Militias or Personal Arms?

This post is just a footnote to the latest round of gun debates touched off by the recent murders at Umpqua Community College, near Roseburg, Oregan. I don't believe I can add anything to the debate without considerable research. I've long been interested in the history of the second amendment. That's what this post is about.

The story starts with confusion and a question. Why's the second amendment so weirdly written? Don't tell me you've never noticed. Have a look:

"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."

Groups like to chop this up for various political reasons, but that's the whole thing as it's written in the second amendment. It's oddly written. The odd wording makes it ambiguous. Does it enshrine a personal right or the right of states to maintain militias? (Incidentally, I have questions about grammar and usage in that amendment. I'm researching them and hope to publish about that sometime in the future.)

An avenue of investigation was suggested by a comment in one of Steven Pinker's books. Vague lines in legal documents are often the result of parties who can't agree. They write language that either side can interpret as they wish, with the hopes that a real consensus can be reached later. If this were the case with the second amendment, where could I find material relevant to the theory? I looked at writings published about the constitution at the it was created.

Pennsylvania ratified the constitution on December 12, 1787 by a vote of 46 to 23. Nearly a week later, 21 of the dissenters published in several newspapers a position paper titled, "The Address and Reasons of Dissent of the Minority of the Convention of Pennsylvania to their Constituents." It contains two relevant statements.

First...

"That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence (sic) of themselves and their own state, or the United States, or for the purpose of killing game; and no law shall be passed for disarming the people or any of them, unless for crimes committed, or real danger of public injury from individuals."

and...

"That the power of organizing, arming and disciplining the militia (the manner of disciplining the militia to be prescribed by Congress) remain with the individual states."

So there it is. At least some of our founders wanted to enshrine both an individual right to bear arms and a state's right to organize militias.

Early the following summer, Virginia proposed a bill of rights. Their paper contains this line:

"The people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well regulated Militia composed of the body of the people trained to arms is the proper, natural and safe defence (sic) of a free State."

(I wasn't able to find an online version of this document; however, it is available in this book by Signet Classic.)

Though it's better worded than our second amendment the Virginia language, had it been adopted, would likely have suffered from the same disagreement as our second amendment. Does it assert an Individual right, or only put the militias under the control of the states?

Both interpretations would agree with the dissenters in Pennsylvania. Why then is that position, whatever it was, not stated more explicitly in the bill of rights? Clearly there's more to this story than I've learned so far.

A friend guessed at a piece of the puzzle that my gut tells me is right on the mark. If the Virginia proposal excluded an individual right, there's a historically plausible reason. The powers in Virginia, and all southern states for that matter, probably didn't want firearms laying around, arms that might land in the hands of slaves.

The State's Right to What?

"What was the civil war about?"

"It was about state's rights."

"The state's right to do what?"

"..."

"I'm sorry. What was that?"

"..."

"You don't have an answer?"

My hypothetical debate opponent is now trying to conjure an answer. Try using this line of argument yourself to see how many people can give you an answer.

The state's right to do what? It's the obvious next question. If southern states were willing to go to war over state's rights, there must have been specific rights at issue, something that set them off, something they felt the Federal government was taking away from them.

Even as silence drains the room of energy, I'll bet everyone is thinking the same answer: slavery. It's not too hard to find support for that thought. Try this on:

No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed.

This also turns out to be problematic for the state's rights argument. More about that in a moment.

The quote is from the confederate constitution, specifically, Section 9, Article 4. It lays bare something the state's rights argument deftly avoids. The existence of the Confederate States of America meant the continuation of slavery. Once the blood of northern youths was spilled in opposition, any victory that excluded abolition was a hollow victory.

But why is this problematic for the state's rights view? I have to thank historian James Loewen in his recent Salon interview for drawing my attention to this. The confederacy denied its own states the right to decide against slavery.

Antithekyra Revisited

In 1900 a shipwreck from around 100 BCE was found just off the Greek island of Antithekyra. In the wreck was a bronze-work mechanical device whose complexity wasn't matched until the European Rennaissance.  Its purpose was unknown for decades, but it was eventually found to be an astronomical calculator for predicting celestial events such as eclipses. 

Over the last century the Antithekyra wreck site has been sporatically explored because it's depth makes diving dangerous.  A few months back, several news outlets reported that a new deep-dive exo suit, originally designed for work in the New York sewage system, will be used to thoroughly explore the shipwreck.

This week I learned that the planned expedition will run for one month starting on September 15. I hope there's some way to follow this in real time, but we'll see.

Recent Links

Here's a few things that caught my attention this week.  I have two hopes: that I'm giving you something you missed and that I can make this a regular feature. 

Solar Roads Revisited

I'm old enough to remember the engergy crisis of the 1970's and discussions surrounding the nacent possibilities of solar energy.  I remember in particular the smug way people with "common sense" would dismiss solar energy.  "What do you do on cloudy days? He he!" Obviously, there isn't a complete absence of photons on cloudy days. But, to be honest, I don't know that there weren't real practical problems with solar collectors in those days. 

For the last several months a company called Solar Roadways has been raising start-up money for a technology for paving roads with solar cells.  Like any new technology, they're getting the range of typical criticism from perfectly valid to downright silly. Solar Roadways has responded. The response is not without problems either. Instead of another pundit run-down, I thought I'd give you their side directly.

Half-Baked Science

Is marijuana a harmless pastime or a societal menace? It turns out that facts don't really care about your beliefs, as an article in the latest edition of science news shows.

Egyptian Pixels

Did you ever want to visit an Egyptian building as it was when it was new? Have you ever thought to ask that question? I hadn't either, until I stumbled on a collaboration between a company creating immersive learning software and an Egyptologist.

A company called Corinth and one Jaromír Krejčí, Ph.D (no, I don't know how to pronounce that) both out of the Czech Republic have created an application that lets you move through a three dimensional reconstruction of the hall of a fifth dynasty pharaoh named Raneferef. Is ancient history not your thing? Corinth has a few other apps that might interest you. Please remember you're there for the 3D, not the translated text.

History On Line

I recently watched the documentary "Titanic's Final Mystery" in which historian Tim Maltin uses historical sources to tease out new information about the tragedy of said ship's sinking nearly a century ago. To get a sense of weather conditions in the North Atlantic, in particular on the night of the sinking, Maltin reviews the logs of ships that crossed the ocean in April of 1912. NOAA's ships logs were, at least, transferred to computer punch cards in the 1970s. Records of German ships are still kept in their original log books at an archive in Germany. This is important because in historical research the only thing that counts is original records.

What jumped out at me was how he viewed them. In neither case were these records available on line. Maltin had to physically travel to their storage facilities to examine them.

Someday, I need to do a post about how 'proving' a point in the internet age still requires going beyond Google, sometimes way beyond Google. At least, that will be the case until all the paper in all the obscure archives is digitized.

Paper is one thing. Our intuition expects that paper will transferred to computer. But artifacts? This week I learned that museums are starting to put three dimensional scans of artifacts on line. Until now the public's access to archaeological relics has been restricted to views behind ropes and through panes of glass. Only top scholars get the privilege of turning these objects over and looking at them closely.

That isn't likely to ever change. But with online scans and now burgeoning virtual reality technology, exemplified by the recently released Oculus Rift, you and I will eventually get the chance to examine ancient artifacts.

The latest museum to enter the 3D club is the University College London's Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology. Never heard of it? Among Etymologists, UCL ranks right behind the Cairo Museum and the British museum in the number and quality of ancient Egyptian artifacts.

You can view UCL's collection here. Meanwhile, I'll be looking for links to other collections. I hope someone has built a specialized search engine. I doubt this is on Google's radar yet.

Cheaper by the Dozen

This post isn't about curiosity.  It's free hypothesizing.

Here's a bit of freakonomics I can't find discussed anywhere.  Why are laws and contracts thicker now than they were in past decades or centuries?  The meme is that the people writing them are power hungry control freaks, or they need to justify their jobs or something.  I'm not sure I buy it.

Before I explain, let's make sure we're on the same page.  The law of supply and demand: if the cost of production goes down, the supply goes up; if the supply goes up, the cost of use goes down.  Now has anyone noticed that the cost of adding text to laws and contracts has been going down for centuries?

When documents began to replace customs in the 13th century all laws and contracts had to be handwritten.  The cost of hand copying documents, need I say, is prohibitive.  Because of low literacy they had to be read out loud to many.  The printing press changed that. After 1440 a ruler could print as many as were needed.  Drafts of laws were still a little pricy, but we'll solve that shortly.

It was 500 years before other improvements were made.  When they came, change was, in human history terms, rapid. Next came the typewriter in the mid-19th century, the mimeograph in 1890, the Xerox machine in 1949, the word processor, web pages, mobile devices.  As newspapers have discovered, the bottom has fallen out of the cost of producing and distributing text.  Why, then, are we surprised that laws and contracts have gotten more complicated?  

Attributing this phenomenon to some "essential" quality of legislators and lawyers is to mischaracterize the problem. In so doing, do we look to the wrong solutions? Do jokes about lawyers at the bottom of the ocean really help us? I can't say I have a solution either, but I'll confidently say I think we've been looking in the wrong place.