A friend of mine posted a question on Facebook which got my attention. He wanted to know that why, in political debate, it matters what the Founding Fathers thought. (The context was over the current gun control debate that is raging right now.) Don't get outraged yet, it's a serious question and deserves a serious answer.
He had pointed out that the Founders were not gods or demigods (which I agree with entirely) and that they owned slaves. (I will address that argument later on here.) His overarching point was that the founders are long dead, and what “we” (meaning the country) want matters more than what he described as “putting our opinions in the mouths of figurehead corpses.”
Hopefully, I have presented his argument faithfully. I had responded to him, and that's what consists of the bulk of this article. (However, I have added things here that were not part of my original argument.) Now, it is my belief, and the belief of many others that what the Founding Fathers believed matters, and here are the following reasons why:
1. It shows us how they viewed things such as the 2nd amendment, and therefore provides us with a guide on how to correctly interpret the Constitution (such as, again, with the 2nd amendment.) The Constitution is not a "living document" as some like to say; it can be changed, but only through the amendment process. The words of the document cannot be changed just because some people feel like it. "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" says what it says, regardless of what anti-gunners think and feel. They cannot change what the words meant in that time period.
Now, it is my belief, and the belief of millions of Americans, that the Founders believed in the people's right (as in armed citizens) to keep and bear arms. There are many quotes from the Founding Fathers that support this, but for the sake of time and space in this article, I will refrain from doing that. Instead, I will leave that task up to you, the reader, for your own investigation. Google is your friend. However, even without quoting the Founders, an examination of history proves that they supported the individual's right to keep and bear arms, and that's what points 2-4 will prove.
2. You have to remember that they had just won a war fought against the tyranny of the British Empire. They set up the Articles of Confederation so that they could preserve liberty. However, it didn't work because it was too little government, bordering on the edge of anarchy. The Founders created the Constitution so that they could have a workable government, but also protect liberty. After all, the common complaint about the Constitution was that there were no written guarantees for the protection of liberty, such as rights of freedom of speech, for example. This, of course, led to the Bill of Rights, which protected, among other things, the people's right to keep and bear arms.
3. In regards to the 2nd amendment, the majority of the guns used in the Revolution came from private hands. In fact, that was one of the difficulties they had in the war, because different guns used different ammunition. However, it was better with no guns at all; the Founders needed guns so that they could fight the war to defeat tyranny.
4. Because of #2, in that the Founders set up the Constitution to have a workable government that would protect liberty, we would do well to be cautious of attempts to change one of our founding principles (in this case the right to keep and bear arms). Remember; if they did not have guns, they would not have been able to revolt against British tyranny. If that protection was removed from the constitution, and so-called "weapons of war" were removed from the hands of American citizens, then one branch of the government (most likely the Executive branch) could ignore the checks and balances in the Constitution, take over the whole government, and declare a dictatorship. The only thing that could theoretically stop them is the military, and there is no guarantee they would do that (especially if the military agreed with the ideas of the regime taking over.)
5. Yes, some of the Founders owned slaves, but that does not mean that everything they believed was wrong. Everyone in every age has some sort of moral blind spot in their life, but just because they have that blind spot does not mean that everything they say about politics is now wrong.
6. Let me address the "what we want is important" argument. This inevitably goes back to the Democracy vs. Republic argument; are we a democracy, or a republic? In a democracy, rights could be voted away as long as a majority approved of it. In a republic, rights are innate to everyone, and protected by a constitution. The Founders hated democracy for that reason; they preferred the Republic, because then no rights could be taken away unless huge majorities of Americans agreed.
7. Continuing with #6, gun control is a very sharply divided debate; there is no huge agreement on it. There are many people, such as myself, who want gun rights to remain as they are or even be expanded. It would be very unwise to take away gun rights because a narrow majority (or even a minority, depending on whose numbers you believe) say so. There's a reason why the amendment process requires overwhelming agreement to change the Constitution; so that the "passions of a mob" would not be able to change the government and infringe on people's rights.
8. This has nothing to do with the Founders, but as a side note, when people's inalienable rights are infringed upon by government, bad things tend to happen. Consider, for instance, Nazi Germany's 1938 Regulation Against Jew's Possession of Weapons. Under that law, Jews were required to surrender their weapons to the government. We all know what happened next. A similar story plays out in other totalitarian governments, such as the Soviet Union and Mao's China; that is, large amounts of people tend to die, ie; through democide. Take away the people's right to keep and bear arms at our own peril.
9. Finally, we must remember that what the Founding Fathers did set foundation for Freedom in the world. The Founder's actions in the Revolution and beyond brought forth the greatest expansion of liberty in history. That liberty has a foundation of certain ideals, that people have certain unalienable rights, such as the right to live, the right to speak freely, without fear; and yes, the right to defend that life through arms. To remove or infringe on the Second Amendment is to take an axe to that foundation of liberty. Like I said earlier, we would do well to be cautious of attempts to change one of our founding principles.
In conclusion, it is true that the Founders were not gods. They were, however, the wisest and smartest of their age, and if they put something down in the Constitution, 99% of the time there's a good reason for it. That is why what they believed matters.
