David Michael Miller
For those who believe that guns are the scourge of our nation, the situation is bleak. President Obama’s recent executive actions will do little to curb violence, even according to many “gun safety” supporters. And forget about Congress. No substantial gun legislation will pass as long as sparsely populated red states continue to send two senators each to Capitol Hill.
But as much damage as people do with them, guns are not our biggest menace. We should be glad that most American adults have the option of being armed. Put another way, we should be glad that we live in a country where the government does not have all the guns.
I am not personally fond of guns. And I am not among the libertarian types who believe that government is inherently evil. I don’t even believe that government is a “necessary evil.” Government is just plain necessary. I have seen enough of human nature to know that private individuals would routinely violate the rights of others absent an organized system of deterrence.
But the men who founded our nation knew something that modern-day Americans often forget: Government can be a dangerous thing, too. Countless times throughout history, men have taken hold of governments and turned them into tools of oppression, or even mass murder.
Whether you agree that an oppressive government could ever take hold in the United States, there is no denying that the possibility was on the mind of those who ratified the Second Amendment. In The Federalist No. 29, Alexander Hamilton discussed citizen militia as a potential check on an abusive “standing” governmental army. He wrote that such an army “can never be formidable to the liberties of the people, while there is a large body of citizens...who stand ready to defend their rights and those of their fellow-citizens.”
During the ratification debates, shortly before the Second Amendment was introduced, Noah Webster declared that “[b]efore a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed, as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe.” The founders — with no exceptions I have seen — were certain that physical power should not be completely concentrated within the government.
Those were different times, of course. But if U.S. citizens have finally and permanently tamed government through force of democracy, then it’s a very recent accomplishment. There are black people alive today who remember being absolutely tyrannized by government in the South. Civil rights pioneer Ida B. Wells famously advised that “the Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home.” But racially biased Jim Crow disarmament laws made many Southern blacks sitting ducks for abuse. Of course, those laws were instituted by the tormentors themselves.
(By the way, those who think we are completely over racially disparate disarmament practices should examine ”stop and frisk” statistics from America’s big cities. Guns are still being confiscated from black people at a disproportionate rate.)
If government having all the guns still sounds like a good idea, please consider that we might be one terrorist attack or stock market crash away from having Donald Trump as commander in chief of the very “standing army” that unsettled the founders. Whether or not Trump is ultimately electable, his already surprisingly successful candidacy has exposed a rich vein of easily exploitable fear in the U.S. electorate. If this particular megalomaniacal demagogue goes down in heartily deserved flames, how long will it be before another like him emerges, since we now know that a substantial number of voters can be won over through an express hostility toward the rule of law?
Unfortunately, U.S. government as we know it — as a servant of the people rather than the other way around — is a more tenuous thing than its long durability, thus far, might suggest. Progressive icon Hubert Humphrey recognized this, observing that “[t]he right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, and one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.” Humphrey did not define what he meant by “possible,” but developments since his time have not been encouraging. We have come to a point where our representatives barely care what we think, according to a recent study.
The notion that private gun ownership could still be a vital part of America’s system of checks and balances has drawn some ridicule in recent months. Surely, the awesome firepower of a U.S. government gone rogue would quell any civilian resistance. But the whole idea is to ensure that such a confrontation will never happen. Bullies size up the strengths and weaknesses of potential prey before engaging. They are often deterred by the least indication that a potential target has the means to resist.
While I recognize that mass access to firearms comes at a serious cost, all of the freedoms we enjoy as an open society have downsides. The ongoing American experiment is based on the idea that a free country is better than an unfailingly safe one.
Michael Cummins is a Madison-based business analyst.
