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.

As Thomas Jefferson said, "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."

The Second Amendment and the Historiography of
the Bill of Rights
by David T. Hardy

The second amendment to the Constitution of the United States recognizes that "[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."That there is controversy surrounding the interpretation of the second amendment, or any provision of the Bill of Rights, is hardly surprising. While the disputes relating to the first, fourth and remaining amendments focus upon their detailed application, the conflict over the second amendment concerns the question of its very subject matter. One school of thought contends that the second amendment protects a collective right, a narrow guarantee of a state right to maintain organized reserve military units.This interpretation emphasizes the phrase "A well regulated militia being necessary to a free state," and maintains that the subsequent recognition of the people's right to bear arms is a mere restatement of this collective (i.e., state) right. The other school of thought contends that the amendment recognizes an individual right to possess and use arms.This interpretation emphasizes (p.2)the phrase "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed," and maintains that the preceding description of the militia (i.e., all individuals capable of armsbearing) is a mere explanation of one objective of this guarantee.

The works of neither school entertain the possibility that an "either/or" test may be a gross oversimplification of what are in fact two different sets of constitutional priorities. Yet the fact that prior to 1788 the Framers who proposed protections for individuals' arms did not propose to protect the militia, and those desirous of protecting the militia did not propose safeguards of individual arms, suggests the quixotic nature of previous attempts to demonstrate that the Framers, as a whole, had a single intent. Is it reasonable to assume that John Adams, obsessed with the risk of mob rule, and Thomas Jefferson, who so lightly praised the virtues of frequent revolutions, were of a single mind when it came to popular armaments? When Virginia constitutionalized the principle that a well-regulated militia was necessary to the proper defense of a free state, and Pennsylvania instead guaranteed that the people had a right to bear arms for defense of themselves and the state, was there in fact (p.3)an identical understanding which motivated each statement? Both existing formulations of the second amendment require us to assume precisely that. As a consequence, no existing analysis of that amendment has attempted a critical examination of the proposals for the second amendment against the varied backgrounds and philosophies of their authors, and none has taken account of recent research demonstrating that the different state conventions were dominated by radically differing political philosophies.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------> Read rest of David T. Hardy's article