PA Bill Number: HB1472
Title: In primary and election expenses, further providing for reporting by candidate and political committees and other persons and for late contributions ...
Description: In primary and election expenses, further providing for reporting by candidate and political committees and other persons and for late contrib ...
Last Action: Referred to STATE GOVERNMENT
Last Action Date: Apr 22, 2024
Second Amendment actually a blow against standing armies :: 10/14/2017
With the debate over the Second Amendment once again on our minds, it won’t hurt to remind ourselves how this amendment came to be in the Constitution in the first place.
In 1787, the drafters of the new Constitution had placed it before the public for state-by-state ratification. There was a flurry of concerns. While the drafters were ready to acknowledge the validity of many of them, they were loath to go back to the drawing board. “Ratify your new Constitution,” they promised, “and the first session of Congress will give you the amendments you’re looking for.”
A pivotal controversy was touched off by the power given to Congress in Article 1, Section 8 “to raise and support armies.” Hostility toward standing armies was deep, both in America and in England, and had been for many decades. King James II had infuriated everyone when he unilaterally created a standing army without Parliament’s consent, and the fear this move had provoked still lingered. Those who feared standing armies wanted that part of Section 8 removed.
In a series of Federalist essays, Alexander Hamilton made the national security case for the power to raise an army, arguing that it had to be placed in the Constitution well ahead of any emergency in which it might have to be invoked. Until then, the nation would be defended by state militias, an arrangement carefully protected by the proposed Constitution.
Several states used their ratification conventions to set forth changes they wanted. New York’s declared that “standing armies in time of peace are dangerous to liberty.” New York’s convention asserted that “a well-regulated militia, including the body of the people capable of bearing arms, is the proper, natural and safe defense of a state.”
New Hampshire’s ratifying convention recommended several new provisions, including, “No standing army shall be kept in time of peace, unless with the consent of three-quarters of each branch of Congress,” as well as, “Congress shall never disarm any citizen, unless such as are or have been in actual rebellion.”
Maryland’s convention used language identical to New Hampshire’s to forbid a peacetime standing army without supermajority consent. The Maryland convention also wanted militias under permanent state control — not subject to congressional rules and forbidden from marching out of the state without the consent of the state legislature.
Virginians wrote, “The people have a right to keep and bear arms: that a well regulated militia composed of the body of the people trained to arms, is the proper, natural and safe defense of a free state. … standing armies in times of peace are dangerous to liberty.”
Only Pennsylvania explicitly argued for a right to bear arms that rested partly on the rights and customs of its inhabitants: “The people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and their own state, or the United States, or for the purpose of killing game, and no law shall be passed for disarming the people or any of them, unless for crimes committed, or real danger of public injury from individuals; and as standing armies in time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up.”
Pennsylvania also asserted that each state had a right to determine whether its militia could be called into action by Congress.
The overall logic of those who feared the standing army clause is not hard to understand. They agreed on the need for a common defense and thought that the backbone of this system should be well-disciplined state militias, made up of citizens with the right to bear arms and able to go into battle when summoned.
The committee led by James Madison understood these sentiments. It drafted what was, in effect, an anti-standing army, pro-state militia provision that would soon become the Constitution’s Second Amendment.
Annapolis resident Steven Howard Johns, a longtime consultant, is the author of the book “Getting America Unstuck.” Contact him at steve@americaunstuck.com.
http://www.capitalgazette.com/opinion/ac-ce-column-johnson-20171014-story.html
