Vincent J. Curtis
21 Jan 2013
Some Canadians seem shocked that in the wake of
tragedies such as occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown
Connecticut, that a comprehensive gun ban should be opposed by anyone.
However, there are good and sound reasons in American history and culture
for the protection of gun ownership by its private citizens.
The reason the 2nd Amendment is in the United States Constitution in the first
place is because in 1773 the British tried to suppress the brewing American revolution
by first requiring the registration of firearms and then trying to confiscate
those firearms belonging the the Colonists. The framers of the
Constitution wished to assure the anti-Federalists (those Americans opposed to
the adoption of the newly-written Constitution) that the Federal government
would never be so strong as to possess over-awing authority. In
view of the experience of the revolution and the cost of maintaining a
permanent military on the charge of the state budget, the prossession of
firearms capable of military use by the citizenry was sensible and specifically
protected as an individual right of the citizen in the new constitution.
As Justice Scalia said in the Heller decision, the right to keep and bear
arms was seen as the continuation of a right to self-protection that existed
prior to the Constitution. The right to employ arms for self-protection
is mentioned in the 1689 Bill of Rights of England, and is discussed in
Blackstone's Commentaries on the Common Law.
The right to keep and bear arms by individual citizens is thus grounded in
American history and law, and any effort on the part of government to infringe
upon those rights is seen as an effort for the government to become overawing.
To Canadians this may seem strange. However, the U.S. Constitution begins
with "We the People..." and is a document which proposes limited
government. Nowadays, limited government is respected more in the breach
than in the observance, but the sentiment is that the people created the government,
and they can change it as need be. The government is a creature of the
people, and an attempt by elected officials to deprive the people of necessary
means of ultimately keeping the government in check is seen as a dangerous
movement towards tyranny.
The business of personal protection, a common law right which antedates the
formation of the United States, is also widely and highly regarded in America,
as evidenced by the number of states with conceal carry permit laws.
Every man (and woman) has a right to defend himself, and the attitude of
many of Americans is that if even a few of the teaching staff at Sandy Hook had
availed themselves of this right the tragedy at Sandy Hook would not have been
what it was. It would be the story of a deranged man who was killed for
breaking a school window.
American history is not the same as Canada's. The incidents of massacres
on the frontier, as the white, American civilization moved into Indian
territory, are numerous. The settlement of the American "wild
West" was indeed wild in comparison to the settlement of the Canadian
west. Thus massacres are not as shocking to Americans as to Canadians.
The history of gun control in America began in the aftermath of the Civil War,
when whites tried to deprive Blacks of the means of defending themselves
against lynchings.
All things considered, there are many sound reasons why efforts to throttle gun
ownership and possession in America should fail. These are grounded in
the American experience, of which Canadians often have little awareness and
could care less about.
But if you want to understand why gun control will fail in much of the United
States, rather than simply lament about it, one ought to review the recent
decisions of the United States Supreme Court on the Second Amendment.
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