The Dangers of National Mythology

If there is one thing that the persistent debate over gun control demonstrates, it is that there is a real danger to collective memory. The icon of the National Rifle Association is not an AK-47, nor, indeed, any kind of gun that would be used today. The weapon that Charlton Heston dares the gun control lobby to pry out of his “cold, dead hands” is a revolutionary musket. For those who argue for an unrestrained right to bear arms, the issue is tangled up with those blinding promises of the Declaration of Independence – the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The right to bear arms is not a matter of simple policy, as it was in Britain after Dunblane, or in Germany when a disgruntled pupil shot 18 pupils at a school in Erfurt in 2002. For those who shout the loudest, it is a birthright, inseparable from a free press, freedom of religion, or the right to trial by jury.

The Second Amendment is one that is problematic for anyone who wants to untangle the history of the gun in America. It is the only part of the cherished Bill of Rights to have a preamble: “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.” In recent years, the two parts of the amendment have been seen as an either-or choice. Either the amendment was intended to provide for the upkeep of a militia, or it was intended to guarantee the freedom of the populace to arm itself.

The necessity of having an armed populace was easily evident in 18th century America. The USA did not occupy almost an entire continent as it does today – it was surrounded by hostile powers (Britain in Canada; France to the West; Spain held Florida), not to mention Indian tribes who frequently attacked American settlers on the frontier. The possession of a gun was often the only way to defend one’s property. Moreover, a militia prevented the necessity of a standing army (which Americans despised), and having militia under the control of states, rather than the federal government meant that any developing emergency could be dealt with by a force raised more or less in the area affected by attack.

For all that the freedom referred to in the Second Amendment is nowadays linked to the right to bear arms, historically it made most sense in the context of a militia. It was only through defence being a duty of the virtuous citizen that republican government could be upheld. If government was to defend itself by hiring mercenaries (whether native or foreign), that meant the ultimate power a government could hold – waging war – was controlled not by the people but an institution. And so, in 18th century America, the right to bear arms was just as much a civic duty as a civil liberty. As Saul Cornell points out in his work, the freedom to brandish a musket occurred at the same time that all able-bodied men were required to train and serve in the militia.

Clearly, then, the historical context in which the Second Amendment makes sense is no longer applicable to the modern day. The defence of the United States is no longer carried out by militiamen – indeed, the modern Minuteman Project that is intended to deter illegal border crossings gives an image of militia as a rag-tag bunch of ideological freelancers. In fact, the militia of the early republic were often well-organised and well-trained fighting forces with strict rules of conduct. Yet the job of being a soldier, particularly with rapid increases in technology, has now been contracted to full-time professionals and the National Guard.

There’s more to write about the developments in the interpretation of the Second Amendment both in legal and political discourse, but what is undoubted is that the vision that permeates both sides of the debate is a perversion of history. The right to bear arms means something different today to what it did when Madison proposed the amendment to Congress, and the several states ratified it.

The promises of the American Revolution have an incredibly strong pull – for Americans and non-Americans alike. Not only are the promises of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness attractive in their own right, but the documents in which the key promises are contained are written so powerfully that they have an almost intoxicating effect on the mind. Yet just because something has been written down does not mean that it represents reality. It is the strength of those promises, their irreducable link in the minds of Americans with freedom, that has the strongest impression on the mind however. The words, the societal norms may have changed their meanings, yet their link with the past cannot be broken. 

It is a trick of the mind that leads to the difficulties faced in the gun control debate today. How can words written plainly on a piece of paper change their meaning? But times change. The danger of not studying the past is that laws can last longer than people – and most especially in a (written) constitutional system. The present is even more fraught with danger when the veneration of a political system is so great that it bceomes almost untouchable – that, by linking something with the Founding Fathers, it becomes ‘good’ in itself, rather than because of any intrinsic merit. Society, laws, people are never frozen in time – they move forward with inevitability. The events of the past do not have that luxury – and that makes it essential that we do our best to understand them, and not allow them to become frozen in the modern mind.