Published: August 12, 2008 07:26 pm         

LION AND THE LAMB: Thoughts on state militias

Militias have been an important part of our national history. During our Colonial and Revolutionary War period, groups of volunteers bought their own guns and equipment and formed a citizen army to fight for independence from Great Britain.

After the war the newly independent states were concerned that their militia members be able to keep their private arms in order to counter any oppression or tyranny from their new national government or any possible threat from a new standing army. Southern states had additional reasons for wanting armed militias to continue: as instruments to control their slave populations.

In this context a Second Amendment was added to the Constitution: "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." (One finds several variations in punctuation and capitalization that occurred when this amendment was first hand-copied.)

Supreme Court Associate Justice Joseph Story wrote in 1890, "The militia is the natural defense of a free country against sudden foreign invasions, domestic insurrections, and domestic usurpations of power by rulers. It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in times of peace, both from the enormous expenses with which they are attended, and the facile means which they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers to subvert the government or trample the rights of the people."

Judge Story would be turning over in his grave today if he could see the way our contemporary state militias, the National Guard units, have been co-opted by our administration to become extensions of our nation's standing army in its imperial efforts, to the detriment of environmental victims in New Orleans, our Gulf Coast, and other places.

In recent years this amendment has become the subject of much debate: whether it grants the people a collective right to an armed militia, or an individual right to keep and bear arms for one's own purposes.

In 1876, 1886, and 1939, the Supreme Court came down on the collective side — that the right belongs solely to state governments and empowers each state to maintain a military force. But earlier this year a conservative Court endorsed for the first time the right of each citizen to keep and bear arms — to own a gun for personal use. There is a constitutional right, it said, to keep a loaded handgun at home for self-defense.

There are two problems growing out of this constitutional right, however, that the Supreme Court has not recognized or addressed. A gun in one's home may not offer more protection to a family member or oneself. We are told that a gun in the house is more likely to be used on a relative (or oneself) than on an intruder.

A second problem is the easy portability of a gun beyond the confines of one's house — especially in a world where "self-defense" covers what we do to others in the way of aggression, preemption, and imperial solutions.

Jim Adkisson in Knoxville could easily buy a gun for self-defense at his home, but his home and heart were filled with anger and hatred intensified by the loss of a job and a wife who left him — an anger and hatred that were transferred onto black, gay, and liberal scapegoats and nourished by right-wing hate-peddlers. The outcome was violence and murder unleashed against a religious community that offered the good news of radical welcoming, inclusion, and peace — everything lacking in Adkisson's life.

Where do collective and individual rights begin and end?