Militias as a Means to Avoid the Cost of Standing Armies (or why the second amendment doesn't mean what the NRA wants you to believe it means)

The NRA has distorted the intention of the 2nd amendment and glosses over the historical realities and philosophies of the founding fathers. The 2nd amendment was never intended to give any random citizen unfettered access to any random number of any weaponry they fancied. It was written to describe how free people were to defend themselves without relying on standing armies.

Jefferson’s Republican Democratic Party (which was referred to at various points in the 1790s through 1830s as the Republican Party, Jeffersonian Republicans, Democratic-Republican Party or Democratic Party) thought that war and monarchy were intertwined. The taxes and spending needed to create a standing army led to huge riches for the monarch who ruled it, and a huge tax burden for the people. War and monarchy were seen as entangled. Jefferson and his fellow Republicans did not want a standing army and thought that war could be avoided. (They thought trade sanctions and other economic penalties might be enough to punish or change other nations when needed.)

They also knew that war was not always a choice and for that situation, they had a vision of a Militia rather than army.

Militias were not a standing army. They were formed by free citizens who had day jobs. Militias might (should) meet and train but they had real lives to go back to. The vision was that they would be well-regulated but not that they would be on payroll, lounging around in the barracks or in some free citizens’ bedroom – and the very next amendment addresses that. A standing army meant more expense which meant more taxes.

Now might you just save money on a standing army by letting them stay in the homes of citizens? Nope. The third amendment is "No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law." During peacetime, there would be a Militia that was manned by residents who stayed in their own homes and could rally with their own guns when the need arose.

Such citizens needed the right to bear arms and the first amendment gave them that. Bring your own gun. Sleep in your own bedroom. This is a well-regulated militia we’re relying on, not a standing army collecting a monthly paycheck.

The 2nd and 3rd amendments were about how the US was to deal with breakdowns between nations and how to provide for an army or Militia. The 4th through 8th amendments were about crimes and their consequences, how to deal with breakdowns between citizens through the judicial system.

(The right to a trial by jury has a curious parallel to the Militia. Here was another volunteer citizen group called upon to fill a vital role in a democracy. Militias were a group of citizens who defended the community from outside attack. Juries were a group of citizens who administered justice to defend the community from criminal attacks from within. Both relied on ordinary citizens to do extraordinary things, to restore peace and order.)

The guys in this Militia were a substitute for the standing army that would otherwise need barracks and provisioning and regular paychecks that cost more than what Jefferson and the Democratic-Republicans wanted to pay. And they would have the right to bear arms because soldiers needed weaponry and the small government Jefferson envisioned wouldn’t buy those for them.

With that in mind, read the 2nd amendment again.
“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.”

And lest you think that I’m just making all of this up, I’ll close with a couple of quotes from Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger. The first quote is from an interview of his. The second is from a piece he wrote.

"The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies – the militia – would be maintained for the defense of the state."

"The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires."

One of the biggest cons the NRA has played on the American people is not just that they’ve argued that the second amendment has nothing to do with militias or that militias are just any group that decides to call themselves that. It is that they’ve convinced others that an amendment that begins with the words, “A well-regulated” means that a community cannot regulate gun ownership.