2nd Amendment: Something for Everyone : Guns: Scholarly research supports the intention to have an armed citizenry; ironically, that could make control easier.

The Nov. 8 Republican victory brought with it GOP vows to emasculate landmark gun laws, including the Brady bill. Even if the threats prove to be only rhetoric, this is a good time to give the Second Amendment some serious thought.

This constitutional provision guaranteeing the right to keep and bear arms was until recently dismissed as obsolete by academics, pundits and policy-makers. Yet on examination, the Second Amendment offers answers to today’s gun debate that are likely to please neither pro- nor anti-gun control zealots.

This point was made in a 1989 Yale Law Journal article by Sanford Levinson titled “The Embarrassing Second Amendment.” Although generally considered a left-leaning scholar, Levinson raised tough questions about how the Second Amendment has been wished away. Law professors who had previously ignored the subject began researching and holding conferences. There isn’t complete agreement, but the outlines of what the Second Amendment means are now clear. Its purpose was to ensure an armed citizenry. This wasn’t to prevent crime, or encourage hunting, or defend the country against invasion; it was to ensure that the government didn’t have a monopoly on force. With an armed populace, tyranny was thought unlikely. As Justice Joseph Story said, the right to keep and bear arms is “the palladium of liberties of a republic.” Or, as Thomas Jefferson said, “The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”

Regardless of whether gun ownership promotes crime, the Second Amendment seriously limits gun control--just as the First Amendment bars censoring crime reporting even though news reports sometimes promote “copycat” crimes. And the argument from both sides about preserving “legitimate sporting and hunting” misses the mark: The Second Amendment isn’t about hunting ducks. Nor are weapons that are “only good for killing people” exempted from the Second Amendment’s protection; they are at its core. The framers believed it was important for the people to have weapons that were good for killing, because they thought it essential for the populace to be able to defend itself against an oppressive government.

This won’t please either pro- or anti-gun forces. Many gun-control opponents are hunters; they won’t enjoy hearing that the Second Amendment is not about hunting. Nor is it a barrier to every kind of firearms regulation, any more than the First Amendment prohibits all regulation of speech. While the Second Amendment pretty clearly bans the sort of wholesale prohibition of firearms supported by some gun-control activists, it wouldn’t prohibit reasonable regulation and licensing laws. In colonial times, all citizens were required to have arms and to present them for inspection once or twice a year.

If the government could require citizens to show up in person for inspection, it’s hard to argue that it can’t require citizens to fill out a form. The right to bear arms was always limited to the law-abiding. So similar provisions would clearly pass muster today. Gun-control advocates, meanwhile, seem especially upset by private ownership of “military-style” weapons. But this is what the framers meant to protect: The semi-automatic assault weapons that they most dislike would thus be protected under the Second Amendment.

Of course, some say the Second Amendment is obsolete. But with armed citizens, this country has enjoyed a longer period of peace and stability than any other, while millions of citizens have been killed in this century by the authorities in European nations often held up as models of civilization by gun controllers. Had the millions of Jews and Gypsies annihilated by Nazis possessed weapons, their fate might have been different. Today, from Bosnia, to Cambodia, to Tian An Men Square, the enslavement or annihilation of the weak by the strong seems the rule, not the exception, and there is no reason that this country will always be immune.

Could armed citizens resist a tyrannical government now? True, modern armies have tanks and helicopters and civilians don’t, but from Vietnam, to Lebanon, to Afghanistan, modern armies have consistently lost to armed civilians. So the role of an armed citizenry may not be obsolete.

Ironically, if we take the Second Amendment seriously it may actually make some gun controls easier. So far (as November’s elections proved), barriers to gun control have been political, not constitutional. And opponents have been energized by their well-founded fear that many gun-control advocates want to outlaw guns completely. If the Supreme Court explicitly recognizes the right to keep and bear arms, fear of confiscation might go away, and reasonable regulations--those that would disarm criminals, not honest citizens--might fare better.

What’s missing in today’s polarized debate is trust. Gun-control advocates portray gun owners as depraved merely because they own guns; gun owners oppose any form of control because they see it as a step toward confiscation. Strong recognition of the right to bear arms might heal this breach and let us do something constructive.