On December 15, 1791 the second amendment to the Constitution was ratified along with nine others. Collectively the group of ten is known as the Bill of Rights. These changes were added to the Constitution at the insistence of Anti-Federalists who wanted to keep power with state and local governments. George Mason was among the most vocal for protecting individual rights, and his agitation convinced James Madison, an early skeptic of changing the Constitution so soon, of the importance. Madison thus took up the cause of the right to bear arms among others like free speech and press.
Benjamin Franklin was considerably older than the lot of folks we traditionally deem as Founding Fathers. He has one of the earliest, most succinct, and most important quotes on arms from 1759 with, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Just three months after the Battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775, Founding Father John Dickinson said, “The arms we have compelled by our enemies to assume, we will, in defiance of every hazard, with unabating firmness and perseverance employ for the preservation of our liberties; being with one mind resolved to die freemen rather than to live as slaves.”
Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, said this in that same year in drafting Virginia’s Constitution: “No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.”
Perhaps more famously Jefferson is oft quoted with the following from his Commonplace Book from roughly the same year, though the quote is truly that of the great Enlightenment thinker and earliest criminologist Cesare Beccaria, an ardent gun control opponent: “The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes…. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants.”
Founding Father George Mason had this to say in 1776, reflecting deep distrust in standing armies: “That a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that, in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.”
Fast forward a decade to the spirited ratification debates of the new Constitution in 1787-89, which was to replace the feckless Articles of Confederation. Here are some notable quotes on the right to bear arms and the Founders real fear of standing armies:
“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms.”
– Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, December 20, 1787
“To disarm the people…[i]s the most effectual way to enslave them.”
– George Mason, referencing advice given to the British Parliament by Pennsylvania governor Sir William Keith, The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, June 14, 1788
“The Constitution shall be never construed to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; or to raise standing armies, unless necessary for the defense of the United States, or of some one or more of them.”
– Samuel Adams, Massachusetts Ratifying Convention, 1788
“[I]f circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people while there is a large body of citizens, little, if at all, inferior to them in discipline and the use of arms, who stand ready to defend their own rights and those of their fellow-citizens. This appears to me the only substitute that can be devised for a standing army, and the best possible security against it, if it should exist.”
– Alexander Hamilton, Federalist No. 28, January 10, 1788
President George Washington, in his first annual address to both Houses of Congress on January 8, 1790, with the second amendment still not having achieved the required three-fourths vote by all the states, said this: “A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined.”
That is but a sampling of what some of the Founding Fathers are on record as having said or written in the time prior to ratification of the second amendment. Debate over the actual 27 words of the second amendment and their meaning will likely continue in perpetuity. For context, Stephen Halbrook, a renowned expert author, lawyer, and professor, had this to say in his concluding paragraph of a 1986 scholarly article entitled What the Framers Intended: A Linguistic Analysis of the Right to “Bear Arms:”
“The framers of the second amendment intended to guarantee an individual right to carry firearms and other common hand carried arms. It is inconceivable that they would have tolerated the suggestion that a free person has no right to bear arms without the permission of a state authority, much less the federal government, or that a person could be imprisoned for doing so. As the Founding Fathers realized, every right has its costs, but the alternatives are often more costly.”
Jeff Szymanski works in political communications at AMAC, a senior benefits organization with 2.2 million members. He previously taught high school social studies for 15 years.
