The Right To Bear Arms

I keep saying it, but no one seems to join me. The United States Constitution is a very simple legal document, fashioned in a way that every American can read and understand. Still there is widespread controversy as to the meaning of certain passages.

The Second amendment is 27 words: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." Only the Ten Commandments use verbiage more sparsely "Thou Shalt Not Kill".

Justice Scalia has suggested we seek to understand the framers intentions at the time of the drafting. Such good advice. But doing that requires digging through old texts to find clarifying statements. Where to start?

Happily there are people like Walter E. Williams. Dr. Williams is a member of the faculty of George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and is currently the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics. His is an amazing American story. While I was born on the eve of the Hoover Administration, Dr. Williams was born on the eve of the second Franklin Roosevelt Administration. Born in Philadelphia in those extremely difficult times, he was raised in a housing project, but literally grabbed his bootstraps and pulled himself "Up From The Projects" - which happens to be the title of his autobiography.

Dr. Williams  has done the research for us, and collected  the Second Amendment opinions of our most distinguished founding fathers. Find them at:

Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Go to the site, bookmark it, and review it often. I promise you will love reading the quotes.

For example, people often charge that the Second Amendment was intended to apply only to a "militia". Very well. Check out what George Mason said, in Debates in Virginia Convention on Ratification of the Constitution, Elliot, Vol. 3, June 16, 1788:

"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials."


For those (including the low-information governor of New York) who now clamor for the confiscation of all American's privately owned guns, Dr. Williams included this ominous quote:


"The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing."

-- Adolph Hitler, Hitler's Secret Conversations 403 (Norman Cameron and R.H. Stevens trans., 1961)