Show notes
This podcast is actually a re-do of an earlier podcast which I had to pull because of some factual inaccuracies in my initial research and now we’ve got this put together properly so here we go. This podcast is not the only one I’ll be doing on this topic, but it’s the first and probably most important one because what I’m working to do here is lay out the factual history of how we got to where we are now on the subject of guns in the United States. This show I’m calling “The Real History of the Second Amendment.” Hopefully a provocative enough title to get some attention but for any of you gun advocates out there, don’t worry because I’ve not filled this with any anti-Trump or anti-Second Amendment rhetoric. I have put this podcast together as objectively and honestly as I know how and I hope that any of you watching will hear me out to the end because I think there’s stuff here that you don’t know and will benefit from learning. What I’m doing in this show is tracing the history of guns going all the way back to before they even existed and then incorporate that into how the Second Amendment came into being, why our Founding Fathers wrote it in to the Bill of Rights in the first place and how it has fit into American history and our love of guns. So here we go. The Second Amendment was written in a vastly different time from our current culture and concerns. None of the issues which are so heatedly discussed on social media and at town halls were even in the headspace of the colonials who founded America, so when looking at how we got to where we are now, we have to examine not just the context and intent of the Second Amendment at the time it was written, but the various interpretations of its words by the Supreme Court over the last 2.5 centuries. There have been some pretty radical changes, especially in recent times. First though, let’s go back to the beginning. Killing people efficiently and effectively over a distance has been a problem for millenia. Throwing rocks may have been the first effort and somewhere along the way, the bow and arrow was invented. Our best data now indicates these were invented about 64,000 years ago in Africa and when men left their native country for India, Australia, Asia and Europe, they took their bows and arrows with them. This technology remained relatively unchanged until about 2500 BC when someone in Asia invented the composite bow using multiple layers of wood glued together which could bend a lot farther without breaking and were significantly shorter, so could be fired while riding a horse. This spread throughout the known world from Egypt to China and beyond. However, as anyone knows who has actually tried it, hitting something with an arrow requires a great deal of practice and skill. Archers could be devastating as cavalry units but took a lot of time and resources to train. So around 450 BC, Chinese blacksmiths invented the crossbow. It was the first weapon meant for a relatively untrained individual to replace the bow and it was very effective. Now fast forward 1300 years and we have a discovery that changed the world. The Chinese were quite good at mixing various compounds to medicines and other useful mixtures but they didn’t expect to invent gunpowder. This was discovered in 850 AD by Chinese alchemists who mixed sulphur and charcoal with saltpeter – a common name for potassium nitrate. Not yet knowing what they had done, they used this powder to treat skin infections but it had the unfortunate side effect of creating smoke and flames which burnt hands and faces and even the whole house where they were working burned down. Then someone realized that this might be better used to kill people than cure them and it was quickly put into use in the military against the invading Mongols. Not long after, the very first weapon recognized as a gun was invented in the 10th century in China. These were bamboo or metal tubes which projected flames and shrapnel by packing gunpower in the tube behind metal shards. These were known as fire lances. By the 1200s, gunpowder was exported to the Middle East by invading Monguls and to Europe, either over the Silk Road or also by Monguls, where it quickly was put to use in cannons to take down walled fortresses and castles which were previously damn near impossible to penetrate. These cannon changed the entire face of armed conflict. Cannon first appeared in Italy around 1320 and spread quickly throughout Europe. However, there were problems with them. They weren’t very accurate, gunpowder was extremely expensive and the cannon operators hurt themselves as often as their targets. Smaller hand cannons were created in Italy in the 14th century and the first handguns appeared in the mid-15th century in France when cannons were also essentially shrunk down to individual size. The invention of the lock – the firing mechanism – was the big break here and resulted in the arquebus. This created a new class of soldier, the infantry, and gave birth to modern warfare, although it would look quite different from what we’re used to today since it took two minutes to load just one shot and was still not a totally practical replacement for archers or bowmen. Something important to note here is that the reason guns caught on at first was not because of how lethal they were, but because of how they equalized the players on the battlefield. Almost anyone could be quickly trained to load and fire a gun, whereas archers and swordsmen required years of training to be any good. This slowly but surely changed the entire nature of warfare, strategy and tactics. Inventors and innovators made guns more and more efficient at their single purpose – killing people – and thus made it more and more economically feasible to create larger and more powerful armies which could do more damage than anything that came before. The fact that guns could be used for any other purpose such as hunting or sport was completely ancillary to their main purpose, which was to kill other human beings. So we come to the United States and the European colonists who originally came to settle it. Before the Europeans arrived, there were no guns in the Americas, but that doesn’t mean the Americas were a pastoral land of peace and tranquility which was ruined by the arrival of the white man. No, it was quite the opposite. The Native Americans across the plains of North America and the deserts and jungles of South America had developed quite a variety of lethal weapons including the bow and arrow, spear, tomahawk and knife. In South America, they had even created a kind of sword using obsidian embedded into the side of wooden clubs, with edges sharper than high quality, steel razor blades. However, the European developments were far in advance of what had been invented in the Americas. As anthropologist Jared Diamond pointed out, the advances of Eurasian society gave the Europeans three things that the Native Americans did not have: guns, germs and steel. David Silverman, a professor of history at George Washington University, wrote: “Germs refer to plague, measles, flu, whooping cough and, especially, the smallpox that whipsawed through indigenous populations, sometimes with a mortality rate of 90 per cent. The epidemics left survivors ill-equipped to fend off predatory encroachments, either from indigenous or from European peoples, who seized captives, land and plunder in the wake of these diseases. “Guns and steel, of course, represent Europeans’ technological prowess. Metal swords, pikes, armour and firearms, along with ships, livestock and even wheeled carts, gave European colonists significant military advantages over Native American people wielding bows and arrows, clubs, hatchets and spears. The attractiveness of such goods also meant that Indians desired trade with Europeans, despite the danger the newcomers represented. The lure of trade enabled Europeans to secure beachheads on the East Coast of North America, and make inroads to the interior of the continent. Intertribal competition for European trade also enabled colonists to employ ‘divide and conquer’ strategies against much larger indigenous populations.” But contrary to some popular belief, the Native American populations did not just stand by and get slaughtered. They were keen to trade with the new settlers and got their hands quickly on the guns and other superior bits of technology the Europeans brought with them. As Silverman wrote: “In early Quebec, Jamestown and Plymouth, colonists held an advantage in firearms only for a handful of years before Native people began building their own arsenals. The founders of later colonies, such as Pennsylvania or Georgia, arrived to find indigenous people already furnished with the best gun technology Europe could produce and keen to acquire more. Except under the rarest circumstances, no one state authority had the ability to choke Indians off from guns, powder and shot. There were just too many rival imperial powers and colonies in North America, their governments were weak, and the trade ran through a labyrinth of unofficial channels.” The point being that it took almost no time at all for armed conflict to occur between the Native Americans and the Europeans and between tribes too. In fact, guns became a kind of currency and various colonial interests competed with one another for the Natives support by placating them with weapons. In the 1630s, the colonization of the US began in real earnest. English Puritans arrived by the thousands to create the colony of Massachusetts, and quickly spread into the Connecticut River Valley, Narragansett Bay and eastern Long Island. And the Mohawks were the first tribe to take advantage of the opportunities for trade in firearms. Within ten years, the Mohawk tribe had 400 muskets and plenty of ammunition, while the Iroquois had at least twice as many. And these Native American tribes did not hesitate to use them against other tribes for conquest and to take their resources. In 1640, a major advancement in gun technology was the invention of the flintlock. The idea was that by using a bit of flint in the hammer, a spark could be created that would ignite a small bit of gunpowder which would in turn ignite the gunpowder packed in the gun’s barrel and that would launch a small round pellet or bullet. Loading and firing took as long as it would take to pour the gunpowder into the barrel, stuff the bullet down in there, cock the hammer, aim and pull the trigger. However, their range was not very far, they were noisy and created smoke so were not very good for hunting and, more often than not, were seen as a secondary weapon to a sword or knife. So it would be wrong to get the idea that every colonist or Native American was walking around packing heat. However, by the mid-1700s there had been enough flintlocks brought over from Europe that the colonists managed to successfully wage open rebellion against Great Britain and gain their independence. The Revolutionary War went down and it’s been so well documented and described that there’s nothing more I have to add about that. Once it was over, it came time for the newly created United States of America to figure out what it wanted to do with and about guns. They ended up settling on the 2nd Amendment to the Bill of Rights which states: “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.” The US Constitution and Bill of Rights are unusual for many reasons, not the least of which is that we specify a right to bear arms. Out of the nearly 200 constitutions in the world today, only three include the right to bear arms: Guatemala, Mexico and the US and only ours does not include explicit restrictive conditions. There is no international law that gives the right to bear arms and in every catalog of human rights around the world, there is no human right to self-defense. According to human rights scholars, states are actually obliged to limit access to firearms as part of their duty to protect the right to life. There’s an important distinction there. You as a human being have the right to live and that right should not be infringed. You don’t have the right to kill. A cornerstone of every civilization on this planet is making this distinction and giving the state the power to enforce that its citizens do not indiscriminately kill one another. This is one of the most fundamental reasons we have societies and civilizations in the first place. To the degree any society has rampant and random violence against its members is the degree that society is not fulfilling its actual purpose. So getting back to the early United States, why did the Founding Fathers feel compelled to add the Second Amendment to our Bill of Rights? Well, one reason was because that right had already been spelled out in the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, the first state constitution ratified following the Declaration of Independence. Article 13 stated “That the people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and the state; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; And that the military should be kept under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.” Additionally, when the Revolution was over, each newly independent state adopted the existing English common law except where such laws were explicitly rejected or nullified by American legislation. This is where many of our legal traditions came into force for the first time, including habeas corpus, trial by jury and the right to keep and bear arms. However, if you dive deeper into the debates and conversations that were going on to convince the states to sign off on the Constitution, you find some interesting points being made about this Second Amendment. Actually, this time in American history is crammed with interesting facts and arguments, because not everyone was on the same page when it came to how our newly formed independent nation should be organized. There were Federalists and Anti-Federalists and they were duking it out over a number of issues. Initially, our first attempt at a constitution between the 13 original colonies was called the Articles of Confederation and a Federalist was someone who supported these. The problem was that the Articles of Confederation had created a central government which lacked enough authority to actually be able to deal with issues with interstate relations, commerce and trade. Before the Revolutionary War was even over, it became apparent and something had to be done if this central government was going to work at all. This is why the Constitutional Convention was held in Philadelphia in 1787 and why the Articles of Confederation ended up being scrapped and our existing Constitution was drafted. The 55 attendees of this Convention are the people we now call our Founding Fathers. It took them four months to get the work done of hammering out the Constitution, but once it got around to the states, not everyone was on board with a strong central or federal government. As their name implies, the Anti-Federalists were wary of anything resembling an English monarchy and opposed creating a strong central government. It was because of the Anti-Federalists, led by Patrick Henry of Virginia, that a Bill of Rights was created at all. During the debates in the Constitutional Convention, a Bill of Rights was suggested but in what has been called “a political blunder of the first magnitude” it was voted down and may have even been thought of as a kind of delaying tactic. The Founding Fathers had not predicted what a strong issue this would eventually become. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that many of the points of concern the Anti-Federalists had about the proposed 1787 Constitution had merit. They didn’t want too much power invested in the Off…
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