THE SECOND AMENDMENT AND THE SPIRIT OF THE PEOPLE.

• Author: Lerner, Renee Lettow

Of all the rights in the U.S. Constitution, the right to keep and bear arms most reflects the spirit of a free people. It is the spirit of resisting oppression. That oppression can come in different forms: oppression by the government, and oppression by private thugs. As we'll see, the United States is not the only place where that spirit exists. It's growing in other places around the world.

Jordan Peterson reminds us--if we needed reminding--that some persons are genuinely malevolent. (1) They wish us harm. We must say "no," early in the cycle of oppression, and mean what we say. To do that, he says, takes aggression. (2)

That is true, but a better word for the quality that's needed is "spirit" or "spiritedness." This is the quality that the ancient Greeks called thumos. (3) Good thumos is the emotion that drives virtue. It is indispensable to having and keeping virtue. It is the spirit that resists oppression, that causes one to stand up for oneself, one's family, and one's community. It is the spirit of courage. And it is the spirit of self-reliance.

Self-reliance was famously a classic characteristic of the American people. The American people settled a continent in the face of staggering dangers. There are many great accounts of this. One of the best, in my opinion, is Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books. Wilder has a long description of Pa carefully cleaning his rifle. (4) She helped him, as a six-year-old girl. She also describes Pa at the hearth in their log cabin, casting bullets. And again, she helped him. She even helped him load the rifle. That rifle, she makes clear, was absolutely essential to feeding the family, because of hunting, and to protecting the family. When Pa wasn't carrying it, they kept it, fully loaded, on hooks on the wall of their cabin (5)--a cabin that was full of young children. There is never a hint, in Wilder's books, that there was the least danger of accidental use. The past tells us a lot about the present.

In certain circles these days, self-reliance is not a popular virtue. The argument goes, we no longer live on the frontier. We have a specialized police force. It will keep us safe.

Really? Violent crime has not disappeared. But in America, it is localized.

The fear of violent crime doesn't affect me personally much at all. I don't live in a high-crime neighborhood. I never have. Most other suburban soccer moms haven't either. I grew up, and I currently live in, McLean, Virginia. A place that I sometimes call "the mean streets of McLean." (My family roll their eyes.)

But mean streets, and mean places, are not a joke for many persons. A friend of mine became interested in carrying a gun for self-defense because of a new job. That job was being a clerk on the graveyard shift at a motel on Route 1 in Howard County, Maryland. After my friend had quit his previous job and started work at the motel, he found out the reason for the job opening. The previous night clerk had been shot dead by a person robbing the motel. A police officer who stopped by from time to time suggested that he get a permit and a gun. Such permits were very hard to get. The police approved his application, though, maybe because they felt bad about never solving the murder at the hotel. He got a gun right away after that and carried it.

Of course for persons who live in high-crime neighborhoods, these sorts of problems are routine. There's a considerable risk, if you're walking alone at night, that you will be robbed. That is something it's easy to forget when you're a suburban soccer mom, or otherwise upper-middle class. Suburban soccer moms are not likely to hear much about the many times that firearms are used in self-defense-over 67,000 times per year, according to a study by a pro-gun-control group using data compiled by the FBI. (6) That's considered a low estimate. (7)

But what a suburban soccer mom is likely to hear about, a great deal, are mass shootings. These mass shootings play on the fears of an already quivering and anxious society. And so the call goes out: Do something about it! And here's where complete irrationality sets in. Because the shooter used this particular gun or this particular part, we must ban them. (8)

What really creates the danger is not the legality of this or that part. What really creates the danger is so-called "gun-free zones." Every major recent mass shooting was in a "gun-free zone." (9) Gun-free zones are death traps. Mass shooters know it. We sometimes think of mass shooters as totally crazy, but they're not. They are rational, in that they deliberately target gun-free zones, because they know the persons in them are sitting ducks. They can't fire back. They can't defend themselves. Mass shooters know they'll be able to kill a lot more persons that way.

But instead of realizing that "gun-free zones" are the danger, politicians rush to say that they want to ban this or that device that was used. (10) How effective is that? Let's take a look. In 1764, the Italian enlightenment criminologist Cesare Beccaria had something to say about gun control. (11) He is much beloved of Progressives these days because he opposed the death penalty. (12) In his own time, he was famous throughout Europe, and also influential with the Founders of this country. (13) Let's hear what he wrote about gun control:

False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils, except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of...