Bearing arms in America
The individual right to gun ownership is the law of the land. Until it isn't.
A well-meaning friend reposted a piece on Facebook that used the Wounded Knee Massacre as an object lesson for why the Second Amendment right to bear arms is so important. The point being that a well-armed citizenry is needed and could withstand the assault of a tyrannical government’s army.
I doubt he had any idea how offensive that was in the context of American Indian history. It was toward the end of the so-called Indian Wars. Their lands seized, their buffalo gone, and their treaties violated with impunity, the slaughter on December 29, 1890, was orchestrated against a forced encampment of a small group of Lakota Indians who didn’t want to stay on the reservation. Fifty-eight rifles were said to have been recovered from among the 150 or so killed: old men, women, children, a few warriors. It was an act of terror fully endorsed by the white residents of the region, many of whom believed it was either kill-or-be-killed.
If there is an object lesson in that, it is that white men cannot be trusted by those who are neither white nor citizens. And that brings us to the Second Amendment. Using 18th-century reasoning to dictate answers to 21st-century questions doesn’t work. It can inform, but not dictate. As it is, the founders, working from various, sometimes conflicting points of view, desired to assure the constitutional legitimacy of well-regulated citizen militias. An individual’s right to own a gun was not something that crossed their minds. Why would it? A musket was an everyday tool to hunt for food and for frontier protection. The right to own one was never a question anyone asked.
