important reasons for separating from the Crown.  That separation was in fact  initiated by  the well regulated  local militias in armed resurrection against the established government, under the command of men like Ethan Allen from Vermont and John Parker of the Massachusetts Minutemen, engaging the highly organized British army with privatelyowned firearms.   Those several militias, which then organized themselves as units of the Continental Army under the command of George Washington, are unquestionably what the drafters meant when they drafted the Second Amendment beginning with the  Militia clause. 

So the Second Amendment was in fact ratified to secure an individual right to bear arms, but that was clearly and specifically secondary to the more fundamental rights for which the American Revolution was fought, including civilian control over the military as through the local civilian militias that initiated the armed Revolution itself.   If Palin's claims about the purpose of Paul Revere's ride had even a shred of accuracy, then there would surely have been a statement in the Declaration saying, in effect if not verbatim:

He has seized and taken away the rightfully owned firearms of the citizenry and has banned their sale and possession.

But such a statement is conspicuously absent from the Declaration's lengthy list of causes for the American colonist's separation from England.  It is clear beyond any doubt, therefore, that depriving the colonists of their right to bear arms was not among the reasons for either the Revolution itself or Paul Revere's ride in service of that Revolution, contrary to Ms. Palin's smugly ignorant revisionist view of American history.

http://www.capecodtoday.com/blogs/index.php/2011/06/10/title-439?blog=214