The Logan City Council passed a resolution showing support for the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution at an unusually long meeting on Tuesday night in Logan.
Fire Chief Scotty Beckett said that several people had approached him and other members of the Logan Fire Department about asking for a resolution showing supports for a basic, fundamental American right at a time when many people felt those rights had been under fire by national level political figures.
Many members of the Logan Fire Department are enthusiastic outdoorsmen and have been very vocal in support of the Second Amendment and the public’s right to self-defense. For two years in a row the Logan Fire Department has been a strong presence at the annual Logan Area Friends of the NRA benefit dinner and are strong supporters of the outdoors and shooting sports.
As adopted and ratified by the States in 1791, the Second Amendment states — “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” The amendment has long been held as a part of the United States Bill of Rights which protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms. For many years some politicians had claimed that the amendment referred to state militias, an unusual concept given that the militia at the time it was written consisted of rebel freemen. In 2008 the Supreme Court ruled that the amendment referred to an individual’s right to possess firearms.
In recent weeks, following a shooting incident at an elementary school, national level politicians have sought to pass a host of restrictions on gun ownership. Opponents have noted that those restrictions only affect law abiding citizens and seldom have stopped anybody who has criminal intent of using a firearm to commit a crime.
In the midst of this national debate on guns and gun ownership many county sheriffs across the United States have come forward and said they will not enforce any federal legislation which violates the Second Amendment or the US Constitution. A national movement has also started among law enforcement officers and active duty members of the U.S. Military referred to as “Oathkeepers” who have vowed they will take their oaths to uphold, protect and defend the Constitution seriously and will not act against the rights of their fellow Americans.
“I have not seen anything anywhere about a city council showing its support for the Second Amendment,” Beckett noted.
Councilman Basil Ken Lee said he felt the council would agree to the resolution given that most of the councilmembers themselves also shared the strong feelings towards the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. In fact, Councilman Keno Muncy operates a retail gun store, Councilman Jay Mullins is a former law enforcement officer and other councilmembers are gun owners and have concealed carry permits.
Lee was proven right when the resolution was passed unanimously. One local member of the Coalfield Shooter’s Association present at the meeting noted that all the people sworn in on the council had been asked to uphold, protect and defend the constitution so there should be no problem with the resolution.
Several other resolutions were passed for over $50,000 in grant money to help the city on several different projects, including:
• $5,000 for community participation grants for Phase One Structure Demolition
• $1,000 for the Cal Ripken Little League
• $10,000 for the Logan Police Department and a second $10,000 police department grant
• $10,000 for acquisition and demolition Phase One Grant
• $1,000 for the West Virginia Freedom Festival
• $4,000 for the Logan Fire Department
• $2,000 for the Logan Fire Department for upgrades
“We are very thankful to Governor Earl Ray Tomblin, Senator Art Kirkendoll, Delegate Rupie Phillips and others who worked so hard to get these grants for us,” Mayor Serafino Nolletti said. “Their love of their community is reflected in what they have done to make Logan a better place.”
Three positions were filled on the Civil Service Commission at the meeting. Dave Whitman was appointed to serve for four years, former Logan Mayor Gary Hylton was appointed to serve for two years and Nicky Bailey was appointed to serve for six years.
The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference - see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too.
In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states.
In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.
As Dr. Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998, "The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search 'all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition' and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds."
It's the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, "Why don't they just rise up and kill the whites?" If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains.
Sally E. Haden, in her book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, notes that, "Although eligibility for the Militia seemed all-encompassing, not every middle-aged white male Virginian or Carolinian became a slave patroller." There were exemptions so "men in critical professions" like judges, legislators and students could stay at their work. Generally, though, she documents how most southern men between ages 18 and 45 - including physicians and ministers - had to serve on slave patrol in the militia at one time or another in their lives.
And slave rebellions were keeping the slave patrols busy.
By the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South. Blacks outnumbered whites in large areas, and the state militias were used to both prevent and to put down slave uprisings. As Dr. Bogus points out, slavery can only exist in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the militias.
If the anti-slavery folks in the North had figured out a way to disband - or even move out of the state - those southern militias, the police state of the South would collapse. And, similarly, if the North were to invite into military service the slaves of the South, then they could be emancipated, which would collapse the institution of slavery, and the southern economic and social systems, altogether.
These two possibilities worried southerners like James Monroe, George Mason (who owned over 300 slaves) and the southern Christian evangelical, Patrick Henry (who opposed slavery on principle, but also opposed freeing slaves).
Their main concern was that Article 1, Section 8 of the newly-proposed Constitution, which gave the federal government the power to raise and supervise a militia, could also allow that federal militia to subsume their state militias and change them from slavery-enforcing institutions into something that could even, one day, free the slaves.
This was not an imagined threat. Famously, 12 years earlier, during the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, Lord Dunsmore offered freedom to slaves who could escape and join his forces. "Liberty to Slaves" was stitched onto their jacket pocket flaps. During the War, British General Henry Clinton extended the practice in 1779. And numerous freed slaves served in General Washington's army.
Thus, southern legislators and plantation owners lived not just in fear of their own slaves rebelling, but also in fear that their slaves could be emancipated through military service.
At the ratifying convention in Virginia in 1788, Henry laid it out:
"Let me here call your attention to that part [Article 1, Section 8 of the proposed Constitution] which gives the Congress power to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States. . . .
"By this, sir, you see that their control over our last and best defense is unlimited. If they neglect or refuse to discipline or arm our militia, they will be useless: the states can do neither . . . this power being exclusively given to Congress. The power of appointing officers over men not disciplined or armed is ridiculous; so that this pretended little remains of power left to the states may, at the pleasure of Congress, be rendered nugatory."
George Mason expressed a similar fear:
"The militia may be here destroyed by that method which has been practiced in other parts of the world before; that is, by rendering them useless, by disarming them. Under various pretenses, Congress may neglect to provide for arming and disciplining the militia; and the state governments cannot do it, for Congress has an exclusive right to arm them [under this proposed Constitution] . . . "
Henry then bluntly laid it out:
"If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress [slave] insurrections [under this new Constitution]. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress . . . . Congress, and Congress only [under this new Constitution], can call forth the militia."
And why was that such a concern for Patrick Henry?
"In this state," he said, "there are two hundred and thirty-six thousand blacks, and there are many in several other states. But there are few or none in the Northern States. . . . May Congress not say, that every black man must fight? Did we not see a little of this last war? We were not so hard pushed as to make emancipation general; but acts of Assembly passed that every slave who would go to the army should be free."
Patrick Henry was also convinced that the power over the various state militias given the federal government in the new Constitution could be used to strip the slave states of their slave-patrol militias. He knew the majority attitude in the North opposed slavery, and he worried they'd use the Constitution to free the South's slaves (a process then called "Manumission").
The abolitionists would, he was certain, use that power (and, ironically, this is pretty much what Abraham Lincoln ended up doing):
"[T]hey will search that paper [the Constitution], and see if they have power of manumission," said Henry. "And have they not, sir? Have they not power to provide for the general defense and welfare? May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery? May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power?
"This is no ambiguous implication or logical deduction. The paper speaks to the point: they have the power in clear, unequivocal terms, and will clearly and certainly exercise it."
He added: "This is a local matter, and I can see no propriety in subjecting it to Congress."
James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution" and a slaveholder himself, basically called Patrick Henry paranoid.
"I was struck with surprise," Madison said, "when I heard him express himself alarmed with respect to the emancipation of slaves. . . . There is no power to warrant it, in that paper [the Constitution]. If there be, I know it not."
Patrick Henry even argued that southerner's "property" (slaves) would be lost under the new Constitution, and the resulting slave uprising would be less than peaceful or tranquil:
"In this situation," Henry said to Madison, "I see a great deal of the property of the people of Virginia in jeopardy, and their peace and tranquility gone."
So Madison, who had (at Jefferson's insistence) already begun to prepare proposed amendments to the Constitution, changed his first draft of one that addressed the militia issue to make sure it was unambiguous that the southern states could maintain their slave patrol militias.
His first draft for what became the Second Amendment had said: "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country [emphasis mine]: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person."
But Henry, Mason and others wanted southern states to preserve their slave-patrol militias independent of the federal government. So Madison changed the word "country" to the word "state," and redrafted the Second Amendment into today's form:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State [emphasis mine], the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
Little did Madison realize that one day in the future weapons-manufacturing corporations, newly defined as "persons" by a Supreme Court some have called dysfunctional, would use his slave patrol militia amendment to protect their "right" to manufacture and sell assault weapons used to murder schoolchildren.
The rise of the Second Amendment as a serious obstacle to gun control legislation is astonishingly recent.
Here's a quick way to see how rapidly things have changed. Warren Burger was a conservative Republican, appointed chief justice by President Richard Nixon in 1969. In a speech in 1992, six years after his retirement from the court, Burger declared that "the Second Amendment doesn't guarantee the right to have firearms at all." In his view, the purpose of the Second Amendment was only "to ensure that the 'state armies'— 'the militia' — would be maintained for the defense of the state."
A year before, Burger went even further. On MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, Burger said the Second Amendment "has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud — I repeat the word 'fraud' — on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime." Burger wasn't in the habit of taking stands on controversial constitutional questions on national television. In using the word "fraud," Burger meant to describe what he saw as a clear consensus about the meaning of the Constitution.
To understand what Burger was thinking, consider the words of the Second Amendment: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Fair-minded readers have to acknowledge that the text is ambiguous. Sure, it could fairly be read to support an individual right to have guns. But in light of the preamble, with its reference to a well-regulated militia, it could also be read not to confer an individual right, but to protect federalism, by ensuring that the new national government wouldn't interfere with citizen militias at the state level.
A lot of historians believe, with Chief Justice Burger, that some version of the latter interpretation is the right one. Until remarkably recently, almost all federal judges have agreed. It is striking that before its 2008 decision in District of Columbia vs. Heller, the Supreme Court had never held that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to have guns.
For almost seven decades, the court's leading decision was U.S. vs. Miller. The 1939 case involved a ban on the possession of a sawed-off shotgun. Sounding like Burger, the court unanimously said that the Second Amendment's "obvious purpose" was "to assure the continuation and render possible the effectiveness of" the militia. Without evidence that the possession of a sawed-off shotgun was related to preservation of a well-regulated militia, the court refused to say that the Second Amendment protected the right to have such a weapon.
For decades, federal courts overwhelmingly rejected the conclusion that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. It wasn't until the 21st century that lower federal courts, filled with appointees of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, started to adopt the individual rights position. And, of course, the Supreme Court itself adopted that view in 2008, by a 5-4 vote.
The legal question is genuinely difficult, and people disagree in good faith how to solve it. What is important to see is that in the very recent past, the United States has lived through a Second Amendment revolution, spurred by an intensely focused and well-funded social movement with both legal and political arms.
More important still, the Supreme Court has proceeded cautiously, and it has pointedly refused to shut the door to all gun regulation. On the contrary, the court said, "Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms."
To this the court added that the sorts of weapons it was protecting were those "in common use at the time" that the Second Amendment was ratified. We should respect the fact that the individual right to have guns has been established, but a lot of gun-control legislation, imaginable or proposed, would be perfectly consistent with the court's rulings.
Reasonable people can debate about what policies would actually work. That is a debate worth having. It is past time to stop using the Second Amendment itself as a loaded weapon, threatening elected representatives who ought to be doing their jobs.