I recently wrote a column for a police magazine, that leans left in that it is very much politically oriented and prioritizes police association benefits and pay. I have included the text of my column below: My view is solely mine but it accurately reflects the views of 85-90 of my brother and sister officers on the medium sized (300+ sworn officers) department I served in.
I was grading papers the other night and was struck by a student’s rather sweeping statement that our Constitution was a happy result of the Declaration of Independence. Sure I thought, if we ignore a sequence of events including the War for Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the Constitutional Debates. Nevertheless her statement made me think about the relationship between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Given the intense debate over gun control measures currently being waged in Washington D.C. in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy, perhaps it is time that those of us in law enforcement refresh our memories about the origins of the Second Amendment.
The Second Amendment was part of the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the new Constitution. These amendments were offered as a package to assuage the fears of Anti-Federalists that the powers entrusted to the federal government as a result of the new constitution were too numerous and too powerful. In short, without the Bill of Rights, the Anti-federalists feared the potential of the new central government to become every bit as tyrannical as the British monarchy from which the Founding Fathers had so recently divorced themselves.
Experts on both sides of the gun control debate have spent countless hours and written thousands of articles parsing the words of the Founding Fathers in framing the Second Amendment. Any objective analysis however cannot fail to conclude that the Founding Fathers strongly believed in an individual right to bear arms. More recently, the Supreme Court has upheld this right in D.C. v. Heller.
If you are truly in support of Federal gun control legislation, I would direct you to examine the writings of Alexander Hamilton in Federalist #29 and James Madison in Federalist #46. Both of these gentlemen acknowledged the very real protections afforded by the militia in the event of foreign invasion or domestic insurrection or the potential of domestic usurpation of legitimate power.
Arguments can and have been made that both of these essays extend only to providing the militia with the right to bear arms. This is fallacy. The militia in those days was constituted of every able bodied male, literally those from 14 to 65. The Founders intended that everyone have the right to bear arms. They did not do so to ensure that game was placed on the table, that the occasional Indian raid be met with force or that the British should they decide to return, could be turned aside. Certainly those were all considerations of the need to retain arms in the hands of the citizen at large. However just as clearly, the Founding Fathers believed that an overarching central government must be met with whatever means up to and including force.
If I sound like an extremist to some of you, you would do well to reexamine your history and our founding documents. Thomas Jefferson was quite clear in the Declaration of Independence when he wrote that:
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
With those words freshly in mind and their own arduous experience of the Revolutionary War so recently behind them, the Founding Fathers determined that the right to keep and bear arms was an essential element of a free state. If you consider the potential of the United States to dissolve into domestic turmoil remote, then you are willfully ignoring history. Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s I would never have considered the possibility that the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics would collapse either, but it did. Do I foresee a similar fate for our own nation in the near term? No, but that does not mean that it cannot happen either. The chaos following the L.A. Riots and Hurricane Katrina provide ample evidence that in the event of a breakdown of governmental authority, armed citizens are fully capable of protecting themselves and their property. This ability must ever be defended.
On March 6, 2013 the PORAN Board of Directors voted unanimously to instruct our lobbyists in Washington D.C. to oppose all Federal gun control legislation except those bills designed to restrict the executive in the implementation of gun control measures absent Congressional approval. It was our considered opinion that gun control is a constitutional issue and only Congress or the States have the authority to amend the Constitution and to advance legislation that encroaches on our Second Amendment rights. We were reminded that the Bill of Rights is a bill of negative rights, that is, they are rights that cannot be abridged by the Federal government. They are acknowledged to be afforded man through natural or divine law. When we take our oath of office we swear to uphold the Constitution of the United States, that oath includes the Second Amendment and the earlier articles that define the process for changing or amending the document. It does not extend to executive action circumventing the Constitution and attacking both our right and the right of our fellow citizens.
That should read 85-90% of my brother and sister officers.
Nice essay. How was it received by the audience?