Heller and "Select Militias"

The big takeaway for me on the Second Amendment case of District of Columbia v. Heller is the description of its history.

Justice Scalia writes intriguingly about what the framers and the people of the 18th century thought about the right to keep and bear arms.

Their memory was the attempt by governments to disarm the people they didn’t like. In the late 17th century their memory was of the British kings Charles II and James II and their “select militias.”

Between the Restoration and the Glorious Revolution, the Stuart Kings Charles II and James II succeeded in using select militias loyal to them to suppress political dissidents, in part by disarming their opponents.

You can imagine that folks didn’t have a very rosy memory of that time. In the runup to the American Revolution a similar thing occurred, according to Scalia. This time the British king was George III.

In the tumultuous decades of the 1760s and 1770s, the Crown began to disarm the inhabitants of the most rebellious areas. That provoked polemical reactions by Americans invoking their rights as Englishmen to keep arms.

Governments don’t disarm the populace out of a noble desire to preserve peace. They do it out of a desire to weaken their opponents.

The situation really isn’t that different today. Liberals want guns out of the hands of conservatives. They see right-wing militias under every bush. Liberals are in charge of education, culture, and the government bureaucracy and they instinctively know that it is not in their interest to have the average conservative householder armed and dangerous. Neither side is going to give up, not without a fight.

Glenn Reynolds makes this point in the New York Post today.

But winning in the Supreme Court is just the beginning of the story. Even the biggest civil-rights victories have taken years to percolate through the lower courts, often in the face of foot-dragging or outright resistance from lower-court judges, states and municipalities.

Seems like the National Rifle Association is still going to need our support.