Comments on the Potomac Institute's National
Firearms Policy
Part 3: "The People" -- Rowland's Dissertation, Gordon Wood, and
the Second Amendment
Part 1: "Individualism" -- Tocqueville, the
Framers, and "soccer moms"
Part 2: Second Amendment Scholarship and the Historical
Record
By John Crouch, Attorney at Law,
Crouch & Crouch, Arlington, Virginia; (703)
528-6700;
Copyright John Crouch 1998
Other Crouch Articles
I read the portions of the Rowland dissertation that are on the Potomac
site. There is
a lot of good detail about Militias and about the ratification debates,
but
nothing about why the operative part of the Second Amendment, the part about
"the
right of the people," should not be effective. Also, even if we were
to accept the
proposition that this right somehow can only be exercised through a Militia
system,
then you would have to deal with the question, well, how do we set up a
Militia system involving a nearly all adults in today's society, since the
Founders apparently believed such a system was the only way to prevent tyranny?
Rowland takes Gordon Wood's findings on how people envisioned sovereignty
from
1776 to 1789, but then re-defines their term "the people" not
as a plural noun, people who can act
collectively but have individual minds and wills, but instead in a 20th-century
progressive-era sense, as some single huge metaphysical entity that can
act only as a mass
driven by historical forces. This metaphysical way of thinking about politics
was not invented until the 19th century and was not taken seriously by people
in government until the 20th.
Also, Rowland tries to use the gradual change of cultural meaning, described
by Wood, as if it had the effect of a legal enactment, which dictated that
"the People" officially had become sovereign in
name only, because their mass sovereignty was jointly delegated to state
and
federal governments, thus depriving "the People" of any legitimate
means of
ever expressing their will directly and exercising their power to grant
or
withhold the consent of the governed. This idea may have worked as a legal
sophistry to the satisfaction of a few hard-core Federalists, but is not
the kind of thing that could have been a widely held political theory among
"the people" who voted on ratification or attended ratification
conventions. (Ditto for his notion that the Second Amendment became a dead
letter immediately upon its ratification.) Everything in the constitution
and the surrounding debates, and
most of our history afterwards, indicates that ratifying was not an
unconditional surrender of self-government; and that our belief in
the
"consent of the governed" was anything but a meaningless
technicality, nor a mere
primordial creation myth of the state.
Rowland also seems to think that we should be guided disproportionately
by the
beliefs and concerns of the federalists, because they won the ratification
of
the constitution and were the more nationalist party who were on the side
of
history or something. However, the federalists only got the constitution
ratified on the condition, demanded by the antifederalists and made explicit
in the ratification documents of key states, that a Bill of Rights be added.
The nationalistic, centralist party that took the name "Federalist"
later in
the 1790s was opposed by Madison (a leading 1780s small-f federalist) and
dwindled steadily to non-existence after losing the election of 1800.
(My commentary draws on what I learned as a American History major concentrating
on the eras of the revolution and the constitution in Brown University's
very rigorous
and book-heavy program under Gordon Wood, Bill McLoughlin, and Jack L. Thomas.)
Part 1: "Individualism" -- Tocqueville, the
Framers, and "soccer moms"
Part 2: Second Amendment Scholarship and the Historical
Record
[originally part of a letter to Seth Merritt]
Return to: Crouch Articles