A Better World

The National Guard of today is not exactly the same as the militias of yore, but it is generally considered to be the successor to those militias. If the early militias were unpaid it was probably because the states didn't have the money to pay them. The colonies had militias, mostly to defend against Indian attacks, before they ever thought of using them against the King of England. The Second Amendment guaranteed that the newly formed U.S. government would not deprive the states of this traditional means of defending themselves. Article II, Section 2, Paragraph 1 gives the president the power to call the militias into national service when needed, just like he calls the National Guard into service today. When either the militias or the Guard are not employed in national service, which is most of the time, they remain under the jurisdiction of their own state governments.

If you have to be a landowner to be a yeoman, then I certainly qualify. You, being a renter, probably do not. That doesn't make you any less of an American than I am, so I guess you have pretty well demolished my "yeoman" argument concerning the right to bear arms. I guess we agree that the right of private citizens to own guns doesn't come from the Second Amendment either, but that still leaves the Ninth Amendment with its reference to other rights "retained by the people". When you think about it, the only rights anybody really has are the ones he is willing to assert. The constitution doesn't grant you any rights, it just guarantees that the government won't interfere with your exercise of them. Then there's the Fifth Amendment, which states that no person shall be "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without the due process of law;". This statement seems to go against the whole concept of "rights", which makes me wonder why the constitution bothers to mention them in the first place.

I think that Jefferson's concept of a nation of yeomen was a utopian vision of the future. The culture in which he was born and raised certainly wasn't like that. He inherited his land, and the slaves that came with it. The slaves were something like the peasants of Europe, and Jefferson was more like an aristocrat than a yeoman. He talked about freeing his slaves, but he never did it. Maybe he couldn't figure out how to run his farm without them, or maybe he didn't know what would become of them if he turned them loose. What he could have done was free them on paper, and then offer them all jobs doing the same work they were already doing. Chances are that most of them would have stayed on because they had no place else to go. Too bad somebody didn't think of that back in those days, the whole Civil War could have been avoided.

We started discussing guns (this time) because you said that you wanted to talk about the Second Amendment. Now you have challenged me to explain how gun ownership makes this a better world. Okay, shifting gears now: Although I would not hesitate to use my guns in defense of myself or another person, I have thankfully never had to do that, and that's not the primary reason I own them. The main reason I have guns is for sporting purposes, hunting and target shooting. This makes my personal world better because I like to do those things. Other people like to play baseball and football, and those sports make their world better. If they weren't doing that, who knows what sort of mischief they might get into with their spare time and energy? People who use guns for defense are certainly better off than if they meekly surrendered their lives, and the lives of their loved ones, to the depredations of murderers and rapists. Of course, murderers and rapists can use guns too, which is all the more reason why decent people need them. Perhaps we should expand on this theme, since we have pretty well run the constitution discussion into the ground.