My Point of View by Jennifer Vogt-Erickson

Among people who defend extreme gun rights, I often encounter the belief that the Second Amendment charges people to rise up in armed rebellion against the U.S. government if it descends into one of various, loosely-defined forms of tyranny.

There are several reasons why this notion doesn’t make sense. No government document gives people permission to be in open insurrection. The U.S. Founding Fathers only used the tyranny rationale in the Declaration of Independence, and if the outcome of the American Revolution had been different, they may have faced execution.

The framers did not transfer this language into the U.S. Constitution. The Second Amendment is meant to help the country and individual states defend against foreign and domestic threats, not give domestic threats strength.

The meaning of the amendment has gotten twisted around, especially within my lifetime. In a series of debates in St. Louis in 1914, John Basil Barnhill stated, “When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny.”

That forum was long before I was born, but in the 1990s, the quote started being misattributed to Thomas Jefferson (or Sam Adams or Thomas Paine). I’ve come across it numerous times in gun rights arguments.

Believe it or not, though, none of the Founding Fathers thought it would be ideal if citizens could threaten their newly-created government with armed overthrow.

By the time the Revolutionary War ended, the patriots had no illusions about the costs of violence. According to Garrett Epps in The Atlantic, one of the issues on the minds of the framers at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 was the recently suppressed Shays’ Rebellion, a revolt among farmers against Massachusetts’ state government.

The rebellion factored into George Washington’s decision to come out of retirement and join the convention. One of his goals was to prevent future uprisings. Four years later, Washington led troops in ending the Whiskey rebellion, the only time a sitting president has commanded an army in the field.

A second and very practical reason why it doesn’t make sense to store up arms against the government is that the U.S — thanks to decades of super-charged military budgets — now has an absurdly powerful military. What if the worst paranoid fantasies of gun extremists came true and our government went rogue? The military wouldn’t budge at the sight of armed citizens pointing guns at them. They’d have tanks and bombers to back them up, and they’d most likely control the media narrative.

A third reason, and the most important one, is that storing up caches of firearms and ammunition won’t stop such a day from arriving. The tree of liberty is watered with democratic participation, not guns and bullets.

There is a great reserve of visceral fear within the gun rights movement. Fear of government is only part of it. Beneath the surface of appreciating guns for hunting, sport and home defense, there are also narrower and deeper veins of fear of different races and religions, women and immigrants.

Extremist fears like these have animated more than a few mentally unstable people to open fire in numerous settings. Whether the main motivating factor is racism, radical Islam, Islamophobia, misogyny or hatred of government, the body count keeps growing.

Wayne LaPierre, vice president of the NRA, has tapped into extremist fear of government many times. Once he went so far that President George H.W. Bush rebuked him, but overall his fear mongering has been a wildly successful fundraising strategy.

What Franklin Delano Roosevelt implored the country to remember in his first Inaugural Address, though, is still true: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”

Fear is a highly destructive force that grips our minds like a tyrant and shuts down our reasoning. We have to continually reach beyond this natural impulse for higher principles. Civilization and democracy depend on it.

David Fellerath, a gun owner, recently opined in the Washington Post, “The Charleston massacre probably won’t result in gun reform, but its survivors have challenged the NRA’s bleak, seething worldview by suggesting that kindness can be the dominant mood of our public life. By offering perhaps premature forgiveness to the young man who killed their loved ones with a legally purchased Glock semiautomatic, they have shown us the possibility of living a more open, less timid existence. They imagine a world of joy, community and shelter, not fear, hatred and violence.”

We’ve seen political support for public displays of the Confederate flag give way like a rotten beam in the last few weeks. Sensible gun reforms may become feasible sooner than we think.

The true story of guns in America is that both gun rights and gun control have gone hand-in-hand since colonial times. Before it moved to the paranoid fringe, the NRA used to support this balancing act, and our society was safer for it. The NRA has been hijacked by tyrants.

 

Jennifer Vogt-Erickson is a member of the Freeborn County DFL Party.