“You have no right to a gun. You are not a militia,” Hogg tweeted. “When you’re talking about your Second Amendment rights you’re talking about a state’s right to have what is today the National Guard.”
He added that the “modern interpretation” of the Second Amendment is a “ridiculous fraud” perpetrated for decades by the gun industry.
The Second Amendment in its entirety says, “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.”
Unfortunately for Hogg, the meaning of the Founding Fathers is crystal clear. Future President James Madison wrote in Federalist 46 that U.S. citizens have the power to join together “for the purposes of repelling tyranny.”
Madison, known as the “Father of the Constitution,” asserted that even the standing army of a federal government cannot withstand the combined force of an armed citizenry banded together.
He plainly said that the throngs of armed citizens “fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by (state) governments possessing their affections and confidence” will not be overcome. Madison clearly understood the text of the Second Amendment as providing a safeguard against a tyrannical government.
Sorry, but that does not fit the definition of the National Guard.
In fact, another Hogg tweet referenced his “reading about the history of the Second Amendment” and speaking to professors at Harvard. The student declared last month that the amendment was intentionally misinterpreted and was never meant as an individual right.
Only, there are literally centuries of Supreme Court decisions to debunk this erroneous line of thinking.
In the 1876 ruling in United States v. Cruikshank, the high court found that the Second Amendment protected the right of “the people” to keep and bear arms. The “militia” aspect was found so lacking that the word was not even included in the ruling.
In 1886’s Presser v. Illinois, “militia” made an appearance in the decision, but the Supreme Court specifically referred to the Second Amendment as “securing to the people the right to keep and bear arms.”
The ruling in 1939’s United States v. Miller is often misused by the anti-gun lobby to cast aspersions on the right to keep and bear arms, but that is a fallacy. The case revolved around the legality of a short-barreled shotgun and the fact that it was not protected from stringent regulations.
Also, the Court noted that “militias” expected members to show up with their own firearms.
Flash forward to 2008, when in District of Columbia v. Heller the Court in no uncertain terms declared that “the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia.”
Is that clear enough?
More recent rulings in McDonald v. Chicago and 2022’s NYSRPA v. Bruen only reconfirmed that the Second Amendment clearly affords the liberty to keep and bear arms to ordinary citizens.
Those who would abolish the Second Amendment are willing to take any action they deem necessary to reach their goal. Many times, it is through federal or state legislation that chips away at constitutional freedoms.
Other times, however, they will resort to rewriting history and denying its obvious meaning. For this to be successful, however, depends on the person they are attempting to convince being woefully unaware of both history and legal precedent.
In other words, someone who educates themselves will not fall for the legal gymnastics the anti-gun lobby attempts to sell as facts. The Second Amendment is clear in its intentions, and centuries of court rulings prove it.
