The New York Times is taking note of Senator Cruz’s suggestion that the Second Amendment was intended to “serve as the ultimate check against governmental tyranny — for the protection of liberty.” The Gray Lady calls it among the “ridiculous arguments against gun control.” It suggests the silliest such the idea is that the framers wanted to “preserve the possibility, or even encourage, the idea of armed rebellion against the government.” What arrests us about this note is the absence of any reference to Elbridge Gerry.
Gerry was the representative from Massachusetts who, during the debate over the Second Amendment in the First United States Congress, marked the point to which Senator Cruz refers. The House was considering an early phrasing of what became the Second Amendment. Namely: “A well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; but no person religiously scrupulous shall be compelled to bear arms.” Here is what Gerry said:
“This declaration of rights, I take it, is intended to secure the people against the mal-administration of the Government; if we could suppose that, in all cases, the rights of the people would be attended to, the occasion for guards of this kind would be removed.” What bothered him, he went on to note, was the religious exemption, which, he feared, “would give an opportunity to the people in power to destroy the constitution itself. They can declare who are those religiously scrupulous, and prevent them from bearing arms.”
In other words, he was worried that the protection of the right to bear arms was not broad enough. He wanted to make sure that Congress couldn’t disarm the people by declaring them religious. Then he came back to Senator Cruz’s point, saying: “What, sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty. Now, it must be evident, that, under this provision, together with their other powers, Congress could take such measures with respect to a militia, as to make a standing army necessary.”
In the event, the religious exemption was struck from the Second Amendment on the grounds that it could be read as a curb on what was finally worded as the “right of the people to keep and bear arms.” That is to say, Senator Cruz is exactly correct in his explication of the Second Amendment. How the Times could raise an objection to his point without an adversion of any kind to Gerry is so otherwise inexplicable as to suggest that the Gray Lady is just not being forthright and that she fears the historical record.
Editorial of The New York Sun | April 18, 2015
http://www.nysun.com/editorials/ted-cruz-the-times-and-guns/89131/
