Gun Control is a State's Rights Issue

 

Every time there is a mass shooting in America, the Federal Government makes another power grab in an effort to limit or restrict the rights enshrined in the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The problem with this is that the Second Amendment exists precisely as a limit on Federal Authority and efforts to undermine it are unconstitutional.

The text of the Second Amendment is as follows:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

At the time this amendment was penned, each state fielded its own militia, and it was these militias that waged war on England during the U.S. Revolutionary War (1775 - 1783). These militias were comprised largely of citizen volunteers, mainly farmers, who owned their own muskets and who were available at a moment's notice to rally to the defense of the fledgling nation.

It is precisely these citizen warriors, who served by authority of their own state's militia, that the Founding Fathers were thinking of when they penned "the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."

The fear of the Founding Fathers was that a national army would come to replace the militia system and that the Federal Government would concentrate power and seek to confiscate weapons from the citizenry to prevent rebellion and insurrection. It is well documented that the formation of a standing army was one of the Founding Father's greatest fears. They believed that keeping a standing army at the ready in times of peace could only lead to mischief and to a loss of freedom generally.

Instead, they preferred the concept of state militias over that of a national standing army, to be regulated by each State's legislature. Basically, each state was to maintain its own militia to be organized (and armed) as that state saw fit, and that the new federal government must not take any action to disarm the citizens that comprise these militias.

However, the Founding Fathers did not want the nascent nation to devolve into the chaos of internecine violence. For this reason, they imagined (or hoped, really) that each state would field a "well regulated" militia, with proper discipline and training. They always felt that the right to keep and bear arms must be for a specific purpose, that being in support of the state militias in defense of each state and, by extension, the defense of the nation.

Therefore, the Constitution strictly outlaws the regulation of arms at the federal level, but not at the state level. In fact, the Constitution demands the regulation of arms at the state level. The problem we are facing as a nation is that too many states have failed to properly regulate their own citizens which has led to the chaos and internecine violence that the Founding Fathers feared could emerge.

The solution is for state legislatures to take up this matter and enact regulations that will make their states safer from gun violence. The Federal Government can enact legislation to help states fund these efforts, but they must not enact legislation that usurps this essential authority.