There
are 3 documents that are considered the whole and are inseparable. As always,
the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. These are the Declaration of
Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Thomas Jefferson was the
principal drafter of the Declaration and James Madison of the Bill of Rights;
Madison, along with Gouverneur Morris and James Wilson, was also one of the
principal architects of the Constitution. I will assert here that the whole was
conceptualized by one mind, who had it all resolved before any was put to pen.
Most
importantly, the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are
based on the idea that all people have certain fundamental rights that
governments are created to protect. Those rights include common law rights,
which come from British sources like the Magna Carta, or natural rights, which,
the Founders believed, came from God. The Founders believed that natural rights
are inherent in all people by virtue of their being human and that certain of
these rights are unalienable, meaning they cannot be surrendered to government
under any circumstances. One should underline all people and inalienable.
Inalienable
right refers
to rights that cannot be surrendered, sold or transferred to someone else,
especially a natural right such as the right to
own property. ... These rights cannot be bartered away, or given away, or taken
away except in punishment of crime.
The
Declaration stands on its own—it has never been amended—while the Constitution
has been amended 27 times. The Declaration and Bill of Rights set limitations
on government; the Constitution was designed both to create an energetic
government and also to constrain it. The Declaration was signed by the
Delegates, each of them. You could legitimately say that they signed it with
their own blood since we were at war and their signatures would have consigned
them to treason with death as their reward.
The
author of the Declaration was not even in audience throughout most of the writing
of any of it. He was in Paris as our Ambassador of France. He was, however, the
architect of each—the Declaration, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Jefferson
had been elected as Chairman of the Committee to draft the Declaration, all the
while in residence in Paris. Jefferson had 17 days to produce the document and
reportedly wrote a draft in a day or two. In a rented room not far from the
State House, he wrote the Declaration with few books and pamphlets beside him,
except for a copy of George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights and the
draft Virginia Constitution, which Jefferson had written himself. He did not
pull this stuff out of the air. He had a template, if you will. I find the most
important sentence of the Declaration to be, “Governments are instituted among
Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” In other
words, when Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and began to articulate
some of the rights that were ultimately enumerated in the Bill of Rights, he
wasn’t inventing these rights out of thin air.
How
could Jefferson write this at a time that he and other Founders who signed the
Declaration owned slaves? The document was an expression of an ideal. In his
personal conduct, Jefferson violated it. But the ideal—“that all men are
created equal”—came to take on a life of its own and is now considered the most
perfect embodiment of the American creed. Some things do not happen overnight,
but this did happen over time. Furthermore, there were laws in the Colonies at
that time which precluded a slaveholder to release slaves other than to sell
them to another slaveholder while personally accompanying them to that slaveholder.
In other words, slaveowners were constrained by statutes.
In
addition to its promise of equality, Jefferson’s preamble is also a promise of
liberty. Like the other Founders, he was steeped in the political philosophy of
the Enlightenment, in philosophers such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui,
Francis Hutcheson, and Montesquieu. All of them believed that people have
certain unalienable and inherent rights that come from God, not government, or
come simply from being human. They also believed that when people form
governments, they give those governments control over certain natural rights to
ensure the safety and security of other rights. Jefferson, George Mason, and
the other Founders frequently spoke of the same set of rights as being natural
and unalienable.
It
took 4 months of debate to draft the Constitution. You can see the entirety of
the debate in Madison’s Notes on the Constitution. It is no mystery, it is
documented. You can also see it after the fact in the Federalist Papers. There
is no excuse for anyone to have a lack of understanding of the Framers’ intent.
The
Constitution was originally sent to the 13 Colonies without a Bill of Rights. 9
states originally ratified it but others would not at this juncture. This was
the point at which the Bill or Rights entered into the quotient. Madison was
not favorable originally to a Bill of Rights, believing they were unnecessary/
dangerous for 2 reasons:
1) Because the federal
government was granted no power to abridge individual liberty
2) Dangerous since it implied
that the federal government had the power to infringe liberty in the first
place
Madison
clung to his belief until he sought the advice and counsel of his mentor,
Thomas Jefferson. What took place was an exchange of letters between Jefferson,
while in Paris, and Madison at home. I have those letters. They are contained in
a book in my library. In those letters, Jefferson named each of the individual
rights that he urged to be included and ratified. Jefferson had his own
personal copying machine. I saw it myself in Monticello. Damnedest contraption I’ve
ever seen but also damned effective. Without it, I would not be writing this
and we would not know the man behind all 3 of those documents, which I consider
sacrosanct.
What
happened next was the proof of the pudding. James Madison introduced a series
of Constitutional amendments in the House of Representatives for consideration.
Among his proposals was one that would have added introductory language
stressing natural rights to the preamble. Another would apply parts of the
Bill of Rights to the states as well as the federal government. Several sought
to protect individual personal rights by limiting various Constitutional powers of Congress.
Like Washington and Jefferson, Madison urged Congress to keep the revision to
the Constitution "a moderate one", limited to protecting individual
rights. They did limit the Constitutional powers of Congress, explicitly in
Article 1, Section 8, for all us to see and understand. All else was left to
the States and to the People, in Amendments 9 and 10.
The
Delegates concurred. In the end, by pulling from the amendments proposed by
state ratifying conventions and Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights, Madison
proposed 19 amendments to the Constitution. Congress approved 12 amendments to
be sent to the states for ratification. Only 10 of the amendments were
ultimately ratified in 1791 and became the Bill of Rights. The 2 Amendments not
included in the Bill of Rights were essentially housekeeping matters for
Congress that came later, not having to do with Individual Rights.
What
did Jefferson say about what ultimately become the 2nd Amendment? Jefferson
was adamant, he felt the States might become the true barrier of our individual
liberties. He wrote:
“Nor
can they be constrained to it by any force he can possess…ready organized for
action by their governor, constitutionally the commander of the militia of the
State, that is to say, of every man in it able to bear arms; and that militia
too, regularly formed into regiments and battalions, into infantry, cavalry and
artillery.”
This
is the precedent for the 2nd Amendment. The right to keep and bear
arms is an individual right, as are the other Amendments in the Bill of Rights.
These rights are not to be abridged:
Abridge
(Divest), verb attach, deprive of, dispossess of, disseise, divest of, expropriate, limit, restrict, seize, strip, take away, usurp, wrest from.
In
addition, the militia are codified in Title 10 Section 246.
10
US Code Title 10 Sect 246
(b)The classes of the militia are—
(1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and
the Naval Militia; and
(2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the
members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the
Naval Militia.
--In
other words, we are all the militia.
Constitutional
revisionists stipulate that it is not an individual right to bear arms. They
are defeated on two counts. Each of the first 10 Amendments, the Bill of
Rights, are explicitly Individual Rights. Secondly, see paragraph 2 above, the
unorganized militia. As usual, they usually paint themselves into a corner with
their specious arguments.
One
often hears much about the Federal Supremacy Clause and how the Federal
Government is Supreme in all things. Not! It is only supreme in those rights of
the federal government iterated in Article 1 Section 8. Once again, all else is
left to the States and to the People.
For
example, the Right of Naturalization is listed as a federal government function
and thus, supreme, with respect to Naturalization. By that, I mean that State Governments
have no dog in that hunt. The federal government and in fact, the President,
has the sole authority on matters respecting Naturalization.
Fourteenth
Amendment: "All
persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction
thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they
reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the
privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State
deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law;
nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the
laws."
While I often times call the Fourteenth Amendment as the most redundant
Amendment on the planet, as it repeats the Supremacy Clause as well as the
Fourth and Fifth Amendments, however this reaffirms the fact that the States
cannot violate our rights that are protected by the United States Constitution.
Conversely, with respect to the 14th Amendment, non-citizens are
guaranteed nothing, anywhere in the 14th Amendment or the
Constitution generally. Just disabuse yourself of that notion. If you hear an
argument otherwise, their argument is without respect to the Constitution and
they usually refer to what they call Case Law, which in relation to the
Constitution is a nonsense.
When it comes to Red Flag Laws, everything about them is unconstitutional and
ought to be resisted on all fronts. Red Flag laws are in direct violation of
the Second Amendment
Fourth Amendment
Fifth Amendment
Sixth Amendment
Seventh Amendment
Fourteenth Amendment
If
we are complacent and apathetic on the issue, we will quickly lose not only our
gun rights, but our due process rights along with them! In this, Federal Law is
Supreme, inalienable and without abridgement. Period!
The
only rights that States retain with respect to firearms/ militia is the right
to appoint officers and provide the training of the militia. We, you and I, are
the militia.
