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Five myths about gun control

By Robert J. Spitzer,December 21, 2012

(Page 2 of 2)

In 1619, the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a law making the transfer of guns to Native Americans punishable by death. Other laws across the colonies criminalized selling or giving firearms to slaves, indentured servants, Catholics, vagrants and those who refused to swear a loyalty oath to revolutionary forces. Guns could be confiscated or kept in central locations for the defense of the community. And in the late 1700s and early 1800s, the state and federal governments conducted several arms censuses. (Imagine what the NRA would say if government officials went door to door today asking people how many guns they owned and whether they were functional.)

On the western frontier in the 19th century, to stave off violence, new towns and cities enacted laws to bar carrying guns. In fact, the typical western town had stricter gun laws than many 21st-century states. Today, four states have completely eliminated permits for handgun ownership and carrying.

5. The Second Amendment was intended to protect the right of Americans to rise up against a tyrannical government.

This canard is repeated with disturbing frequency. The Constitution, in Article I, allows armed citizens in militias to “suppress Insurrections,” not cause them. The Constitution defines treason as “levying War” against the government in Article III, and the states can ask the federal government for assistance “against domestic Violence” under Article IV.

Our system provides peaceful means for citizens to air grievances and change policy, from the ballot box to the jury box to the right to peaceably assemble. If violence against an oppressive government were somehow countenanced in the Second Amendment, then Timothy McVeigh and Lee Harvey Oswald would have been vindicated for their heinous actions. But as constitutional scholar Roscoe Pound noted, a “legal right of the citizen to wage war on the government is something that cannot be admitted” because it would “defeat the whole Bill of Rights” — including the Second Amendment.

robert.spitzer@cortland.edu