• Symposium Transcripts
• Saul Cornell's Presentation*
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• Audio

On February 16, 2000, the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence hosted a distinguished group of historians at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., to challenge the gun lobby's on-going campaign of misinformation about the Second Amendment; a campaign so severe that Chief Justice Warren Burger called it "one of the greatest frauds on the American people." This "fraud," perpetrated by the National Rifle Association and its sympathizers, has taught the American public to ignore the first half of the Second Amendment, which reads, "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state," and focus only on the latter half – "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." This campaign has been successful in generating an extraordinary degree of public misunderstanding.

Recent polls show that almost 80 percent of the American public feels there should be greater regulation of guns in this country, such as required safety training for gun owners and photo licensing prior to purchasing a gun, but 48 percent of that group believes the Second Amendment guarantees the right to own guns. The public's misconception of the "the right to keep and bear arms" directly contradicts the courts' interpretation of the Second Amendment. The federal courts of this country have long been in agreement – the Second Amendment protects the right to bear arms, but only in relation to the furtherance of a well-regulated militia. Erwin Griswold, President Nixon's Solicitor General and former dean of Harvard Law School, called this legal finding "the most well-settled proposition in American Constitutional Law." Unfortunately, it is apparent that the "fraud" has overtaken the "well-settled proposition." Last April, Judge Sam Cummings, a federal court judge in Texas, became the first federal judge in 60 years to find that an individual has a right to bear arms – regardless of militia purpose. It was Judge Cummings' decision that prompted the historians to step forward to correct the record – for history's sake. In U.S. v. Emerson, Judge Cummings found that an individual, even one who threatens his wife and child with a gun, has a right "to keep and bear arms." Judge Cummings' decision was remarkable, not only for its aberrant finding, but because it ignored the legal precedents and instead relied upon law review articles and history books. Judge Cummings claimed, "[a] historical examination of the right to bear arms, from English antecedents to the drafting of the Second Amendment, bears proof that the right to bear arms has consistently been, and should still be, construed as an individual right." The panel of historians at the National Press Club explained that a full historical examination of the right to bear arms does not support Judge Cummings' contention.

Instead, specialists in English history and Early American history, demonstrated that the history behind the Second Amendment has nothing to do with an unqualified individual right to bear arms. Prof. Lois Schwoerer, Kayser Professor of History emeritus at the George Washington University and the leading expert on the English Bill of Rights, explained that the English forerunner of our own Bill of Rights did not allow anyone an unbridled right to firearms ownership. To the contrary, Article VII of the English Bill of Rights – the counterpart to our Second Amendment – was a gun control measure designed to arm only the Protestants and then only in accordance to their "condition and according to the laws." Their "condition" was their social standing (the House of Lords wanted only the Protestant upper classes to own firearms) and even then gun ownership was "subject to the laws," which were used to further hamper the ownership of arms. Don Higginbotham, Dowd Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a renowned military historian, explained that when the Founding Fathers discussed the "right to keep and bear arms," it was always within the context of a militia. The Constitutional drafters were concerned that federal control of the militia would leave the states defenseless against a tyrannical federal government. To prevent that possibility – the Second Amendment prohibited the federal government from interfering with the arming of the state's militia.

In fact, history teaches us that the Founding Fathers would surely roll over in their graves if they knew the Second Amendment has become a popular argument against reasonable gun control measures. Prof. Saul Cornell of the Ohio State University and editor of the upcoming Whose Right to Bear Arms Did the Second Amendment Protect?, pointed out that our forefathers lived during a time of extensive firearm restrictions. At the time of the drafting of the Second Amendment, all of the states had restrictions on gun ownership, Boston banned the possession of loaded firearms within its city limits and Pennsylvania permitted only those deemed to have the necessary "virtue" to own firearms. It is ironic that the Founding Fathers lived at a time when it was routine for the government to know who owned guns and how many they owned, yet today those same Founding Fathers are cited in opposition to gun licensing and registration laws. It is time for the gun lobby to cease its incessant distortion of the historical record and its time for all of us to get the record straight. Click here for a transcript of this important Symposium.

*The slides are easier to understand if you print and read the transcripts from Saul's speech while you view them.