“The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.” These wise words from Thomas Jefferson seem particularly insightful after nearly two years of COVID hysteria. Across the country, and around the world, governments are in full steam, grasping power and lashing out at anyone who questions authority. What we’re seeing is the “natural progress” of an ongoing assault on individual freedom.
It’s bad enough in the United States, where “lockdowns,” mask mandates, and attempts to compel people to get vaccinated, have run the economy onto a sandbar and pit citizens against one another. But it could be worse. Look at what governments are doing in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and closer to home, in Canada. Societies that once prided themselves on their liberal values have turned into dystopian police states almost overnight.
When American statesmen gathered in Philadelphia in 1787, they understood the nature of government and the tendency of its institutions to grow at the expense of freedom. Having seen arbitrary authority exercised by King George and his minions in Parliament and having successfully fought a war of independence to free themselves from their grasp, they devised a federal system that provides numerous means to counter the rise of tyrants.
A written constitution denoting the express powers of this new government, employing checks and balances and a Bill of Rights, was seen as the best means of protecting the people. Representatives in the legislature are chosen at regular elections, and criminal cases are decided by juries selected from the people at large. The right of the people to peacefully assemble, speak their minds in public or in print, and petition their government for a redress of grievances – all of these were a first line of defense. Should they ultimately fail, however, armed citizens would act as a counterpoise to power. To ensure that some means of resistance would always be available, the Second Amendment ensured that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
Critics of the Second Amendment point to its opening words, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,” as evidence that it was merely meant to protect a “state’s right” to maintain a militia, and that “well regulated” means the government has the final say in the matter. But “well regulated” in eighteenth-century parlance meant properly functioning and trained, not subject to the whims of politicians. And while a militia was seen as “being necessary” for security, it was understood in a historical context. A militia is an armed citizenry, available for service in the event of an emergency. The nature of that emergency depends on circumstances.
When Tacitus, the first-century Roman historian and scholar, wrote his Germania, he observed that the people of the ancient tribes “transact no business, public or private, without being armed,” comparing the ownership and bearing of weapons to the Roman toga, as conferring full citizenship. When the German tribes during the Volkerwanderung migrated westward, their laws and customs followed as they swept across England from the fifth through the seventh centuries, replacing centuries of Roman rule. Eventually settling down to the plough, they never relinquished the right to be armed. The fyrd, the Anglo-Saxon militia, was their greatest security against external threat.
Centuries of harsh Norman rule, beginning with William the Conqueror’s defeat of King Harold Godwinson at Hastings in 1066, could not erase the value Englishmen placed on their personal weapons. Villagers were still expected to answer the “hue and cry” when a criminal was about, serving the local sheriff as the posse comitatus, and the county’s Lord Lieutenant as a reserve force in case of invasion. “Every man was his own soldier and his own policeman,” wrote the historian G. G. Coulton.
When English colonists began populating the eastern seaboard of North America in the last part of the sixteenth century, they relied on the militia for internal policing and protection against Indian attacks and foreign aggressors. From Massachusetts to Georgia, armed Americans gathered to perform military exercises and service, acting as an extension of the civil authority. Echoing down through the ages, membership in a militia denoted “respectability” and “full citizenship in the community,” as John Shy notes in A People Numerous & Armed.
In New England, members of the militia elected their officers rather than serve under those appointed by a colonial legislature. This ideal reached its zenith during the War of Independence, when the king and Parliament declared the people to be in rebellion, and in defiance, George Washington and George Mason of Virginia formed the Fairfax County Militia Association, an illegal organization. Their actions were emulated by patriots throughout the colonies. The militiamen who regularly turned out to fight the British army and loyalist partisans were therefore acting against their own lawful government, in defense of liberty. The Framers of the Constitution knew this when they praised the militia years later and cited it specifically as “necessary to the security of a free State.”
The militia, as the people at large, armed with their own personal weapons and organized for defense, is no less important today than it was in 1775. Images of people being attacked for leaving their homes or gathering in peaceful protest reveal the true nature of the state. Those who once naively believed in the inherent decency of their leaders are getting a taste of what absolute power means in the hands of megalomaniacs. Standing astride the path of any march into tyranny is still the citizen militia.
