Page 919 - Week 03 - Thursday, 14 March 1991
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must feel that this is just a retread. As a result of that episode between 1775 and 1781 it became extremely important indeed, within the United States Constitution, to have some kind of defence for the right of individuals to carry weapons; but let us see what that was.
If you look at the famous American Bill of Rights of a hundred years later - the first 10 amendments of the United States Constitution - which was ratified in 1791, 200 years ago this year, and contrast it with the 1689 Bill of Rights you see the second amendment, the right to bear arms. That amendment has been massively misused. It is certainly misused in the United States. I think it is even more misused when we try to take an historical constitutional document and apply it to Australia. It is irrelevant. But in a weird way it would not be irrelevant if it was constitutionally understood.
The second amendment is very brief and I am going to read the bit that keeps getting quoted by those who think they should be able to bear arms. It does indeed say, "The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed". But I want to read the piece that precedes that and it is the piece that is forgotten. The complete amendment is:
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.
It is not about individual rights. Of course, people on the frontier could bear arms. Trying to stop them from bearing arms would have been extremely difficult. There would not have been enough people to stop them. The whole point of that amendment was that Connecticut, Delaware, Rhode Island, New York or whichever new State would have a State militia. The people in that State with arms could join the militia straight from their farms, their houses or the frontier so that the State could be protected.
We are talking about a world at the end of the eighteenth century which had no standing army. Standing armies were anathema, as, indeed, they had been anathema in the seventeenth century. So, too, they were anathema to the American colonists. Of course, the American colonists remembered the Hessian troops who had been brought over by the English authorities. I keep saying "English". Is that a form of prejudice? They wished to have a "well regulated militia". They wished to have guns to oppose their enemies. So, we have the whole mythological tradition of the "minutemen", the men who could pick up their arms in a minute and dash to the militia and therefore oppose the British or any other enemy that faced them. That amendment has been misused by the National Rifle Association, the gun
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