Showdown! There’s a struggle raging over interpretation of the Second Amendment’s “right to bear arms” message. Recent legal scholarship has won over a number of prominent liberal former gun control proponents. Michael Bellesisles’ historical examination showing that only a small proportion of Colonials owned guns contributes by turning the romantic image of the Minutemen on its head. Here’s an overview of the dispute. What’s at stake is enormous — the entire right-to-rebel principle embodied in the individual liberties reading of the Bill of Rights (not that the extreme right cares about historical or constitutional law scholarship!).
Nor, says Michael Bellesiles, a historian at Emory University, should the American romance of the militia and minutemen blind scholars to the truth about early-American gun culture. It is a common assumption that both gun ownership and militia membership were near universal at the time of the nation’s founding, as suggested by these words of the Declaration of Independence signatory and Anti-Federalist Richard Henry Lee: “To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms.” This notion of universality is crucial to Standard Modelers, who object that the National Guard cannot be the militia meant by the Second Amendment because its membership is selective, like that of the hated standing army. But Bellesiles, who… has extensively researched antebellum gun ownership and regulation, argues that only a small percentage of the colonial elite possessed firearms in the first place.
In fact, Bellesiles says he has surveyed more than eleven thousand highly detailed probate records (inheritance lists for white males) from the years 1765 to 1850 from New England and Pennsylvania. His results, which will be published in this spring’s The Origins of America’s Gun Culture (Knopf), were astonishing: “Roughly 14% of all adult, white, Protestant males owned firearms. Fourteen percent. That translates to about 3% of the total population of the United States at the time of the Revolution. This percentage holds fairly constant up through 1840. So that in other words, all this talk about universal gun ownership is entirely a myth that I can find no evidence of.”
Lingua Franca
