 The following article is under submission.  Reproduction
 on computer bulletin boards is permitted for informational
 purposes only.  Copyright (c) 1993 by J. Neil Schulman.
 All other rights reserved.




                    AS AMERICAN AS GUNS

                    by J. Neil Schulman


 "You know why there's a second amendment?  In case the
 government doesn't obey the first one."
   -- Rush Limbaugh, August 17, 1993

                              #

     Advocates of the right to keep and bear arms in the
United States usually base their arguments on the Second
Amendment: "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."

     But what if the Second Amendment were repealed?  Would
the right to keep and bear arms disappear?

     If we do not have a basic understanding of the nature
and source of rights in general, as did the Framers of the
Constitution, then it is near-impossible to defend the right
to keep and bear arms as a right that exists independent of
its enshrinement in the Constitution, and a right that would
still exist even if the Constitution were amended to repeal
the Second Amendment.

     The concept of liberty is that of a society organized
on the basis of universal individual rights -- rights which
are equally held by every individual in that society.

     What do we mean by a "right"?   Here's a working
definition: a right is the moral authority to do something
without needing prior permission from another to do it.

     In Biblical times, it was assumed that only God has
rights, and that He grants them only to a specific chosen
few.   He liberated the nation of Israel from bondage to
the Egyptians by a series of plagues imposed upon the
Egyptians.  Was God violating the Egyptians' rights?  Not
according to the Biblical writers, who viewed the Egyptians
as merely God's property, to do with as He will.

     Later, God ordered the Israelites, under the command
of Joshua, to evict everyone from Canaan, killing every
man, woman, and child among them and take the land for
themselves, as His exclusively authorized tenants.

     The Biblical writers assumed that God had the rights
of a landlord to do so, and the Canaanites had no rights to
live there: only the nation of Israel, to whom God granted
an exclusive, long-term lease.

     Still later in Biblical accounts, the nation of Israel
petitioned God to have a king, so they could be like other
nations.  Reluctantly, God agreed, and thus was born the
concept of the divine right of kings.  The King appointed
by God had an exclusive moral authority to take actions
in that society, answerable only to God Himself.  Everyone
else was under the King's authority and had no rights of
their own -- no rights to their own lives, property, or
freedom of action.  All these were owned by the king, who
dispensed them to his favored few.

     There were historical variations, of course.  Often
kings found that they needed to share power with military
men in order to keep their turf -- thus the birth of
aristocracy.  The ancient Greeks vested much authority into
military leaders, and experimented with popular government
without much success.  Ancient Rome experimented with a
republican form of government, in which certain classes  of
people had greater rights than others, ranging from the
Patricians, to the plebeians, to slaves -- even women had
certain rights.  Later, when Rome became an empire, we find
one of the oddest reversals of rights being that of the
Roman Emperor's right not only to rule on earth with
absolute authority over all that he conquered, but to
create new gods as well.

     In any event, as history progresses, there is a
tendency to disperse rights among larger and larger groups
of people.  There were a number of forces at work to
produce this.  One of them was the Reformation.  Another
was the greater importance of merchants and trade.  Still
another was the necessity of kings requiring wide dispersal
of arms to as many of their subjects as could handle them,
to  discourage other kings from invading.

     Eventually, you get to the 18th century, when a
curious idea started gaining popularity among certain
Englishmen, particularly those living in America: that
rights are not invested by God in a single King, but in
every single individual.

     In Europe, however, the dispersal of rights took a
different road, particularly in the French revolution.
Instead of rights being seized from the king and given to
the individual, it was given to new collectives of
revolutionaries.  Thus the idea of revolutionary communism
and revolutionary socialism was born.  The moral authority
to act without permission was shifted from the king to the
governing council or party.  Because this idea granted the
people a moral sense that it was proper to kill the old
kings and aristocracies and grab their lands and property,
it became popular -- popular until it became evident to
everyone that all that had happened was the transfer of
power from an old aristocracy to a new one called by a
different name.  The new aristocracy was just as hard to
overthrow as the old ones, and it is only well into the
20th century that there has been any success at it.

     This history lesson has a point.  No matter what the
institutions are of a given society, or what names they are
called, the fundamental question is whether rights in that
society are universally held by all the people, or whether
they are reserved to those with the political power to get
their own way.

     "Getting your own way" can take a number of forms.

     One of them is institutional politics.  This can take
the form of a political party, or a political lobby, or a
class of people who are well-organized enough to require
those in power to take their desires into account.  It can
be the ability to convince politicians to grant favors --
sometimes by cash payoffs, sometimes merely by a promise
that you  will support their next campaign for office.
Sometimes it can be something as silly as being a popular
actor or TV personality whom people are willing to pay
attention to.

     But underneath all this civilized horse-trading is the
question of, when push comes to shove, who has the raw
force to win the day?

     Historically, the king's rights meant nothing if his
soldiers wouldn't act on his orders, or if others could
overthrow him by force of arms.

     What is true for the rights of kings is just as true
for the rights of the people.  Rights are only as secure as the
ability to wield sufficient force to defend them.

     In a free society which recognizes the moral authority
of individuals to act for their own good -- to make decisions
about their lives, lifestyles, and property without prior
permission from a king, political party, or even their
neighbors -- individuals are the sovereign, the kings.
Whatever compacts such sovereigns make with one another to
keep from violating each other's boundaries only have the
moral authority which is first held by the individuals
themselves.

     America is a culture historically different from any
other in the history of the human race, and still largely
different from any other elsewhere on this world.  What has
distinguished American civilization from all others is the
doctrine of universal individual sovereign rights.  This
unique difference made the American civilization superior
to any previous or foreign civilization in the known
universe.

     I carefully said "made" in the previous sentence rather
than "makes."  Reactionary forces for the last century have been
working hard at eliminating those qualities that made the
American civilization unique, and America is a long way on the
road back into the quicksand of European and Asian barbarism
from which it once freed itself.

     In every previous civilization, the individual was finally
the servant of the polity, whether that polity was the tribe,
the religious order, or embodied in the person of a king or
emperor. Even in such decentralized polities as existed in
ancient Ireland or Iceland, an individual pledged fealty to a
king above himself, regardless of his ability to change his mind
and switch kings.

     The American civilization, which was born on July 4th,
1776, utterly rejected this doctrine for the first time in human
history, in its founding document, the Declaration of
Independence:

     "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with
certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights,
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of
Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of
the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new
Government, laying its foundation on such principles and
organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most
likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

     The Declaration of Independence implemented a view of
individual rights originating in John Locke's 1690 "Two Treatises
on Government."  In an historical instant, all previous
conception of the relationship between the individual and the
polity was reversed.  From then on, each individual held
sovereignty as a birthright: not a king's claim to rule others
and sit in judgment on them, but a free man's sovereignty to
determine his own destiny, rule his own life, and dispose of
his own property as he saw fit.  For the first time in human
history, a polity declared itself a nation  -- a single people
-- by an act of will rather than by an accident of geography
or history or religion or language.

     It is true that the structural implementation of this
doctrine of universal individual sovereignty was decidedly
flawed.  At the outset, the implementation excluded women,
Africans, and native tribes, and favored landed property
owners.  In practice, rights were held only by white Protestant
male property owners.  These were hangovers from the Old World
way of doing things.  But the rhetoric was universalist.  The
power of this rhetoric of universal rights acted as a moral
goad, in the United States, first to rebellion against the
King, then later to wider and wider dispersal of rights, until
chattel slavery of Africans was abolished and full legal rights
accorded to them; property qualifications for franchise were
eliminated; and full citizenship rights were granted to
women as well.

     While the principles propelled the culture to progress
toward closer and closer approximations of extending universal
rights, reactionary forces were working to destroy the concept
of sovereign rights entirely.  In the twentieth century we have
seen the doctrine of universalism triumph while the doctrine of
individual powers is nearly extinguished.

     The Constitution of the United States in 1787 was the first
attempt in human history to forge a government of individual
sovereigns.  The Articles of Confederation before it was not: it
was merely a confederation of states with varying degrees of
individual versus state sovereignty.  From the perspective
allowed by 205 years of observation, it is clearly an imperfect
attempt in that it provided no reliable institutional mechanism,
short of revolution, to enforce punishment upon magistrates,
legislators, and executives who usurped the people's rights and
powers.

     But it did preserve the option of revolution as a final
means of enforcement of the people's rights and powers, and it
did that in the Second Amendment to the Constitution's Bill
of Rights, the Preamble of which declared the Bill of Rights'
purpose: "The conventions of a number of the States having at
the time of their adopting the Constitution, expressed a desire,
in order to prevent misconstruction or abuse of its powers,
that further declaratory and restrictive clauses should be
added  ..."

     The "militia" referred to in the Second Amendment --
supported by debates at the time and enabling legislation -- was
the people as a whole.  It was the expectation of the
Constitution's Framers that the people would train to arms and
be available both for defense against foreign enemies and as a
posse comitatus (Latin for "power of the county") against
domestic enemies.  The constitutional debates now known as
the Federalist Papers, largely written by Madison and Hamilton,
clearly distinguished the militia from both a standing army and
"select" militias.  The revolutionaries had had experience with
both, courtesy of the British, and wanted the people armed and
ready as a protection against them.

     Today, 201 years after the Second Amendment was made part
of the Constitution, the right of the people to keep and bear
arms is under attack as the final barrier to the triumph of
statism's conquest of America, but two centuries of that right's
existence has left us a living legacy from its authors.  In
spite of an extreme hostility toward civilian arms from every
powerful organized institution in this country, half the homes
in this country still maintain a private arsenal, and two-thirds
of Americans have said to Louis Harris pollsters that they have
no intent of surrendering their arms, even if they are both
bribed and threatened by the law.

     Gun control, so-called, is a fraud perpetrated by those
who are fundamentally opposed to the doctrine of universal
individual sovereignty: individual liberty.  Its proponents
are either philosophical pacifists or statists, or both.  Its
stated purpose of reducing crime and violence has never succeeded
in doing either, no matter how thoroughly it has been tried; as
good a case can be made that it disarms only the innocent and
increases violent crime overall.    While the purposes for which
it is proposed are dubious, its function is clearly to
deinstitutionalize, once and for all, the doctrine of universal
individual sovereignty in this country by depriving the people
of their final means of resisting incursions upon their lives,
property, and liberty: armed force.

     Arms are the power of the sovereign, whether that sovereign
is one man or a billion.

     If the doctrine of universal individual sovereignty is to
triumph on this planet, the last, best hope of mankind -- the
United States of America -- must preserve the power of its
people to defend the rights of its people.

                               ##

J. Neil Schulman is a Los Angeles-based novelist and
screenwriter.  Two of his novels have won Prometheus Awards
for promoting the concepts of liberty, and he wrote the
Twilight Zone episode in which a future historian prevents
the JFK assassination.


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