The American Revolution was a revolution of
common people who were armed with weapons. The long
rifle, fired from a distance, was a formidable weapon. A
man who could shoot straight at a distance of several
hundred yards could kill an officer on horseback. Officers wore
special uniforms. This enabled their troops to identify who was
in charge. They rode on horseback, above the troops. There
was a universal agreement among the warriors of Western
Europe that they would not target the officers. This, of
course, was an agreement among officers.
The Americans honored no such agreement.
Americans would target the officers from hundreds of
yards away. The chain of command of British troops was
disrupted by the American rifle. This was considered unsportsmanlike.
But the Americans did not honor the same rules and
sportsmanship.
This is why the militias were the formidable
opponents of the British Army. George Washington only had
two major victories, Trenton in 1776 (won by surprise)
and Yorktown in 1781 (won by the French Navy). His army
was usually unable to make direct confrontations in the
field with the British Army. In contrast, militia units, firing
from a distance against massed armies, and then running into the
woods, could not be dealt with by British Army
tacticians. The British armies were always tied to the
cities. They could not venture far into the countryside
to get food, because too many of them would be gunned
down by militia members. They were dependent upon the
British Navy to deliver supplies to them.
It was therefore impossible for the British to
win that war. For as long as the Americans would stay in
decentralized units, firing from a distance into the
organized troops of the British, the British could not extend military
control, and therefore political control, over the
Americans. The Americans kept fighting until British
taxpayers grew weary of funding the war, and until the
French, during one 30-day period, provided the naval
support to block the British Navy from resupplying Cornwallis's
Army. George Washington got the credit, as did the centralized
army under his command, but it was the militia that had kept the British at bay for the previous five years.
In Defense of the Second Amendment
I want to go over in considerable detail the
fundamental issues of the Second Amendment to the United
States Constitution: the right to keep and bear arms.
There is a great deal of emotional commitment in the
United States to one of two extreme positions: (1) the
right of every non-felon adult citizen of the United
States to own any weapon he chooses, and (2) the right of
the government of the United States to outlaw the ownership of
firearms.
I am hard core. I would extend this right to convicted
felons who have served their time or have made
restitution to their victims. I would not let the federal
government revoke this fundamental right of citizenship.
To understand the Second Amendment, we need to go back to something like the beginning.
FEUDALISM AND POLITICAL SOVEREIGNTY
In English common law in medieval times, meaning as
late as the 13th century, the feudal legal system limited
ownership of military weapons to members of the knightly
class, and those classes over the knights. In other
words, the ownership of weapons had to do with legal status.
The common man, meaning a peasant, could not be called
into military service. Military service was a matter of
inheritance of land and status, and this inheritance
mandated military training, which created a military
mindset. Thus, the weapons associated with this class,
which was also a matter of social status, were not to be shared
with the peasantry. This placed the peasantry at an obvious
disadvantage in terms of military power. It also extended
to political power. They had little political power.
They were represented mainly by priests.
One of the marks of the knightly class was the right
to wear armor. Armor was heavy. So, a peasant who had a
simple walking staff was in a position to knock a knight
off his horse. A knight in shining armor who was lying on
the ground could not get up by himself. He was defenseless.
So, the fact that a peasant not under a knight's authority was not
allowed to carry a sword, or a bow and arrow, did not
necessarily place him at a complete disadvantage,
one-on-one, when dealing with a knight on horseback. It
all depended on the tactics of surprise. The knight who
was not expecting to be knocked off his horse might be at
a disadvantage.
Peasants early on learned how to use walking sticks as
weapons. Peasants could not be deprived of their walking
sticks. So, they retained a degree of power which was
not legally associated with their class. The movie scene
of Robin Hood, an outlaw from the knightly class, battling
Little John on a log over a stream was unlikely. Little John would
easily have killed him. Knights were not trained in the use
of staffs.
Anyone who possessed expensive weapons began with a
competitive advantage in the use of power. The knightly
class was careful to guard its legal rights. Magna Carta
was a document created by the barons to defend their
rights against the king. These rights were jealously guarded
both against intrusions of power from below, as well as any
intrusions from above. It was part of a hierarchical
social and legal social order.
There is no question that, under most circumstances,
the knightly class could deal with the peasants in the
field of military battle. There were peasant rebellions
from time to time. But, over the centuries, the knightly
class did prevail against attempts by the peasants to overturn
the legal status of the knightly class.
One of the advantages of this system was that
civilians, meaning peasants and the people who lived in
towns, were to be left alone by the warriors. They were
not to be slaughtered in a military confrontation. Warriors
were to do battle with other warriors. Warriors were not to use
the specialized implements of warfare against civilians. This
was a good arrangement for civilians.
GUNPOWDER
Gunpowder signaled the end of feudalism. It did not
cause this decline, but it accompanied it. Armies became
professional. Mercenaries appeared. Legal access to
weapons was no longer based on birth and legal status. With the
demise of the feudal order after the 14th century, and the rise
of professional armies, which were funded by taxation
rather than by a grant of land by the king to specific
families, access to military training became available to
common men. The more that the armies depended upon
conscription, or payment by the central government, the
greater the demands for the right to vote by the lower classes.
This demand became open during the Puritan revolution
of the 1640s in England. Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army
was made up of commoners as well as members of the
higher social orders. Puritans believed in the exercise
of the franchise in their local congregations. English
Puritans were Congregationalists. They did not believe in a hierarchy
of bishops, nor did they even believe in the hierarchy of
presbyteries. Presbyterianism was a Scottish concept, not
an English Puritan concept. So, with the triumph of
Cromwell and the New Model Army, the issue of the
franchise became an important political issue. Debates were
held in 1647 within the New Model Army over what constituted the
right to vote. The Levelers, who were not Communists,
believed that the franchise should be extended to members
of the New Model Army, irrespective of their wealth.
This was opposed by the upper classes, including
Cromwell, but there was an open debate over the issue.
Cromwell's son-in-law, Ireton, argued for wealth, meaning personally
owned land or money, as the basis of the right to vote.
Rainsboro, a representative of the Levelers, argued that
mere residence in the land should qualify a man to vote.
With the coming of the rifle in the 18th century, it
became possible for independent farmers -- "peasants" --
to purchase the implements of war. These could be used
for hunting. Civilians were still not part of the warrior
class, but as the price of weaponry fell, beginning in
the early 18th century, a shift of political power also began
to take place.
In the second half of the 18th century, the common
citizen in the British colonies of North America
possessed a rifle. In most cases he was a man of the
countryside. He had the ability to use it. For the first time,
weapons that were available to common people had equal firepower
to weapons available to the central government.
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
So, the central government faced a crisis. The
colonists in North America were in a position to resist
the King's will. After 1763, resistance against the
King's representatives increased, and the ability of the
King to impose his will on these upstarts became more a matter
of finances than technology.
The American Revolution was a revolution of common
people who were armed with weapons. The long rifle, fired
from a distance, was a formidable weapon. A man who
could shoot straight at a distance of several hundred
yards could kill an officer on horseback. Officers wore
special uniforms. This enabled their troops to identify who was
in charge. They rode on horseback, above the troops. There was a
universal agreement among the warriors of Western Europe
that they would not target the officers. This, of course,
was an agreement among officers.
The Americans honored no such agreement. Americans
would target the officers from hundreds of yards away.
The chain of command of British troops was disrupted by
the American rifle. This was considered unsportsmanlike.
But the Americans did not honor the same rules and sportsmanship.
This is why the militias were the formidable opponents
of the British Army. George Washington only had two
major victories, Trenton in 1776 (won by surprise) and
Yorktown in 1781 (won by the French Navy). His army was
usually unable to make direct confrontations in the field
with the British Army. In contrast, militia units, firing
from a distance against massed armies, and then running into the
woods, could not be dealt with by British Army tacticians. The
British armies were always tied to the cities. They
could not venture far into the countryside to get food,
because too many of them would be gunned down by militia
members. They were dependent upon the British Navy to
deliver supplies to them.
It was therefore impossible for the British to win
that war. For as long as the Americans would stay in
decentralized units, firing from a distance into the
organized troops of the British, the British could not extend military
control, and therefore political control, over the
Americans. The Americans kept fighting until British
taxpayers grew weary of funding the war, and until the
French, during one 30-day period, provided the naval
support to block the British Navy from resupplying Cornwallis's
Army. George Washington got the credit, as did the centralized
army under his command, but
it was the militia that had kept the British at bay for the previous five years.
Americans fully understood this when the leaders wrote
the Bill of Rights in 1790. This is why the Second
Amendment was inserted into the Constitution. The voters
understood that it was their ability to fight any organized
army, through the organization of the militia, which was basic to
their concept of citizenship. It was the citizen warrior,
armed with a rifle that was every bit as good as that
possessed by members of the Army, who was perceived as
possessing final political sovereignty. The whole concept
of "we the people," which introduced the Constitution,
rested on the well-known ability of the American citizen
warrior to grab his rifle and fight.
DEMOCRACY AND WEAPONS
Professor Carroll Quigley of Georgetown University was
an expert in the history of armaments in Western Europe.
He is famous among conservatives for about 20 pages late
in his book,
Tragedy and Hope,
in which he discussed the influence of the Morgan
banking interests. Very few conservatives have ever read all of
this book.
In chapter 2, "Western Civilization to 1914," on page
34, Quigley wrote a very important assessment of the
relationship between weaponry and political power.
In a period of specialist weapons the minority who
have such weapons can usually force the majority who
lack them to obey; thus a period of specialist weapons
tends to give rise to a period of minority rule and authoritarian
government. But a period of amateur weapons is a period in
which all men are roughly equal in military power, the
majority can compel a minority to yield, and majority
rule or even democratic government tends to rise. . . .
But after 1800, guns became cheaper to obtain and
easier to use. By 1840, a revolver sold for $27 and a
Springfield musket for not much more, and these were about
as good weapons as anyone could get at that time. Thus, mass armies
of citizens, equipped with these cheap and easily used
weapons, began to replace armies of professional
soldiers, beginning about 1800 in Europe and even
earlier in America. At the same time, democratic
government began to replace authoritarian governments
(but chiefly in those areas where the cheap new weapons were available
and local standards of living were high enough to allow
people to obtain).
The American Civil War transformed military tactics.
The rise of the railroads and telegraphy made possible
the coordination of the movement of mass armies. The only
way that the American South could have won that war,
other than simply by outlasting the Northerners on the
battlefield, thereby weakening the will to continue the war among
Northern voters, was to resort to guerrilla warfare. But the
generals were mostly the products of West Point, or were
promoted on the battlefield by graduates of West Point,
and their concept was the same as George Washington's,
namely, that centralized armies financed by the national
government were the basis of military success. They were
not in favor of guerrilla warfare. (This was not true of Nathan
Bedford Forest, a businessman turned self-funded cavalry officer.
He was a guerrilla, and he was highly effective.)
From the end of the Civil War until today, nations
have been committed to what is sometimes called
second-generation warfare. These are armies, navies, and
air forces that can assemble massed firepower, using
highly precise and very expensive weapons. These military units
no longer can consistently defeat guerrilla movements on the
ground. Fourth-generation warfare, meaning guerrilla
warfare, is now reestablishing the sovereignty of the
common man. Vietnam is the obvious case, but Afghanistan
certainly qualifies. In the case of Afghanistan, the
common man has always had the advantage. Nobody has been able
to conquer Afghanistan for more than a few years. This goes back
to Alexander the Great. The topography of the nation, and
the commitment of its men to fight to the bitter end,
meaning the bitter end of the invaders, has been such
that these people have not been defeated.
The one Western European nation that fully understands
this is Switzerland. Every Swiss male up the age of 60
is expected to serve in the military. Every Swiss male
who serves in the military is expected to master the use
of the rifle. It is a matter of honor to be a good rifleman
in Switzerland. Bankers in their 50s compete against clerks in their
20s as marksmen. This has been true for five centuries.
This is a nation of citizen warriors. It is a nation with
a very weak central government, the weakest in the
modern industrial world. The presidency is a symbolic
office, and it is held on a rotation basis, with only one
year as its term. Yet the nation's army can be mobilized in
a matter of days. Switzerland has the longest history of political
freedom of any continental European nation.
It is true that the Swiss surrender their ammo back to
the local armory at the end of each summer's training.
It is also true that the political tradition of democracy
is so deeply ingrained that it would be impossible for
any Swiss government to refuse to return those weapons the following
summer. The Swiss are not a disarmed population. They simply
let the government store the ammo during the year. The
attitude is not that the government lets the citizens
have access to weapons. The attitude is that the citizens
allow the government to store the ammo. The mentality is
completely different from the gun control advocates in
the United States.
In every nation except Switzerland, gun control
advocates want to centralize the ownership of any weapon
that could be used systematically against agents of the
government. This is not a random outlook. All the
arguments about reduced crime are refuted by the statistics of increased
crime whenever the government confiscates the guns of
the population. Guns are as easily available to the
criminal class as illegal drugs are available to the
citizens and all other residents.
Gun
control advocates insist that the centralization of gun
ownership into the hands of the monopolistic government
is a moral obligation. Why is it a moral obligation? It
is a moral obligation because these people really do
believe that the central government possesses legitimate
original political sovereignty, an exclusive sovereignty, over the
weapons that could be used against the central government.
It is one of those peculiarities that conservatives
who say they believe in the right of gun ownership, and
who sometimes even say that this is a means of defense
against tyranny, are also in favor of invading foreign
nations, when those foreign nations have adopted the concept
of universal gun ownership that is comparable to the philosophy
of American conservatism. The well-armed "little people"
in Middle Eastern countries are able to defeat American
invading troops, just as others like them did in Vietnam,
precisely because the decentralization that is made
possible by a diffusion of gun ownership and explosives
is effective in combating the expansion of centralized
political and military control. In other words, American
troops cannot defeat these tiny countries, precisely because of
widespread ownership of effective weapons that can be used
against the occupying troops.
