Later this month Malcolm Gladwell will release his latest book, and this time around the author is delving into guns. I was intrigued when I learned that he was tackling the topic, but after reading his interview with Time magazine, I'm not sure I'll even bother picking it up.
Gladwell supposedly takes on some of the "dishonesty" on both sides of the gun control debate in The American Way of Killing, but what he considers to be the fundamental dishonesty of Second Amendment supporters isn't backed up by the facts.
You suggest that Americans have profoundly misunderstood the real history of the Second Amendment. What is it really about?
Slavery. The reason the Second Amendment begins with that clause about the militias is that the people who were called upon to ratify the Constitution were worried about their slaves. In many parts of the South, slaves greatly outnumbered their white masters, and as a result, the white masters were terrified of uprisings, of being killed in their beds. To deal with that, they had a whole system of slave patrols, armed militias who went around and kept slaves in check, and they were extremely concerned that this new thing called the United States would limit the ability of Southern plantation owners to run their slave patrols. So they said: because slave patrols are so important to us, you can't take all our guns. That's the Second Amendment, and we have somehow erased that particular history from our consideration of it today.
We haven't erased that history, because it's not the real history. The right of the people to keep and bear arms can be traced back in English common law to at least the 1600s. In the United States, the first state constitution to protect that right was Pennsylvania's, which was ratified in 1776. It proclaimed "That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state; and as standing armies in the time of peace are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; And that the military should be kept under strict subordination, to, and governed by, the civil power."
The following year, Vermont adopted its own constitution that both explicitly protected the right of the people to keep and bear arms for the defense of themselves and the state" as well as prohibiting slavery for men over 21 and females over 18.
Second Amendment scholar and attorney Stephen Halbrook thoroughly debunked the claim that Gladwell is regurgitating four years ago, in a law review article entitled "The Second Amendment was Adopted to Protect Liberty, Not Slavery: A Reply to Professors Bogus and Anderson"
Bogus is Carl Bogus, who was the first to put forth this premise back in 1988. Anderson is Carol Anderson, who repeated the myth in her 2021 book "The Second." As Halbrook laid out in the opening paragraphs of his reply:
As Bogus concedes, no direct evidence supports the thesis. Instead, historical fact refutes it. The predecessor of the Amendment was the English Declaration of Rights of 1689, which protected the right of Protestants to have arms. England had no domestic slave population. Beginning in 1776, some states adopted bills of rights that recognized the right to bear arms. Three of them were Northern states that had abolished slavery. When the federal Constitution was proposed in 1787, it was criticized for lacking a bill of rights. Demands for recognition of the right to bear arms emanated from antifederalists, including abolitionists, in the Northern states, while several Southern states ratified with-out demanding amendments at all.
New Hampshire, whose bill of rights was read to abolish slavery, was the first state to ratify the Constitution and demand a prohibition on the disarming of citizens. The Virginia ratifying convention followed. While some supported an amendment stating that the states could maintain militias if Congress neglected the same, support for the militia was largely tied to rejection of a standing army, not maintenance of slavery. The right to bear arms was proposed in a declaration of rights that had nothing to do with slavery. New York ratified next, also proposing recognition of the arms right.
Halbrook's article is worth reading in its entirety, and I can't help but wonder if Gladwell is even aware of its existence, or if he's solely depending on Bogus and Anderson for his version of the history of the Second Amendment.
Gladwell contends that "if the Second Amendment is really about slavery, and you can't admit that, that's a problem."
Gladwell's problem is that his version of history is simply contradicted by the facts. He believes the Second Amendment was "conceived with the intent to prop up the most heinous institution in American history, and we can't be honest about that."
I have no doubt that there were slave owners in the South who were concerned that a strong federal government might impose on slave patrols, but it's dishonest to ignore all of the evidence that shows northern states that were already moving towards abolition were among the first to protect the right of the people to keep and bear arms, and that southern states were far more likely to impose gun control laws aimed at depriving slaves, former slaves, and freedmen the ability to own and carry firearms.
I'm sure there's a lot in Gladwell's new book that I will agree with, including his belief that bans on so-called assault weapons do nothing to reduce crime, and that "if, for the next five years, we focused only on the behavior of those people who are likely to use guns in an irresponsible manner, we would bring the homicide rate down by a huge number." But Gladwell's premise about why the Second Amendment was put in place is contradicted by the real history of the right to keep and bear arms, and it's a shame that he's made that false history one of the central themes of The American Way of Killing.
