The Second Amendment

by David Barton

Publisher:

Wallbuilders

, 2000

Overview

The Second Amendment has become one of the most controversial parts of the Constitution. Gun opponents claim that “the right to keep and bear arms” is a right that belongs only to the police and military. However, the Founding Fathers who wrote the Second Amendment in 1789 disagreed. Read the Founders’ words and examine their early laws and State constitutions on the subject. The conclusion is inescapable that the guarantees of the Second Amendment pertain to every citizen individually. Furthermore, learn of the Founders’ timeless proposals made two centuries ago on how to deal with the gun violence that today shatters communities and causes the loss of innocent life.

Contents

Top Highlights

“William Sumner (a military general from Massachusetts) and Alden Partridge (a captain, a military instructor at West Point, and the founder of Norwich University) observed that citizens’s blessings of ‘having the choice of their leaders, the firesides, the temples of justice, the altars of religion, national independence and glory, which, under Providence, we have built up, will continue in permanent security’ only so long as ‘people are trained to the use of arms and keep them in their hands.’” (Pages 29–30)

“Since the right to self-defense was an inalienable personal right, the Second Amendment simply assured each citizen that he would have the tools necessary to defend his life, family, or property from aggression, whether from an individual or a government. That the Second Amendment simply secured in writing a right which God had already conferred on His creation was confirmed in the legal commentaries that undergirded American law.” (Page 14)

“The first and governing maxim in the interpretation of a statute is to discover the meaning of those who made it.^{13” (Page 11)}

“every government which has not this in view as its principal object is not a government of the legitimate kind” (Page 13)

“is to construe them according to the sense of the terms and the intention of the parties.^{14” (Page 11)}

Product Details

• Title: The Second Amendment
• Author: David Barton
• Publisher: Wallbuilders
• Print Publication Date: 2000
• Logos Release Date: 2007
• Language: English
• Resources: 1
• Format: Digital › Logos Research Edition
• Subjects: United States › Constitution--2nd Amendment; Firearms › Law and legislation--United States; Constitutional history › United States; Civil rights › United States
• Resource ID: LLS:SECNDAMENDMNT
• Resource Type: Monograph
• Metadata Last Updated: 2022-02-12T05:35:37Z

About David Barton

David Barton is the founder of WallBuilders, an organization which supports the reunification of church and state. In his writing Barton expresses the view that the United States was founded as a specifically Christian nation, which the majority of historians disagree with.