To the Editor
The Hendersonville News
PO Box 490
Hendersonville, NC 28793

Dear Sirs/Mesdames:

Let's get the history, constitutional doctrine, and political theory behind the Second Amendment right. The Constitution's militia clauses, the Second Amendment and the Militia Act of 1792 were about military organization not the civil rights of private individuals. The Constitution is a frame of government. Citizens, "the people," gun owners and non- gun owners alike, are citizens under law and government. They are not sovereign individuals who made a treaty..

The Militia Act required all obligated men to be "enrolled" registered for militia duty. They were taxed to provide a weapon. The Militia Act also required that privately owned weapons be inventoried in the "Return of Militia" and reported to state governors and the President of the US. There were no objections then to those requirements, no concern for a right to armed outside of the knowledge and reach of government. However, that is the individual right that some people have tried to invent today. It is a right to individual sovereignty. Such a right would reduce the Constitution from a frame of government to a treaty among sovereign individuals who give no more than good faith.

The state militias's citizen soldiers were part of a constitutional balance against the potential dangers of the Federal Government's regular army, modeled after the British Army. Militia duty was conscript duty. The regular army was not. In the twentieth century, the Selective Service Acts combined the opposing concepts.

We made these points in our amicus brief in US v. Emerson (2001). Judge Garwood's gratuitous dicta, a great demagogic boost to gun rights ideologies, did not address the fundamental points. Those will have to be taken up by another court. We do not have to wait till then to decide if we are citizens who consent to be governed or individual sovereigns who do not.

Yours truly,
G. Eyclesheimer Ernst

"Forming government reduces one right,"
Letter to the Editor, Herdersonville [nc] Times-News, February 6, 2002

To the Editor
The Hendersonville News
PO Box 490
Hendersonville, NC 28793

Dear Sirs/Mesdames:

In citing the Declaration of Independence, understand a big difference. The Declaration was a charter for Revolution, not a Frame of Government. Revolution is a natural right outside of law and government. Expand the passage:

...all men are created equal [before the law], that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable [natural] rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these [certain but not all inalienable] rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the [natural] Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing it powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

They institute new government, not anarchy. Citizens consenting to be governed create a higher authority. Sovereign powers making a treaty do not. The governmental authority created is also the mechanism to decide which rights will be secured—by law.

The concept was once understood. Hamilton, FP 33:

...the laws ... pursuant to the powers intrusted to [government] by its constitution, must necessarily be supreme ... It would otherwise be a mere treaty, dependent on the good faith of the parties, and not a government, which is only another word for POLITICAL POWER AND SUPREMACY.

Framer James Wilson, at the Pennsylvania ratifying convention:

Civil liberty is natural liberty itself, divested only of that part which, placed in the government, produces more good and happiness to the community than if it had remained in the individual.

Yours truly,
G. Eyclesheimer Ernst

June 25, 1996
[published August 5, 1996] Letters
In These Times

Dear Sirs/Mesdames:

A comment on Chris Lehmann's review of Michael Tomasky's Left For Dead ["Dead again," June 10]: I have not been able to examine Tomasky thoroughly, but I get the picture. The left, with its learned helplessness, has no political instincts or appeal to a broader community. Tomasky provides an insightful and valuable analysis, but his refusal to effectively address gun violence, which Lehmann correctly points out, is more grievous than Lehmann realizes. Tomasky buys into the libertarian fantasy with his refusal to even think about proposing measures against gun violence. The shared political culture that Lehmann and Tomasky seek to build is based on the fundamental proposition that we live under the laws of this government--or some government. A viable political order is the first order of political business. The libertarian fantasy will have it otherwise.