The incredible history of the 2nd Amendment and America’s gun violence problem | Jill Lepore

The incredible history of the 2nd Amendment and America’s gun violence problem

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In 1765, the Britain Parliament passed a Stamp Act, but people in New England rebelled against it. In response to this, the king sent two regimens of the British army to Boston to occupy the city. They were much despised by Bostonians, and this occuptation led to the Boston Massacre in 1770. Since then, many have interpreted the Second Amendment to mean the right of the people to bear arms to aid them in a possible insurrection against the government.

The Supreme Court in 1939 in U.S. v Miller, decided unanimously that gun safety laws are perfectly constitutional — the justices declared that the Second Amendment does not protect the rights of an individual to carry firearms. They said the Second Amendment protects the right of people to form militias, or to participate in the common defense.

According to many historians, bearing arms evokes a military use for the common defense — not for shooting rabbits or for the insurrection against one's government. It seems the purpose of the law is to allow citizens to participate in defense of the country against a common enemy.

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JILL LEPORE

Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. She is also a staff writer at The New Yorker. A prize-winning professor, she teaches classes in evidence, historical methods, humanistic inquiry, and American history. Much of her scholarship explores absences and asymmetries in the historical record, with a particular emphasis on the histories and technologies of evidence and of privacy. As a wide-ranging and prolific essayist, Lepore writes about American history, law, literature, and politics. She is the author of many award-winning books. Her latest book is These Truths: A History of the United States (2018)

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TRANSCRIPT:

JILL LEPORE: One of the more interesting theories about the nature of gun violence in the United States and the quite high homicide rate in the United States, both of which distinguish the United States from other similar nations, has to do with at what moment in time the United States became independent and why the Second Amendment ends up in the Bill of Rights, which is written by Madison. In the theory it is that most states, that is nation states, pursued a historical course that led to the state having a monopoly on violence before the state became fully democratized, that is to say the government essentially seizes the weapons and declares that people can't be kind of holding their own weapons for the sake of wielding kind of satellite forms of armed power against the state and then societies become democratized. So if you think about the United Kingdom like you could think about it in those terms. That doesn't happen in that sequence in the United States, the United States becomes democratized much earlier.

From early in the 17th century British mainland colonies and island colonies as well elect their own local representatives to their colonial legislatures, they pass their own laws. There is a spirit of independence in colonial governments that you don't see in county governments in England say at the same time historically. And among the important elements of that spirit for many people by the 1760s is the idea that in so distant set of colonies from a ruling imperial government, what is dangerous is when people's ability to express themselves politically is interfered with by a standing

army. So the great bugbear of 18th century mainland colonists is the standing army, especially in the north. The south doesn't have as much of a problem with a standing army and Britain's Island colonies in the Caribbean don't have a problem with the standing armies.

A standing army is an army kept by the king in times of peace and quartered among the people or near the people. And Britain's Caribbean colonies what they really, really want is a standing army because that's a bunch of English colonists who are vastly outnumbered by their enslaved African workforce and they want to be defended by the British army so they're forever indeed asking for a standing army to be in the islands to defend slave plantation owners against their own slaves who were constantly rebelling. And that is to some degree the same case in the southern colonies in the mainland. In the north in particular, particularly in New England, the idea of a standing army is the worst form of political tyranny and this assume...

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