Not a Discussion of Gun Control

The gun control argument has heated up again, and this time a certain quote said to be from Thomas Jefferson is in wide circulation. This gives me another chance for pedantic digressiveness, my default mode of evasion these days.

The quote getting wide circulation is this: "When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

Now: did Jefferson actually say that? One can't prove a negative, but it surely smells like a misattribution. It also sounds like a rip-off of the movie V for Vendetta, but let's leave that aside and stick with the founders.

The Monticello website checked into this, here.

Part of the confusion (as appears in the footnotes to the Monticello-site essay) may be that, especially overseas, there is no clarity about Jefferson's role in our founding. Important as he was in 1776, Jefferson was in Paris during the crucial years 1787-88 when a constitution was written and its enactment was debated. He was on the sidelines and, since he had friends on both sides of the ratification fight, he was rather happy to be on the sidelines.

Thus, a scholar apparently working in the Phillipines, referenced by the Monticello essay above, appears to have attributed one of those anti-controller quotations to Jefferson "in The Federalist Papers." That is easy to refute. Jefferson had nothing to do with composing those papers.

Still, that attribution made my inner pedant wonder what those famous papers did have to say about guns. It turns out the subject was addressed once therein. It's in paper #46, generally attributed to James Madison.

http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa46.htm

So Madison, writing as Publius, in fact wrote:

"Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain, that with this aid alone they would not be able to shake off their yokes."

That is the gist of the erroneous Jefferson quote. There is a pretty emphatic assertion of the importance to freedom -- the absence of yokes! -- of an armed civilian population, relating that connection to fear on the part of governments. This presumably is what confused our friend from the Phillipines.

Madison wrote the first draft of what became the Constitution, the so-called "Virginia Plan," and was instrumental too in the development of the Bill of Rights thereafter. As "Publius," writing the above, he was writing on behalf not just of himself but of Hamilton and Jay, also critical founders.

Summing up, then, there is good founding-generation authority for the italicized proposition. The more is the pity, then, when people get it wrong.

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Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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