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Then There’s That Second Amendment.
Opening Remarks on the Resolution that the Right to Bear Arms
is Still an Essential Safeguard for Freedom.
by Mrs. Tanya K. Metaksa, Executive Director
NRA Institute for Legislative Action
YALE POLITICAL UNION
September 12, 1995

Our Founding Fathers did not create our civil liberties — the very
heart and soul of our personal and national lives. They secured those
liberties. They safeguarded them. This Bill of Rights is our
guarantee of freedom.

Then there’s that Second Amendment.

Mankind and womankind had freedom of expression as a natural right.
Humans had freedom of religious expression before reaching the shores
of this country. Even though the right to worship had been
systematically denied the human race for centuries, it was our right
to assert, our right to secure.

Then there’s that Second Amendment.

All these great rights are ours. All these great rights are the
machinery that propels this Republic. Take away one right, weaken one
civil liberty, and the machine of freedom starts sputtering, tearing
itself apart like an engine that’s thrown a rod, grinding to a halt
and leaving us stranded on the side of an abandoned road, a road
patrolled only by a mob.

And then there’s that Second Amendment.

Conservative or liberal, Democrat or Republican, we all know it’s
true. Diminish freedom of the press, and we diminish democracy.
Usher out the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and you usher
in a police state. Abandon the safeguard against unreasonable
searches and seizures, and we abandon our homes.

And then there’s that Second Amendment.

What’s it really all about anyway?

Could it be that the Founding Fathers, after protecting religious
freedom, then set about to protect hunting?

Could it be that the Founding Fathers, after safeguarding free speech
and free assembly, then hastened to safeguard target shooting?

As a hunter, I can debate all night the benefits of the outdoor ethic
and the role hunters play in scientific wildlife conservation. As a
marksman and as an officer of an Association that promotes competitive
shooting, I can attest that marksmanship builds mental control and
self-discipline, two characteristics we need more of in this country.

But other sports build other attributes ...

Why not safeguard gymnastics to ensure an acrobatic citizenry?

How about long distance running to ensure Americans stay lean and
aerobically mean?

Why not protect weight lifting to ensure bulky voters?

Isn’t it so that sport was the furthest thing from the minds of the
Founding Fathers? They were building a country, not a country club.

Perhaps they had states’ rights in mind. That’s it. They wanted to
protect the right of states to form militias. A collective right.

If it’s a right of states, where are the cases filed by states?
Although they are few, Second Amendment claims are brought by
individuals, not states. The courts have never struck down a single
case brought by an individual citizen, because his name was not Alaska
or Alabama. Individual citizens have standing to file a Second
Amendment claim.

And if the Founding Fathers sought to guarantee a state’s right, no
one uttered a word about it. If this Second Amendment safeguarded a
collective right, it was the best kept secret of the Eighteenth
Century. No known writing from the period between 1787 and 1791 even
suggests that a single American even entertained such a notion.

Indeed, the collective rights notion is an invention of this century.
In fact, the theory is an invention of the gun prohibition movement.
Listen to how former Congressman Butler Derrick, once the sweetheart
of the anti-self-defense lobby, defines the Second Amendment,

“The Constitution says that a citizen has a right to form a
militia and to bear arms....”

These crazy so-called militia groups are a by-product of this kind of
fuzzy, bankrupt thinking by Second Amendment opponents. Citizens have
no right to form a militia. Conscientious objectors excepted,
citizens have a duty to respond when a duly constituted official
organizes a militia. With every apology to the real militia —
organized as a function of state sovereignty — like, being called up
by a governor? — and with no apologies to the Fifty First Dogbreath
Militia and other off-spring of the misguided gun ban movement — the
Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to citizens, to
people, people like you.

With a tap root in the British common law right of self-defense, the
Second Amendment is the right that prevails when, heaven forbid, all
else fails.

The Second Amendment is more than an affirmation of your right to
protect yourself and your family. The Second Amendment marks the
property line between individual liberty and state sovereignty. The
state can do all it can to assure our corporate safety, but it cannot
infringe on our right to personal safety. If it does, it is not
heeding the property line. It is trespassing.

When the Founding Fathers wrote those twenty-seven words, they were
laying the fence line between state power and citizen’s rights. Under
the Second Amendment, we are not consigned the role of spectator in
the struggle for freedom and safety. Under the Second Amendment, we
are empowered to become what we should have been all along — an
active participant with the state, a co-equal partner in the pursuit
of personal and community safety.

Is the right to bear arms one of the great human rights? No.

In this amendment, we see preserved the greatest human right. In this
amendment, we see enshrined the ultimate civil liberty — the right to
defend one’s own life — without which there are no rights.

You will hear my opponent say that the courts are hostile to this
right and, because of this hostility, this right is not a right,
people are not people, and arms could not possibly mean arms.

Yes, the courts are hostile to this right, and anyone here who values
civil liberties should not be surprised. Certain jurists have an
aversion to certain rights. It’s the Murphy’s Law of American civil
rights.

But imagine this nation if we all agreed, without exception, to sit
back and say, because of a court’s hostility to a particular right, it
is no longer a right. Then, we must all agree with a Supreme Court
which, years ago, was hostile to the civil rights provisions of the
Fourteenth Amendment. We must all agree that people of different
races should not be treated equally by their government.

From roughly the 1890s until after the Second World War, the Supreme
Court basically refused to enforce the equal protection provisions of
the Fourteenth Amendment and the voting rights provisions of the
Fifteenth — the color-blind voting rights provisions of the Fifteenth
Amendment!

Care to side with the court? Or will you side with the Founding
Fathers and the people as the final arbiters of our rights?

Second Amendment advocates are fond of pointing to Nazi Germany,
Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Cambodia as distant lessons
of tyranny that could have been resisted by an armed citizenry. This
has been a century of holocausts, from the Warsaw ghetto to the
killing fields of Rwanda.

Of course, that sort of thing can never happen here. Is it
intellectual cowardice that prevents us from merely asking the
question about the desirability of the state having a monopoly of
force? Do you become “right wing” by merely posing the question?

Put another way, how can conservative Republicans claim the Second
Amendment as their own?

There’s always been a teeter-totter relationship between the
individual’s delicate rights and the state’s overwhelming power.
Historically, hasn’t it been liberal Democrats who have wanted to
place the fulcrum in the position that favors the individual?

Let me share the words of a great American with you:

“Certainly, one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any
government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right
of the citizen to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that
firearms should not be very carefully used and that definite
rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But
the right of the citizen to bear arms is just one more
safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in
America, but which historically has proved to be always
possible.”

I have not quoted Newt Gingrich here. You didn’t hear this from Rush
Limbaugh. I have quoted the exemplar of postwar American liberalism,
former Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

What was Hubert Humphrey thinking about when he wrote those words? He
knew then — and we know today — that we do not have tyranny in this
country. The courts are open. Voting booths are open. The press,
while it might sometimes appear jobless, is still on the job. We may
not like the taxes, but we certainly endorsed the taxes, if only by
default. We have taxation with representation, and in Humphrey’s day
and our own, Americans who don’t like the taxation work within the
system to change the representation.

So, do we save the Second Amendment for a rainy day when a despot
reigns? Or do we use the Second Amendment for the tiny tyrannies that
claim so many lives? The tyranny of criminal attack. When you are
alone. When all the speaking out on social policies doesn’t matter.
When all the voting and all the praying don’t matter, as you catch a
glint of your reflection on the blade of a knife wielded by an
attacker. And at the scene of this crime scene, as with most others,
there are no police on hand. Just the victim and the predator. Just
you, and your attacker.

Here’s a story about one tiny tyranny that befell a woman in Virginia
a couple of years ago. At three a.m., Rayna Ross slept with her
infant child in her garden apartment. It was fitful slumber. In the
past several weeks, her former lover had attacked her, held her
against her will, threatened her with a weapon.

Authorities held him but later released him. He proceeded to stalk
her and, as he did, he wrote to her. His letters grew increasingly
dark, foreshadowing what experts would later call a murder-suicide
that was inevitable.

Local authorities issued a warrant for his arrest. They couldn’t
encircle the woman with security guards. They couldn’t post police
officers, one at the front door, another on the patio. They couldn’t
follow her to and from work.

They could just issue an arrest warrant.

Because the state of Virginia employs an instantaneous computer
background check for gun purchases, Miss Ross’s gun purchase was
immediate. That’s the system my organization is passing in state
after state — it’s fast, fair and effective. That’s the system that
the Brady waiting period evolves into in a couple of years.

Miss Ross’s gun purchase was not just immediate, it was also
fortunate. Because her attacker burst through the patio door and went
after her with a huge knife that one summer morning, at three in the
morning — just three days after she purchased her gun.

Had she been forced to wait, she and her child would be dead now.

Another tiny tyranny — but, maybe, not so tiny to the victim.

Philip Russell Coleman worked past midnight in a Shreveport,
Louisiana, liquor store and feared criminal attack. He purchased a
gun under the Brady five-day waiting period. But unlike Rayna Ross,
Philip Coleman will never speak out again. He will never vote. He
will never plead the Fifth. Coleman’s gun purchase was approved
August 15, 1995 — three days after he was shot and killed at the
liquor store in the dead of night.

Another tiny tyranny, but, maybe, not so tiny to the victim.

Monroe, North Carolina. 1957. The Monroe chapter of the NAACP feared
intimidation and violent attack at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan.
Bravely, the Monroe NAACP members continued their role in the civil
rights struggle. They exercised their civil liberties. Their voting
rights. Their right to speak out. To assemble. To associate with
one another. But the Ku Klux Klan kept pushing — and they were
armed, and they were illegally using those arms. In retaliation for a
resistance effort organized by the chapter’s vice president, the Klan
set about driving through black neighborhoods and firing guns at
homes. They targeted particularly the home of the chapter vice
president, Dr. Albert E. Perry.

So, the Monroe, North Carolina, chapter of the NAACP decided to
exercise another of their civil liberties. The right to keep and bear
arms. In 1957, sixty members of the Monroe chapter of the NAACP
affiliated with the National Rifle Association of America and received
firearms training. Many posted themselves at the home of Dr. Perry,
their vice president.

When the Klan motored in for another night of tyranny, they came face
to face with the Second Amendment.

In the words of one participant,

“An armed motorcade attacked Dr. Perry’s house which is
situated on the outskirts of the colored community. We shot
it out with the Klan and repelled their attack and the Klan
didn’t have any more stomach for this type of fight. They
stopped raiding our community.”

The terrorists failed, because one right prevailed.

You will hear my opponent offer grim statistics and lay them at the
foot of the Second Amendment. I, too, can offer those same statistics
as gruesome proof of the failure of reliance on laws that do nothing
more than restrict the rights of law-abiding people — from Rayna Ross
to the Monroe chapter of the NAACP — and do nothing to disarm
criminals or thwart criminal attack. Vast numbers of criminologists
have studied gun control schemes and found them ineffective. They’re
in your library.

While your checking the criminologists, check the constitutional law
scholars. The overwhelming scholarship in the law journals comes down
on the individual rights view.

Listen to Yale’s own Akil Amar, Professor of Law:

“The ultimate right to keep and bear arms belongs to `the
people’ not `the states.’ ... `[T]he people’ at the core of
the Second Amendment are the same `people’ at the heart of the
Preamble and the First Amendment, namely citizens.”

History professor Joyce Lee Malcolm from nearby Bentley College has
this to say:

“The argument that today’s National Guardsmen, members of a
select militia, would constitute the only persons entitled to
keep and bear arms has no historical foundation.”

And listen to William Van Alstyne, a contender for a Supreme Court
nomination, now Professor of Law at Duke:

“For the point to be made with respect to Congress and the
Second Amendment is that the essential claim advanced by the
NRA with respect to the Second Amendment is extremely strong
... the constructive role of the NRA today, like the role of
the ACLU in the 1920’s with respect to the First Amendment,
ought itself not to be dismissed lightly.”

We are all painfully aware of the cultural meltdown in our society
with the greatest pain being endured in the inner city. The tragedy
of crime is not only the greatest threat to our lives and property, it
is the greatest threat to our civil liberties as well. A by-product
of racism, it is also, depending on your perspective, a by-product of
either neglect or too much Great Society spending. What is
unassailable is that, beneath the inner city tragedy, lies moral decay
and hopelessness. Restrictions against Second Amendment rights won’t
restore morality, and ineffective schemes only enhance hopelessness.

If we respect the lessons taught by the tiny tyrannies in this country
— and they’re not tiny tyrannies at all, are they? — we will find
ourselves shoulder to shoulder with our Founding Fathers.

In the Second Amendment, they lit a fire of freedom. And we can read
by the light of that fire the two lessons our Founding Fathers
intended — power does not belong exclusively in the hands of the
state and self-defense is indeed the primary civil right.

Thank you.