Opinion ID: 145777
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Post-ratification Commentary

Text: Three important founding-era legal scholars interpreted the Second Amendment in published writings. All three understood it to protect an individual right unconnected with militia service. St. George Tucker's version of Blackstone's Commentaries, as we explained above, conceived of the Blackstonian arms right as necessary for self-defense. He equated that right, absent the religious and class-based restrictions, with the Second Amendment. See 2 Tucker's Blackstone 143. In Note D, entitled, View of the Constitution of the United States, Tucker elaborated on the Second Amendment: This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty. ... The right to self-defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine the right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction. 1 id., at App. 300 (ellipsis in original). He believed that the English game laws had abridged the right by prohibiting keeping a gun or other engine for the destruction of game. Ibid; see also 2 id., at 143, and nn. 40 and 41. He later grouped the right with some of the individual rights included in the First Amendment and said that if a law be passed by congress, prohibiting any of those rights, it would be the province of the judiciary to pronounce whether any such act were constitutional, or not; and if not, to acquit the accused. ... 1 id., at App. 357. It is unlikely that Tucker was referring to a person's being accused of violating a law making it a crime to bear arms in a state militia. [19] In 1825, William Rawle, a prominent lawyer who had been a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly that ratified the Bill of Rights, published an influential treatise, which analyzed the Second Amendment as follows: The first [principle] is a declaration that a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state; a proposition from which few will dissent. ... The corollary, from the first position is, that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. The prohibition is general. No clause in the constitution could by any rule of construction be conceived to give to congress a power to disarm the people. Such a flagitious attempt could only be made under some general pretence by a state legislature. But if in any blind pursuit of inordinate power, either should attempt it, this amendment may be appealed to as a restraint on both. Rawle 121-122. [20] Like Tucker, Rawle regarded the English game laws as violating the right codified in the Second Amendment. See id., 122-123. Rawle clearly differentiated between the people's right to bear arms and their service in a militia: In a people permitted and accustomed to bear arms, we have the rudiments of a militia, which properly consists of armed citizens, divided into military bands, and instructed at least in part, in the use of arms for the purposes of war. Id., at 140. Rawle further said that the Second Amendment right ought not be abused to the disturbance of the public peace, such as by assembling with other armed individuals for an unlawful purposestatements that make no sense if the right does not extend to any individual purpose. Joseph Story published his famous Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States in 1833. Justice STEVENS suggests that [t]here is not so much as a whisper in Story's explanation of the Second Amendment that favors the individual-rights view. Post, at 2840. That is wrong. Story explained that the English Bill of Rights had also included a right to bear arms, a right that, as we have discussed, had nothing to do with militia service. 3 Story § 1858. He then equated the English right with the Second Amendment: § 1891. A similar provision [to the Second Amendment] in favour of protestants (for to them it is confined) is to be found in the bill of rights of 1688, it being declared, `that the subjects, which are protestants, may have arms for their defence suitable to their condition, and as allowed by law.' But under various pretences the effect of this provision has been greatly narrowed; and it is at present in England more nominal than real, as a defensive privilege. (Footnotes omitted.) This comparison to the Declaration of Right would not make sense if the Second Amendment right was the right to use a gun in a militia, which was plainly not what the English right protected. As the Tennessee Supreme Court recognized 38 years after Story wrote his Commentaries, [t]he passage from Story, shows clearly that this right was intended ... and was guaranteed to, and to be exercised and enjoyed by the citizen as such, and not by him as a soldier, or in defense solely of his political rights. Andrews v. State, 50 Tenn. 165, 183 (1871). Story's Commentaries also cite as support Tucker and Rawle, both of whom clearly viewed the right as unconnected to militia service. See 3 Story § 1890, n. 2; § 1891, n. 3. In addition, in a shorter 1840 work Story wrote: One of the ordinary modes, by which tyrants accomplish their purposes without resistance, is, by disarming the people, and making it an offence to keep arms, and by substituting a regular army in the stead of a resort to the militia. A Familiar Exposition of the Constitution of the United States § 450 (reprinted in 1986). Antislavery advocates routinely invoked the right to bear arms for self-defense. Joel Tiffany, for example, citing Blackstone's description of the right, wrote that the right to keep and bear arms, also implies the right to use them if necessary in self defence; without this right to use the guaranty would have hardly been worth the paper it consumed. A Treatise on the Unconstitutionality of American Slavery 117-118 (1849); see also L. Spooner, The Unconstitutionality of Slavery 116 (1845) (right enables personal defence). In his famous Senate speech about the 1856 Bleeding Kansas conflict, Charles Sumner proclaimed: The rifle has ever been the companion of the pioneer and, under God, his tutelary protector against the red man and the beast of the forest. Never was this efficient weapon more needed in just self-defence, than now in Kansas, and at least one article in our National Constitution must be blotted out, before the complete right to it can in any way be impeached. And yet such is the madness of the hour, that, in defiance of the solemn guarantee, embodied in the Amendments to the Constitution, that `the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,' the people of Kansas have been arraigned for keeping and bearing them, and the Senator from South Carolina has had the face to say openly, on this floor, that they should be disarmedof course, that the fanatics of Slavery, his allies and constituents, may meet no impediment. The Crime Against Kansas, May 19-20, 1856, in American Speeches: Political Oratory from the Revolution to the Civil War 553, 606-607 (2006). We have found only one early 19th-century commentator who clearly conditioned the right to keep and bear arms upon service in the militiaand he recognized that the prevailing view was to the contrary. The provision of the constitution, declaring the right of the people to keep and bear arms, & c. was probably intended to apply to the right of the people to bear arms for such [militia-related] purposes only, and not to prevent congress or the legislatures of the different states from enacting laws to prevent the citizens from always going armed. A different construction however has been given to it. B. Oliver, The Rights of an American Citizen 177 (1832).