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Why Conceal Weapons?
Despite not carrying a gun, I’m a 2nd Amendment extremist, which is to say I respect the US Constitution as written.
It says “the right to keep and bear Arms” — not the right to bear only “firearms,” nor only the right to “keep” arms in the home. The Constitution’s authors clearly meant the public carrying of weapons, as evidenced by plain language and history.
They meant it for every state. The Bill of Rights lists the common rights of all Americans; the most basic standards of political liberty. State governments are free to qualify and specify beyond those essential freedoms but have no authority to contradict them. Thus, for example, banning public carry of long knives (in Texas, of all places) is blatantly unconstitutional.
But beyond questions of constitutionality are considerations of prudence. Among them: Why should handgun carriers conceal their weapons?
The founders didn’t. Do modern laws for concealed carry permits prevent situations which were evident before the 20th century? Are there both advantages and disadvantages to carrying openly?
Is the common requirement to conceal weapons a burden or just good sense?
Published in Guns
The other part of this equation is the Federalist position on the Bill of Rights that you shouldn’t need to enumerate rights because everyone should know what they are and respect them. If you define rights, you open the door to the possibility everything you don’t mention will not be protected.
Of course, both the Federalists and the anti-Federalists were proven right. If you lay down certain rights, what you don’t enumerate will be lost, but if you don’t lay out any, you would have lost those too.
Aaron, I’m not clear on what you mean by “one nation.” The Founders created a federalist Republic, in which the federal government had limited powers and most decisions were left to the individual states. The states were supposed to adopt different approaches to governance. They were supposed to be “laboratories of democracy.”
The Constitution does contain protection against any state become a tyranny, as it provides “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government…” And most if not all of the states adopted their own Constitutions which incorporated most of the Bill of Rights. But if by “one nation” you mean a nation where a single set of federal laws controlled everything and applied to everyone, then no – we have never been that. Although the lefties are trying to get us there.
During the first hundred years of the Union, of course, we were deeply divided on the issue of slavery. The Founders were unable to work that one out when they adopted the Constitution, and ultimately it proved impossible to work it out short of war.
By one nation, I mean one people; one culture with various subcultures. The early United States can seem somewhat like Europe: separate peoples/cultures with a common heritage and a common interest in mutual protection against invasion.
The term “state” has normally been used to refer to separate and sovereign nations. But a republic is typically one country. And the States guaranteed free passage of citizens among them. On the other hand, they did not share one official currency for a long time.
It seems such a unique arrangement. A republican government is simply one governed by laws, rather than a ruler’s fleeting impulses. Presumably, the representative aspect of our government is the democratic aspect — meaning there can be alternative, undemocratic, forms of republics. Representation is a matter of degree, anyway.
I wonder how tyrannical and undemocratic (not synonymous terms) the individual States could become under the US Constitution’s loose republican unity. If they were free to reject the liberties listed in the Bill of Rights, denying them local protections, it seems the federal arrangement did not ensure those protections either. Thus, a State could conceivably ban firearms, deny freedom of speech/press/assembly/religion (together, the single freedom of expression), or otherwise enact a local tyranny while remaining generally American.
@larry3435, @aaronmiller, interesting conversation.
I wonder if we have a fundamentally different perspective on the hierarchy of government than the founding citizens had. As I understand it (though history isn’t my long suit), people identified much more strongly with their states than with the new nation: we were, primarily, a union of independent states, rather than a country with self-governing regional divisions.
I suspect the impetus for the Second Amendment was not so much the fear that state government would become tyrannical, but that the national government would impose its will upon the states. Today, I think, we have come to think of ourselves as members of the union first — essentially, subjects of the national government — and state citizens second (if at all), and so now we ask, increasingly, that the national government secure our rights for us against encroachment by the states, rather than seeing the states as the bulwark against overweening federal authority.
The obvious danger is that, to paraphrase an unknown thinker who probably wasn’t actually Thomas Jefferson, any government big enough to secure all of those rights for us is big enough to abrogate them as well.
I think we would be better off if the states retained more individual autonomy, even at the price of some states being less free than others, even on some important matters.
Henry, I agree with that entirely. The new United States was not a nation of common identity, but rather a collection of states that saw themselves as essentially sovereign but which needed to give up a portion of that sovereignty in the interests of common defense and mutual trade – a need that became apparent based on the failed Articles of Confederation. The powers enumerated in the Constitution were essentially what the Founders thought was necessary to achieve those common goals, without abrogating the sovereignty of the individual states any more than was necessary. And the Bill of Rights was meant to protect the states against the federal government as much as to protect individual citizens against the federal government. Which is also why the Founders established the Senate and the Electoral College.
Of course the lefties would have no idea what the hell that last paragraph meant. They think that all those backwards states in flyover country should be ruled by New York and California.
So what the Founders were doing was trying to prevent the weaponization of the federal government. And what the left (mostly, though the right as well on occasion) tries to do is wield the federal government as a weapon.
Thanks. I was aware of the loose confederation in regard to religion and customs, but never applied it to the 2nd Amendment.
May I make a suggestion? Michael Barone wrote a wonderful book called Our First Revolution, about the British revolution that deposed the Stuarts and brought William and Mary to the throne. I highly recommend it as a history that brings you the personalities of the men and women involved, and they are fascinating: William of Orange, Charles and James, and most of all John Churchill and his remarkable wife. The Audible narration is done by Stephen Hoye and he narrates it splendidly. I listen to it for the sheer pleasure of the performance.
In the last chapter, “Revolutionary Reverberations,” Barone analyzes the parts of the Settlement that was offered to William and Mary that enumerated the rights of the British people, and how they served as a basis for much of our own in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Relevant to this discussion is the fact that firearms were confiscated from Catholics and dissenters, and the right to bear arms was one of the points of contention in the Revolutionary Settlement. Our own founders took that and ran with it, as with many other points, because they had examples of what happens when such rights are not firmly codified and supported.