Gun activists frequently misquote and misattribute words to the founding fathers. The founding fathers’ idea of The Right To Bear Arms was framed much differently than today’s debate.
There’s a quote floating around the internet, attributed to George Washington in his first State of the Union Address, which says
Firearms stand next in importance to the constitution itself. They are the American people’s liberty teeth and keystone under independence … from the hour the Pilgrims landed to the present day, events, occurences and tendencies prove that to ensure peace security and happiness, the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable … the very atmosphere of firearms anywhere restrains evil interference — they deserve a place of honor with all that’s good.
As stirring as that quote is to some people, George Washington never wrote or said that, nor did he say anything to that effect. The likely source of that quote is an article from a 1926 issue of a magazine called Hunter-Trapper-Trader.
George Washington is hardly the only founding father being falsely quoted like this; a Google search is all it takes to discover that the majority of pro-gun quotes commonly attributed to the founding fathers are fakes, or are taken out of context. Thomas Jefferson never wrote “the strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government;” these words were first printed by the Orlando Sentinel in the late 1980s.
Jefferson also did not say “the beauty of the second amendment is that it will not be needed until someone tries to take it;” this quote seems to be from a fictional Jefferson in an independently-published novel called On A Hill They Call Capital (sic.)
John Adams, who was famously suspicious of unrest among common people, would never have declared “arms in the hands of the citizens may be used at individual discretion for the defense of the country, the overthrow of tyranny or private self defense,” and Alexander Hamilton could never have said “the best we can help for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed” in the 184th Federalist Paper, as is claimed on a prominent pro-gun website, because there were only 85 Federalist Papers.
Fake quotes like these are abundant and they’re not confined to fringe message boards or bumper stickers. They are widespread and they’ve found their way to the top of the pro-gun mainstream.
In the first chapter of his book Guns, Crime & Freedom, Wayne LaPierre, the executive vice president and public face of the National Rifle Association, argued that several important figures in early American history believed that the population should be armed in the manner that the NRA currently endorses.
In support of his argument, LaPierre misquoted James Madison, cited a deleted sentence from the second draft of the Virginia Bill Of Rights as if it were in the actual Virginia Bill of Rights, and took famous non-gun-related quotes from John Adams and Benjamin Franklin out of context to make it seem like they’d support today’s NRA. This is not some independent printout being sold at a gun rally or an email chain letter; this book is a published, highly-regarded source for people arguing in favor of the NRA’s position on gun control, and it’s riddled with inaccuracies and fake quotes.
People invoke “the founding fathers” in toto pretty often here in the US, and this is a dubious tactic for a number of reasons. For one: The founding fathers were deeply flawed by today’s standards; they were creating a slave-holding nation where only land-owning white Protestant men had the right to vote or hold office.
The founding fathers were also a group of men who disagreed with one another on pretty much every conceivable topic; claiming that “the founding fathers” felt a singular way about a specific idea is like claiming “all sports fans” unanimously consider Peyton Manning the all-time best Quarterback.
Also: The record of what the founding fathers said and believed is incomplete. We have record of the speeches and writings by some founding fathers but not others. Twitter did not exist in the 18th century.
To invoke “the founding fathers” at all is to invoke men whose words have been amended and reinterpreted many times in order to fit the evolution of American society.
So any claim that “the founding fathers” would have all collectively felt one way or another about one of today’s political issues is probably not true; at the very least, this type of claim is not provable.
But it is absolutely true that the founding fathers — and more specifically the intent of the men involved in the creation of the Bill of Rights — are at the core of the issue of guns in this country. Fully understanding the framers’ intent regarding the second amendment is the key to dissecting and discussing the issue of guns in American society.
Guns were everywhere in colonial America. Each colony relied on an armed citizenry to defend against aggression from Native Americans and the French. Men were generally required to own at least one firearm for this purpose and to have a firearm on their person at all times; in some places this included a mandate that guns be brought everywhere, including to church. When an organized fighting force was needed, each colony had its own militia made up of part-time citizen-soldiers that were called to action and disbanded as needed, and this militia was usually supported by private citizens carrying their own weapons. This tradition continued into the American Revolution, where the new, centralized Continental Army was supplemented by local and state militias armed with privately-owned weapons. There were also no police forces in colonial times; policing was largely done by elected sheriffs and the local militia.
What became our second amendment is the result of the new nation deciding on the best way to defend itself now that the colonies had become the United States.
The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787 are the fundamental primary source that we have regarding the intent of the group of men collectively called the “Framers” while they were drafting the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They took detailed notes of the debates they were having, and their debates regarding what became the second amendment are entirely limited to the topic of national defense.
For the most part, it is clear that the framers approved of this part-time militia system, and feared the potential of a centralized standing army. James Madison said:
The means of defence against foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.
Elbridge Gerry, a congressman from Massachusetts and Madison’s future vice president, echoed this sentiment:
What, sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty…Whenever government mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins.
And Robert Yates, an Anti-Federalist, appears to perhaps have been as skeptical of the militia as he was of an army:
What, would you use military force to compel the observance of a social compact? It is destructive to the rights of the people. Do you expect the militia will do it, or do you mean a standing army? The first will never, on such an occasion, exert any power; and the latter may turn its arms against the government which employs them.
There was also a fairly passionate debate regarding the rights of pacifists in wartime. If the militia were conscripting citizens, should Quakers and the like be forced to fight? And if not, should they be compelled to find a replacement?
These two issues: the debate over the merits of a standing army versus a regulated militia, and the rights of pacifists in wartime, appear to be their primary concerns while debating what became the 2nd amendment. There is no record of any discussion of the rights of individual citizens to bear arms outside of the context of the militia.
Several drafts include clauses to the effect of “a standing army of regular troops in time of peace, is dangerous to public liberty, and such shall not be raised or kept up in time of peace but from necessity,” but this was eventually dropped by majority vote.
Several drafts or proposals also include clauses to the effect of “no person religiously scrupulous shall be compelled to bear arms” but this, too, never made it into the Bill of Rights.
There were several proposed amendments that included an explicit individual right to keep and bear arms, or a prohibition against disarming private citizens, but they were not included in the Second Amendment, and there are no records of this topic being debated. For example, the delegation from New Hampshire proposed this:
Congress shall never disarm any Citizen unless such as are or have been in Actual Rebellion.
This never made it into the recorded debates and was not in any of the drafts of what became the Second Amendment.
What we are left with is this:
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.
This is a confusing sentence, at best. It is four sentence fragments separated awkwardly by commas, and the second two sentence fragments can reasonably be seen as non-sequitur to the first two. But we know that the term “Arms” was firmly limited to the topic of defense of the nation and the states by the men who were drafting it, and we know that none of the proposed amendments that explicitly addressed an individual’s right to keep and bear arms made it into the Bill of Rights. So it is likely that “People,” in this context, refers to the Nation and the states. It’s saying The Nation can not allow itself to be disarmed, because the Nation needs to defend itself. Private gun ownership among certain people was assumed due the circ*mstances of the time, but any discussion of a constitutional right to bear arms is firmly confined to the topic of the Militia.
The Second Amendment cannot be interpreted properly without understanding this context. Contemporary gun enthusiasts may argue against this interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, but this is the way the 2nd Amendment was interpreted by the courts for almost two hundred years, without much controversy, and the majority of scholars still believe it is the correct way to read it today.
Again: There is no record of any discussion of the right of individual people to keep and bear arms in the Records of the Federal Convention. So, claiming that the framers intended the second amendment to protect an individual right to keep and bear arms is, at best, unprovable.
Outside of the records of the constitutional convention itself, there are several framers who have quotes that are used in attempted support of the belief that the second amendment guarantees an individual’s right to keep and bear arms. These quotes are best understood in their context.
Alexander Hamilton is one of these framers. Excerpts from the Federalist Papers frequently make the rounds, often in fragmented or embellished form, to claim that Hamilton and Madison believed in the current “gun rights” interpretation of the second amendment. For example, fragments of this excerpt from Federalist № 29 exist on the gun rights internet, but it’s clear in its full form that Hamilton is writing in support of the idea of defense by militia, and specifically that the militia should be regulated and directed by the Federal government.
It requires no skill in the science of war to discern that uniformity in the organization and discipline of the militia would be attended with the most beneficial effects, whenever they were called into service for the public defense. It would enable them to discharge the duties of the camp and of the field with mutual intelligence and concert an advantage of peculiar moment in the operations of an army; and it would fit them much sooner to acquire the degree of proficiency in military functions which would be essential to their usefulness. This desirable uniformity can only be accomplished by confiding the regulation of the militia to the direction of the national authority.
Another excerpt from Federalist № 29 that gets, frankly, butchered in memes and Twitter arguments, is one that I mentioned in the introduction to this piece. Here it is in its full context:
“The project of disciplining all the militia of the United States is as futile as it would be injurious, if it were capable of being carried into execution. A tolerable expertness in military movements is a business that requires time and practice. It is not a day, or even a week, that will suffice for the attainment of it. To oblige the great body of the yeomanry, and of the other classes of the citizens, to be under arms for the purpose of going through military exercises and evolutions, as often as might be necessary to acquire the degree of perfection which would entitle them to the character of a well-regulated militia, would be a real grievance to the people, and a serious public inconvenience and loss. It would form an annual deduction from the productive labor of the country, to an amount which, calculating upon the present numbers of the people, would not fall far short of the whole expense of the civil establishments of all the States. To attempt a thing which would abridge the mass of labor and industry to so considerable an extent, would be unwise: and the experiment, if made, could not succeed, because it would not long be endured. Little more can reasonably be aimed at, with respect to the people at large, than to have them properly armed and equipped; and in order to see that this be not neglected, it will be necessary to assemble them once or twice in the course of a year.
“But though the scheme of disciplining the whole nation must be abandoned as mischievous or impracticable; yet it is a matter of the utmost importance that a well-digested plan should, as soon as possible, be adopted for the proper establishment of the militia. The attention of the government ought particularly to be directed to the formation of a select corps of moderate extent, upon such principles as will really fit them for service in case of need. By thus circ*mscribing the plan, it will be possible to have an excellent body of well-trained militia, ready to take the field whenever the defense of the State shall require it. This will not only lessen the call for military establishments, but if circ*mstances 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.’’
He is arguing against the nation’s security being entrusted to a ragtag, decentralized, untrained militia. If that’s what we’re going to do, he says, the best we can do is to make sure they’re well-equipped and that they be brought together at least a couple of times a year, but this will ultimately be a drain on the productivity of the country. The better option, he says, is for there to be a core well-trained militiamen that would form the backbone of the militia when it would need to be called up. This way, the militia will be trained and strong enough to defend the nation if needed and also stand up to a standing army if one were to be created.
Tench Coxe, delegate from Pennsylvania, is also invoked quite often. In a published letter to James Madison, under a pseudonym, he wrote:
As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people, duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which shall be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow-citizens, the people are confirmed by the next article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.
There are competing scholarly interpretations of this quotation, but as I read it in its context, he is directly in line with other framers. In this letter he is describing the second amendment as a preventative measure against a standing army, and he refers to “private arms” because that’s the system they had in colonial times and the system he and the other framers wanted: defense by part time militias made up of men with their own guns.
Federalist № 46, written by James Madison, is also frequently altered or copy-pasted in fragmented form to fit his words into contemporary gun debates. This is the full, unabridged excerpt:
Extravagant as the supposition is, let it however be made. Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circ*mstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it. Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain, that with this aid alone they would not be able to shake off their yokes. But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will and direct the national force, and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments, and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance, that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it.
Similar to Hamilton in № 26, Madison is speaking of the benefits of a militia system explicitly directed by a representative government. Here he is advocating in favor of individual militias regulated by each state, as opposed to Hamilton who preferred a militia at the direction of the federal government. Such a thing, he argues, would be strong enough to even repel a federal army, if such a thing were created.
It is obvious but needs to be made very clear now that George Washington created an army anyway. We had an army immediately, making most of this irrelevant.
Update and Conclusion (June 2022)
I began this article in 2015 when I realized I did not know what the men who wrote the Bill of Rights intended with the second amendment. My intent was to research this topic as thoroughly as I could and write down my findings. I expected to find a variety of opinions regarding the rights of individuals to keep and bear arms at their own will, and I was very surprised to not find anything of the sort.
I’ve learned a bit more in the ensuing years, but my conclusion today is the same as it was then: The second amendment is a reflection of the fact that framers of the constitution did not want anything resembling an army or a militarized police force; instead, they envisioned a system of defense and public safety that was handled by part-time militias, and where everyone owned a gun in case they were conscripted to service. They did not discuss the individual constitutional right to bear arms outside of this context. Because of this, I believe it is untrue to say that the framers intended the second amendment to protect an individual’s right to keep and bear arms at their own will. At the very best, this is not something you can prove. That’s not what was intended to be protected by the second amendment.
There are indeed scholarly interpretations that disagree with this, and of course there is scholarly work that disagrees with their disagreements. There are court decisions that disagree with this and there are, of course, court decisions that disagree with those court decisions. But at the end of the day, I keep coming back to the same thing: These were verbose men who left detailed records. If they intended the second amendment to protect the individual right to keep and bear arms outside of the context of the militia, they would have said something about this while they were drafting it. They did not.
To see this for yourself, get yourself a copy of The Complete Bill of Rights, edited by Neil H. Cogan. This work is described on its jacket as a documentary record of the process by which these rights and privileges were defined and recorded as law. Every clause in the Bill of Rights is exhaustively documented. The chapter on the Keep and Bear Arms clause contains no concrete discussion of keeping and bearing arms outside of the militia. It reads as a chapter on the Well Regulated Militia clause.
And because the right to bear arms is so directly connected to their desire for a part-time militia system of national defense, the individual’s right to bear arms cannot be extracted. It does not stand on its own.
The framers’ belief in a right to keep and bear arms is directly and inextricably connected to their belief that there should be no standing army, no militarized police, etc. This wasn’t a passing belief on their part. They actively feared such a thing and a significant number of them openly despised it. A person who invokes “the founding fathers” in support of their belief that they have a constitutional right to unfettered access to firearms but also flies a blue lives matter flag, or supports the military, is to me like people who are against hom*osexuality because it is prohibited in Leviticus but who also eat Cheeseburgers, which are also prohibited in Leviticus. You’re not being intellectually honest; you’re choosing the parts that support the thing you want (e.g. discriminating against gay people and owning guns) and ignoring the things you don’t want (e.g. banning cheeseburgers, abolishing the police, not having an army.)
Again: The framers explicitly did not want the army and militarized police forces we have today. They did not explicitly want citizens to be able to own and carry whatever weapons they wanted, regardless of the context. If you invoke the framers, you can’t just take the bit you want and leave out the other, main part.
Also: the “Founding Fathers” seem to have been largely distrustful of common people. Their world was a slave-owning one where only land-owning Protestant white men — at most 6% of the population — were thought worthy to vote at all. Even with this amount of restriction they still decided that the election of president and senators should happen behind closed doors by only the most elite of that elite group of people. Today we have universal suffrage and we directly elect our senators, but primary elections are a recent invention, and we still have the electoral college, which has overruled the popular vote more than once, so it’s safe to say that the framers’ distrust of the average person lives on even to this day. It seems extremely unlikely to me that people who were this dismissive of the Average Joe would also be in favor of an openly-armed civilian population using its guns however it wanted.
It’s been 7 years since I first researched this article. I have been involved in many discussions and have done my best to keep up with the various narratives and trends when it comes to this topic of the intent of the second amendment. I have not seen anything close to an argument that challenges the conclusions I’ve arrived at based on the historical record that we have access to.
About the update: I’ve re-arranged the bits of this article so that it can exist as more of a reference and so that it reads less like a run-on sentence. I’ve also added a few additional quotes to bring wider context to this discussion.
