Second Amendment

“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.” The Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is part of the Bill of Rights proposed by the First Congress. Congress passed 10 constitutional amendments in 1789 and sent them to the states for ratification. The Bill of Rights emerged out of anti-Federalist objections to the Constitution of 1787; it was ratified by the states in 1791.

Orphaned by constitutional scholars and variously embraced and despised by partisans on either side of the debate over the role of firearms in American life, the Second Amendment remains a very contentious issue into the 21st century. Scholars, politicians, and activists continue to debate whether the Second Amendment guarantees an individual the right to firearms ownership or if it refers to an 18th-century aspect of national defense that has long since faded into anachronistic obscurity.

The Second Amendment has roots in the military history of England. During the 17th century, England underwent a series of developments that were part of what historians term the “military revolution.” In that revolution, armies of Europe expanded in size and developed tactics to integrate gunpowder weapons fully into tactical systems of the day. Those tactics stressed fighting in large linear formations that required great discipline from soldiers. On the European continent, armies grew in size and professionalism, and helped to reinforce a growing trend toward centralization of power seen in many states at that time. In France, the development of a large army went hand in hand with the development of the absolutist state.

England, with a heritage of liberty, resisted the development of a permanent standing army. In the early 17th century, England did not maintain a standing army, preferring forces created ad hoc to expensive permanent armies. Parliamentary victory in the English Civil War had replaced the arbitrary rule of Charles I with the Cromwellian dictatorship resting on the power of the New Model Army. Suspicion of a standing army increased in the 1680s with James II's suppression of Monmouth's Rebellion and his increasing penchant for absolutism. When England created its own Bill of Rights in 1689, it included the provision, “that the subjects which are Protestants may have arms suitable for their defense suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law.”

During the War for American Independence, Americans preferred to rely on the militia and an army with short-term enlistments to fight the British. Unfortunately for the Patriots' ideas on defense, the exigencies of the war required that America have a well-trained professional army in order to achieve final victory. While colonial militias enjoyed early successes in the fighting around Boston, Massachusetts, in 1775, later encounters between the untrained Americans and British regulars resulted in British successes. Only after George Washington developed the Continental Army into a disciplined, well-trained force could American troops succeed in open battle against the British.

Perhaps because they were militarily effective, standing armies were seen as instruments of arbitrary power, as corrupt, violent forces to abuse and oppress innocent civilians. The militia, by contrast, was viewed as a virtuous body of free men fighting in defense of their liberties. In colonial America, fear of standing armies, and specifically the outrages committed by British troops on American soil, helped to fuel the movement that became the American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson, in his pamphlet “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,”

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