Hillary Clinton told a gathering of gun rights opponents that Donald Trump’s position on the issue was “dangerous,” “way out there,” and “no way to keep us safe.”
Donald Trump, speaking at a National Rifle Association (NRA) convention in Louisville, Kentucky, on May 20, said that “the Second Amendment is under threat like never before” and that “crooked Hillary Clinton is the most anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment candidate ever to run for office.” The NRA endorsed him the same day.
The following day, Clinton, Trump’s presumptive rival for the White House, told attendees at a conference on gun violence hosted by the Trayvon Martin Foundation in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, that Trump’s policies would lead to “more hatred and violence in our streets.”
However, though there is certainly a contrast between Trump and Clinton’s respective positions on the private ownership of firearms and the Second Amendment, there is skepticism regarding how committed Trump is to the Second Amendment because of views he has expressed in the past. In 2000, for example, he wrote: “I support the ban on assault weapons and I support a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun.” And after President Obama called for tighter restrictions on gun ownership in remarks in Newtown, Connecticut, after the Sandy Hook massacre in 2012, Trump tweeted:
Not all Americans.
Why did our Founding Fathers intend to wall off the right to keep and bear arms from potential assaults by the government? Because they understood that the right to keep and bear arms is the right that, when all others have been abolished, will be the one that can restore the rest.
St. George Tucker was a patriot and friend of Thomas Jefferson. During the War for Independence (there was no revolution in America, there was a restoration), Tucker, on the order of Governor Patrick Henry, smuggled weapons into Virginia for use by the state’s militia. During that war, Tucker himself served in the militia of the Old Dominion, leading several raids on the British invaders.
After the war, Tucker became a judge — first serving as a circuit judge and later as a federal judge appointed by President James Madison. It was during his work as a jurist that Tucker wrote commentaries on the work of William Blackstone, applying analogies from that inimitable work to the Constitution of the United States.
After quoting the Second Amendment, Tucker wrote the following, identifying the reason the right to keep and bear arms was considered sacrosanct by the men of the Founding Generation: “This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty…. The right of self defence [sic] is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour [sic] or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.”
Any pretext whatsoever. That is pretty plain language, language that doesn’t seem to lend itself to the strained and self-serving (mis)interpretation by those who would prohibit liberty.
Later in that same text, Tucker warned of a time that “Congress [would] pass a law prohibiting any person from bearing arms as a means of preventing insurrections….”
Reading between the lines, then, Tucker recognized that guns are great for hunting and for protecting one’s home, but those aren’t the uses of firearms that the Second Amendment was designed to preserve.
The purpose of bearing arms — the ultimate purpose — was then and had been throughout history, defending oneself against tyrants. This, our Founders believed, was the “first law of nature.” Maintaining liberty was believed by them to be a Christian obligation and that duty was only discharged fully and finally by a people armed and able to defeat despots.
As if Tucker needed to be any clearer, he finished his analysis of the ultimate aim of protecting firearm ownership, writing that Congress had no authority to pass any laws restricting the right of the people to own weapons, “nor will the constitution permit any prohibition of arms to the people; or of peaceable assemblies by them, for the purposes whatsoever, and in any number, whenever they may see occasion.”
There he goes again with that direct and undiluted defense of forbidding government from contracting the scope of the public’s right to own and use firearms, even if it meant against those who were once its rulers.
Notice, also, that Tucker’s constitutional exegesis on the purpose of protecting gun rights brooks no regulation of that right, not even the “reasonable” sort advocated to varying degrees by Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and the NRA.
Such a world is anathema to the society Hillary Clinton would build upon the ruins of this once free Republic. Hillary Clinton’s quest to disarm civilians is no quixotic fancy of one without the ways or means of completing her mission. So sincere is she in her desire to emend the Second Amendment that she told her supporters that they “will not be silenced,” and they “will not be intimidated.”
Americans who understand the genuine genealogy of the protections provided by the Second Amendment should make a similar promise to the petty tyrants who would take from them their last and most reliable means of resistance.
Photo of Hillary Clinton: AP Images
(The New American never endorses candidates. Our purpose is to inform the electorate and enable them to draw their own conclusions.)
