Better question is what is wrong with people. I don't think people wanted to believe what Musk always was. If you look at his biography, his previous statements, his actions, his choice of women, why were people so willing to buy into fantasy that he is real life personification of comic book character like Tony Stark. He is is not. He is what he always was. People just wanted to believe he was something he never was.

Musk’s grandfather. Joshua Haldeman, D.C., was the Grand Poobah of Technocracy, Inc. in Canada during the 1930s and 40s. He grew up in a family of well connected globalist technocrats, that is how he was placed as a front, a MASK if you will for all the companies that he neither runs or funds.

In science we trust

Back in the first half of the 20th century, a group called Technocracy Incorporated wanted to reorganize society by putting scientists in charge. The movement flamed out, but its underlying message still appeals to many in Silicon Valley.

By Ira Basen

June 28, 2021
[newsinteractives.cbc.ca]

In a nutshell, historic Technocracy is a utopian economic system that discards price-based economics in favor of energy or resource-based economics. Technocracy is so radically different from all current economic norms that it will stretch your mind to get a grasp of what it actually means and what it implies for a global society.

In the 1930s, there was a popular movement called Technocracy that spawned a large and zealous following of hundreds of thousands of members in the United States and Canada. Sadly, history books reveal little about this movement, and so my study of it required a significant amount of time-consuming original research at significant personal expense. As I dug deeply into historical archives and old media, I was increasingly shocked by the impact that Technocracy had then and is having on the world today.

There have been many small crackpot movements throughout history to which we might say, “Who cares?” When a hundred people get together to talk about UFOs, utopian philosophy or whatever, it’s just a hundred people getting together. If nothing comes of it, all the folks eventually pass and history forgets that they were ever alive. This is not so with Technocracy for many reasons:

• By the 1930s there was at least a 100 year backdrop of philosophical justification for Scientism and Technocracy.
• The organizers were top tier engineers and scientists of their day, many of whom were professors at prestigious universities such as Columbia University.
• Their plans were meticulously detailed, documented and openly published.
• The impact of their policies and philosophy on the modern global society is gargantuan.
• Technocracy is about economic and social control of society and persons according to the Scientific Method. Most of us think about the so-called scientific method when we think back on the carefully crafted experiments in high school chemistry or biology class. That is not what I’m talking about here. Technocracy’s Scientific Method dates back mostly to philosophers Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825) and Auguste Comte (1798-1857).

Technocracy Study Course

This treatise was specifically designed as a study course to fulfill the needs of individual groups that were meeting in homes, halls, churches and granges across the U.S. and Canada. Without top-down guidance, different groups were headed in different directions. The big question is, what was the ideology that Scott and Hubbert intended to implant?

The Preface of the Study Course details some basic elements of the organization itself:

• Technocracy, Inc. is a non-profit membership organization incorporated under the laws of the State of New York. It is a Continental Organization. It is not a financial racket or a political party.
• Technocracy, Inc. operates only on the North American Continent through the structure of its own Continental Headquarters, Area Controls, Regional Divisions, Sections and Organizers as a self-disciplined self-controlled organization….
• Technocracy declares that this Continent has a rendezvous with Destiny; that this Continent must decide between Abundance and Chaos within the next few years. Technocracy realizes that this decision must be made by a mass movement of North Americans trained and self-disciplined, capable of operating a technological mechanism of production and distribution on the Continent when the present Price System becomes impotent to operate….
• Technocracy offers the specifications and the blueprints of Continental physical operations for the production of abundance for every citizen.

Here we see, first, an organizational structure with an intensive hierarchy that roughly resembles a para-military organization: Headquarters, Controls, Divisions, Sections, etc. Second, it is interesting to note that they had to assure readers that Technocracy, Inc. was “not a financial racket or political party”; apparently they had been accused of both. Third, the Study Course is a blueprint for the future. As such, a blueprint normally contains diagrams of various elevations and details such as are necessary for the complete and forthwith construction of a building or structure. Thus, we should treat the Technocracy Study Course with due respect that its purpose is very clear; Scott and Hubbert intended to build a new society that did not currently exist.

In the Preface, a glimpse into the scope of Technocracy is seen:

Technocracy is dealing with social phenomena in the widest sense of the word; this includes not only actions of human beings, but also everything which directly or indirectly affects their actions. Consequently, the studies of Technocracy embrace practically the whole field of science and industry. Biology, climate, natural resources, and industrial equipment all enter into the social picture. [Emphasis added]

There is no doubt that Technocracy, Inc. intended to be an agent of change for a new social structure, although there was nothing that qualified either Scott or Hubbert to play the role of sociologists. That did not hinder them in the slightest. Simply put, they believed that the actions of human beings, both direct and indirect, were the root cause of societal problems and that they were directly related to biology, climate and natural resources. The absence of enlightened scientific management would doom mankind to certain destruction. It is not coincidental that the most visible and manipulative modern agents of change - Sustainable Development, Agenda 21, global warming, the U.N.’s green economy and the modern ecology movement, etc. - all hold to the same underlying assumptions.

Scott’s version of Technocracy was intensely focused on energy. Whether human or mechanical, all work involves the expenditure of energy. Humans and beasts of burden eat food, and machines consume electricity, gas, oil, etc. This emphasis on energy was most certainly fine-tuned by the presence of M. King Hubbert who was a well-educated and aspiring geophysicist trained in energy-related science. In 1955, Hubbert went on to create his “Peak Oil Theory”, commonly known as Hubbert’s Peak, that stated that known reserves of oil would peak and go into decline as demand and consumption increased to an unsustainable level. It is also not coincidental that Hubbert is often revered as a “founding father” of the modern environmental and Sustainable Development movements.

According to Scott and Hubbert, the distribution of energy resources and the goods they produce must be monitored and measured in order for their system to work. Every engineer knows that you cannot control what you cannot monitor and measure. Both Scott and Hubbert were keenly aware that constant monitoring and precise measuring would enable them to control society with scientific precision.

It is not surprising then that the first five out of seven requirements for Technocracy were:

• Register on a continuous 24 hour-per-day basis the total net conversion of energy.
• By means of the registration of energy converted and consumed, make possible a balanced load.
• Provide a continuous inventory of all production and consumption.
• Provide a specific registration of the type, kind, etc., of all goods and services, where produced and where used.
• Provide specific registration of the consumption of each individual, plus a record and description of the individual.

In 1934, such technology did not exist. Time was on the Technocrat’s side, however, because this technology does exist today, and it is being rapidly implemented to do exactly what Scott and Hubbert specified, namely, to exhaustively monitor, measure and control every facet of individual activity and every ampere of energy delivered and consumed in the life of such individual. The end result of centralized control of all society was clearly spelled out on page 240.

Technocracy rising - the Trojan horse of global transformation, 2014 by Patrick M. Wood

Tell me if that does not remind you of ESG, carbon credits and net zero agenda? That is the world from where Elon Musk came from via his Grandfather. He is a retarded moron, that somehow became richest man of the planet? How is that possible? Only in a world ruled by ideology, not merit.

Balanced Load becames Carbon Neutral, but original idea remains the same as it was in the 1930's

WEF of today is what Technocracy.inc was back in 1930's when it was very popular in USA and Canada from where Elon Musk grandfather adopted it from.

A voila somehow Starlink. Space X, Neruolink, EV cars with tesla and communication with twitter all goverment funded and protected, with dumbass like Elon on the front page for plebs to be confused about who is actually running the show. That is why he ended up with this chick form WEF. They are indirectly the one that borrowed him the money to buy twitter and now they want ROI.

@Krunoslav Yes, lots of science and scientism happened in the 19th century and the early 20th century to set the stage for what is going on today. Eugenics, a biological study of genetics, created the holocaust and with Canadian advocates of the science, such as Tommy Douglas, creator of our socialist political party - the New Democrat Party (NDP), now indistinguishable from our Liberal party, we started seeing sterilization laws in our provinces, in order to weed out defective genes in the population. Tommy Douglas then brought us socialized medicine and we have an expensive, top heavy and ineffective system that is trying to solve its overwhelm by instituting medical assistance in dying, known as M.A.I.D., which will destroy the medical ethic of "Do no harm". It obscures the line of harm and now decisions will be made by doctors as to what harm means. Think the line is clear? Look at what is happening in America regarding abortion and whether or not partial birth abortion and post natal abortion are harmful.

Tommy Douglas was a big fan of Hitler until he went over to Germany and met him. It's too bad he thought Hitler was mad and didn't connect it with the fact socialism is an insane political ideology. he just couldn't be wrong about socialism.

Eugenics was only a part of it, of course. We also invented the means to destroy the world with atomic bombs. Today science is going to engineer our climate, our food, our diet, our cities, our population size, use of our resources, our very lives......at least Musk is trying to get us off this planet and away from the crazies trying to destroy humanity.

I don't pretend to know what is going on with Musk. He says he is for freedom of speech and he is very into technocracy. Appointing Linda Yaccarino seems pretty antithetical to freedom of speech and technocracy that leads to human extinction, as opposed to sustainability, is not desirable.

@FrankZeleniuk Yes. Pretty much.

As for Musk there was an interesting article about him.

[technocracy.news]

I think for Musk many things are cool, like new toys that are fun for a while, but I don't see him really doing the hard grind on anything. He is not a philosopher. He is not a big thinker. He is not a dedicated worker or someone who really stays with anything once the honey moon phase is over. He is like a spoiled kid that gets new toys, he gets board of it and moves on to something else, because he has the luxury of it. He mentioned free speech, sure, but what does meant in practical sense for him? I doubt he knows or care. He probably thinks it means posting tweets and trolling someone. It does not seem he has nay real world, tangible grasp on the concept or any knowlage of philosophical though or arguments or historic development of the concept of free speech. its just a new term that sounds cool for twitter, until the rent is due.

I for one, am not for free speech as it is popularly understood in America because its detrimental to meaningful though. Free speech for maximalists today means, yell as much as you can about whatever you can in any way you can. That usually leads to noise of bad ideas, suffocating good ideas and meaningful ideas from voices that don't have the numbers or power to stand out in today's platforms. There used to be investment in forums and platforms for skillful rhetorical defense of meaningful ideas or at very least a discussion with pressure on the merits of arguments as well as skill of delivery. All that traditions is gone now. It has been at best, reduced to memes. But means can take the society only so far. The lack depth and sophistication of any meaningful civilization. And if you look at Elon Musk, and hear him try to talk, its a disaster. He is neither rhetoric wiz, nor do his ideas can measure up with the greats of human spicies . He is a master troll though. He speaks the language of memes. And by those standards I think he conceptualizes free speech. As meme free space on twitter. I've never heard him provide any other arguments, neither legislative or philosophical . And sine he really doesn't build anything, he plays with it, I would imagine he conceptualized free speech the same way. As meme free twitter. Beyond that I doubt we can expect from someone like Musk. And with his choice in women and CEO now, even meme free twitter might be too much to expect.

@FrankZeleniuk I mentioned how I think Elon Musk conceptualizes free speech only way he knows how, with memes? I was right.

@Krunoslav Indeed, what does freedom of speech mean? As with any freedom type of freedom there is a price and that is personal responsibility in the exercise thereof. It certainly doesn't mean you have no responsibilities toward others or your environment. If you want freedom that means it is you that must be the one that curtails your freedom. It means you decide, not others or a government. You have all the freedoms you need in actuality but that doesn't mean a person will freely choose to rob, loot and pillage his fellow man, he generally learns to weigh the consequences of his actions and restrains himself accordingly. We would need no laws if we understood the full ramifications of our acts and were responsible for the sustainability of all life and our environment. We would know who is not exercising any responsibility towards that sustainability and it would be an exercise of freedom to restrain or even destroy that individual, such as in self-defense, thus originates a right such as America's 2nd amendment.

Restricting freedom basically means another person or persons or agency restricting or taking away an individual's right to make his own choices in his actions. A person may agree to restrictions if he can be reasoned with ad convinced they are beneficial for his own preservation but that is again his choice.

Lots has been written and said about freedom but in a nutshell it is about responsibility, reason.
Vigilance is often said to be necessary to freedom and it is because agencies will overwhelm the individual and start making choices for him, choices that are often not in his interests but the interests of individuals who formed those agencies in order to overwhelm the individual.

@FrankZeleniuk You write from a modern liberal perspective or at best classical libertarian perspective, buts its not that simple. Many of your arguments would not be sufficient to convince the opponents of this doctrine you echo. For example...

I think originally freedom or liberals use the term when they mean liberty of the ancient was very different than that of the moderns. And most people today, don't think in those terms because they lack knowlage of history and political though. so I would encourage everyone to read something like this:

The Liberty of Ancients Compared with that of Moderns
Benjamin Constant

To read more about Benjamin Constant (1767-1830), see this biography by James Powell. The following essay was delivered in Paris in 1819.

[fee.org]

.................................

"Lots has been written and said about freedom but in a nutshell it is about responsibility, reason."

Actually it is not. That is only one of many views and many do not agree with it. One can trace the ideas of that trough history and geography, but for simplicity one can simply read this...

Roger Scruton on Natural Rights, Prepared for a Conference on Human Rights, Lincoln's Inn, London, 2011.

[morec.com]

or this....

Witherspoon Institute’s online center for Natural Law, Natural Rights, and American Constitutionalism. This resource is conceived as an archive for and a commentary and study guide to the seminal documents of the natural law and natural rights tradition, especially as that tradition relates to American constitutionalism and political thought. Link: [winst.org]

.................................

You also mentioned second Amendment. Today most link it to owning weapons for self protection... but few know its political history and purpose. I don't think second Amendment makes sense anymore, and I would argue that owning weapons for self protection is a different set of political ideas and arguments than those that made second Amendment a thing in the first lace.

Noah Shusterman wrote a good book on this: Armed Citizens: The Road From Ancient Rome to the Second Amendment, 2020

Synopsis: "In Armed Citizens, Noah Shusterman explains for a general reader what eighteenth-century militias were and why the authors of the Constitution believed them to be necessary to the security of a free state. Suggesting that the question was never whether there was a right to bear arms, but rather, who had the right to bear arms, Shusterman begins with the lessons that the founding generation took from the history of Ancient Rome and Machiavelli’s reinterpretation of those myths during the Renaissance. He then turns to the rise of France’s professional army during seventeenth-century Europe and the fear that it inspired in England. Shusterman shows how this fear led British writers to begin praising citizens’ militias, at the same time that colonial America had come to rely on those militias as a means of defense and as a system to police enslaved peoples. Thus the start of the Revolution allowed Americans to portray their struggle as a war of citizens against professional soldiers, leading the authors of the Constitution to place their trust in citizen soldiers and a "well-regulated militia," an idea that persists to this day."

.................................

@FrankZeleniuk Introduction: The Long Road to the Second Amendment

THE SECOND Amendment to the US Constitution no longer makes sense.

It no longer makes sense not because today’s weapons are more powerful or because American gun violence is out of control (although both of those statements are true). The Second Amendment no longer makes sense in a much more basic way: people no longer understand what it means. Nor do they understand what it meant to the generation that created it. The first half of the amendment—“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state”—has become a cryptic phrase, waving at us across the centuries.

The amendment’s second half still makes sense. “The right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Some Americans like that phrase more than others, but everyone understands what the words mean. In 1791, though, when the states ratified the Bill of Rights, the entire amendment made sense. Contemporaries understood what the framers of the Constitution meant by a “militia,” and they knew how important it was that those militias be regulated. And they knew why, for eighteenth-century republicans, a state without such a militia could never be truly free.

They knew about militias because Britain’s North American colonies had militias. Of the thirteen colonies that fought for their independence, all but one had maintained a militia since their founding. As a result, the militia was a familiar institution to the inhabitants of the United States. These were not the voluntary associations that call themselves militias today—far from it. The colonial militias were official institutions, governed—sometimes effectively, sometimes less so—by colonial laws and regulations that required most citizens to participate. As a result, those citizens were accustomed to mandatory militia service of one sort or another. (Most of the people who lived in the colonies were not citizens—more on that below.) Since the 1607 arrival of English colonists in what would become Jamestown, Virginia, settlers had been expected to provide their own security. The Jamestown colonists were responsible for planting their own crops and fighting their own battles. And as Virginia grew, that remained true. The other colonies developed along mostly similar lines, with citizens required to participate in the militia and with relatively few professional soldiers.

What, then, were these colonial militias? They were official military forces under the command of the colonial government and acting on its behalf. Their duties included both internal and external matters—in other words, they could act either as an army or as an internal police force. Such overlap in tasks was not unusual at the time: in Europe, which had a much larger population, the distinction between soldiers and police officers was only just emerging in the eighteenth century. What differentiated a militia from other armed forces was that its members were only part-time soldiers. They had careers to attend to, homes to maintain, and, ideally, families to lead. These militias had their own lines of command, as in the army, though in many colonies the officers were elected by the militiamen themselves. Peacetime duties were relatively light: the men would muster on several Sundays over the course of the year. Sometimes these musters were serious affairs with rigorous training and exercises. At other times, musters were little more than excuses for gathering and drinking. When colonists decided the situation demanded it, these militias sprang into action—which, again, amounted to the colonists’ looking after their own military needs. For most of the colonies’ existence, the militias were not just the colonies’ first line of defense but their only one.

When full-scale war broke out between France and England, the militia system was not enough for the colonies’ military needs. During the French and Indian War (1756–63), the British government sent professional soldiers to do most of the fighting—aided, though not always effectively, by colonists who had experience in the militia.1 In that war’s aftermath, Britain stationed far more soldiers in North America than it ever had before. Eventually, those troops’ presence began to rile the colonists. The citizens of Boston, especially, began to bristle at the presence of so many “redcoats” stationed among them. The tensions between the New Englanders and the British soldiers would lead to the two sides fighting each other in Lexington and Concord in April 1775. After that, the war was on.

Britain would send far more professional soldiers to its North American colonies during the American Revolution, this time to fight against those same colonial militias—their former comrades in arms. In response, the Continental Congress authorized the creation of the Continental army, which became the United States’ main fighting force. For the first time, the Americans had their own professional army.

Once the War of Independence ended, everyone accepted that the states would revert to having citizens meet their own military needs. The Articles of Confederation, which the Continental Congress wrote during the fighting, required each state to “always keep up a well-regulated and disciplined militia.” Most of the states wrote constitutions during the Revolution that included some mention of a militia. And the US Constitution—as ratified in 1787, before the Bill of Rights was included—not only called for a militia; it devoted more words to the militia than it did to the army and navy combined.2

So the leading men of the day agreed on the need for a militia. They did not agree on how the militia should be run or who should run it. During the debates about the Constitution and its ratification, Federalists and Anti-Federalists would fight quite viciously over the national government’s authority of “calling forth” the militia. But both sides agreed on the militia’s importance.

Familiarity and continuity, then, guaranteed the militia a place in the young republic. Economics provided another guarantee. “We are too poor to maintain a standing army adequate to our defence,” George Washington noted, and few people—neither his contemporaries nor historians—would take issue with the notion.3 France maintained such an army, but it was a larger and richer nation. And whereas the United States gratefully accepted French aid during the Revolution, British citizens on both sides of the Atlantic had for decades seen the French army’s existence as proof that the English were a freer people than their French rivals. The founders of the new republic were not about to abandon that belief. France’s military spending would also bankrupt the French government by the late 1780s. The new United States, all but buried beneath its war debts, was in no position to hire a large professional army. Nor did it need or desire one. Come peacetime, citizens would again be expected to handle their own military needs and their own policing.

The Second Amendment gave a stamp of approval to an institution that the colonists, as much for practical and economic reasons as for ideological and philosophical ones, had come to know. But the language of the Second Amendment showed that the founders’ attachment to the militia went beyond familiarity, continuity, and the need to economize. When the authors of the Bill of Rights declared that a well-regulated militia was necessary for the security of a free state, they also endorsed a tradition of republican thought that had elevated militias to a place of honor and glory well above what their lackluster military achievements would suggest.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, writers and politicians—mostly, though not only, in Great Britain and the British Empire—developed a view of militias, and of human society and history, that placed militias at the center of all that was good, just, and manly. These writers claimed that militias could outfight any other army because citizens who were part-time soldiers fought better than professional, full-time soldiers. They also claimed that the time those men spent training as part-time soldiers would mold them into better citizens. In these pro-militia theories, a state with no armed forces could never be secure, and a state with a professional army could never be free. Only a state in which the citizens were part-time soldiers—and in which all soldiers were also citizens—could be both. Hence the militia’s necessity to the security of a free state. By the time of the American Revolution, the basics of these theories had become part of the nation’s guiding assumptions, accepted even by those who, through personal experience, were aware of the militias’ shortcomings.

George Washington wrote Sentiments on a Peace Establishment in 1783, after the fighting against England had ended. It was his way of sharing his thoughts on the sort of defense force the new nation would need. The United States had raised a professional army during the Revolution, and Washington had led that army, but the war was over, and everyone knew that the thirteen states would go back to having citizens protect themselves. Most soldiers would be returning to civilian life; the question was what sort of force would continue to exist. By the standards of his day, Washington was not an enthusiastic proponent of the militia. His experiences with colonial militias during the French and Indian War (and the superiority of the British professional soldiers) had left him skeptical of the likelihood that relatively untrained citizens would shine on a battlefield. “To place any dependence upon Militia,” he wrote in 1776, “is assuredly resting upon a broken staff.”4 His experiences in the War of Independence mostly confirmed those views. Yet in his plans for a peacetime force, Washington introduced his discussion of the militia by declaring it a “great Bulwark of our Liberties and independence.”5

Washington knew his readers well. He knew he did not need to convince them that the militia was needed. Washington spent most of his section on the militia discussing how to ensure that the militia would be strong enough and ready enough. Much of that material was of a fairly technical nature (“it appears to me extremely necessary that there be an Adjutant General appointed in each state&rdquo, leading Washington to ask of his readers “the indulgence of suggesting whatever general observations may occur from experience and reflection.”6

If Washington’s advice on the militia was more technical than ideological, that was because he found it “unnecessary and superfluous to adduce arguments to prove what is conceded on all hands”—namely, that the nation’s protection depended upon a “respectable and well established Militia.” Should a justification of citizens’ militias be needed, though, Washington reminded his readers that we might have recourse to the Histories of Greece and Rome in their most virtuous and Patriotic ages to demonstrate the Utility of such Establishments. Then passing by the Mercinary Armies, which have at one time or another subverted the liberties of all most all the Countries they have been raised to defend, we might see, with admiration, the Freedom and Independence of Switzerland supported for Centuries, in the midst of powerful and jealous neighbours, by means of a hardy and well organized Militia. We might also derive useful lessons of a similar kind from other Nations of Europe, but I believe it will be found, the People of this Continent are too well acquainted with the Merits of the subject to require information or example.7

The nation that George Washington helped found has changed. The citizens of today’s United States are no longer so well acquainted with the subject of the militia. To understand why Washington insisted on the militia’s importance in 1783—or why, eight years later, the Bill of Rights declared those militias necessary for the security of a free state—Americans now do in fact require information and examples.

That Washington would turn to the lessons of history for proof of the militia’s necessity likewise typified the thinking of the era. Writers and politicians alike could count on their readers to know about the history of the Roman Republic and how it became an empire. They could count on readers to know the histories of Cincinnatus and Hannibal, of Louis XIV and Oliver Cromwell. Militia advocates had not only created a theory that saw in citizens’ militias the key to the security of a free state; they had also assembled a series of historical examples to support their points. This theory and these examples were a major component of the knowledge that the educated men of the eighteenth century shared, to the point where Washington could declare any further explanation “unnecessary and superfluous.” That common knowledge has since become the domain of specialists and academics. What was once superfluous has become necessary. Providing that information, and explaining those examples, is the first task of this book.

At the center of these theories lay two basic points. The first was about how good militias were. The second was about the monstrous evils that were standing armies. The two points mirrored each other. The most devoted advocates of the citizens’ militia believed that military training prepared citizens for any hardships they might encounter. Spared that training—as would happen in a society with a professional army—men would become soft and undisciplined, tempted by all the vices eighteenth-century society had to offer.

By contrast, these same writers and politicians believed that a standing army—an army of professional, full-time soldiers—could destroy a society’s freedom. The logic: because soldiers’ livelihood hinged on the continued existence of an army, their primary loyalty would be to their general—or even to a king or a dictator. Whoever commanded the army could even take the earth-shattering step of ordering his army to march on the citizens themselves. This was the fundamental lesson of Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon (the subject of chapter 1). There was also a practical consideration: the costs of a standing army could bankrupt a nation, while a militia’s costs were minimal. Above all, though, a militia could guarantee a society’s freedom.

There was a question at the heart of all of the militia theorists’ projects: How can a society defend itself without being threatened by its defenders? Any society that hired soldiers to do its fighting for it could, in turn, be attacked by those very soldiers. Or, as the Scottish writer Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun (chapter 6) would put it, “What security can the nations have that these standing forces shall not at some time or other be made use of to suppress the liberties of the people?”8 Thus a standing army became a sure-fire path to an oppressed and emasculated citizenry. This fear of the standing army stood at the center of everything that militia advocates wrote during seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Any nation with a standing army could never be free. Generals could order the army to march on the people; kings could order the army to destroy any parliament, any legislative body. When Washington wrote his Sentiments on a Peace Establishment, he made no attempt to go against this view. “A large standing army in time of Peace,” he wrote, “hath ever been considered dangerous to the liberties of a Country.”9 If the advantages of a militia were one of the early republic’s guiding assumptions, the other side of that coin was the fear of standing armies. It was a point on which Federalists and Anti-Federalists, as well as northerners and southerners, agreed.

This book’s first task, then, requires not only explaining why and how the men of the eighteenth century came to consider militias so necessary for a free people; it also requires explaining why and how those same men came to consider standing armies to be such a threat to freedom. The second task of this book is to show the role that militias played in the societies of the eighteenth-century Atlantic World—especially in England’s North American colonies. Again, from the time of their first arrival, European settlers had looked after their own military and police affairs. As Virginia’s settlers became more established and set down the rules for their colonies, they put this reliance on citizen-soldiers into law, establishing an official Virginia militia. All of the other colonies, save Quaker-run Pennsylvania, would follow suit. Studying these militias in action shows them in a different light. There was a gap between the militias that writers described in their books and the ones that mustered on Sundays in the towns of colonial North America—or, for that matter, in Great Britain. When it came to their performance on the battlefield, the militias of the eighteenth century were something less than the citizens’ army of the Roman Republic. Eighteenth-century militias were inconsistent and unpredictable forces, capable of great heroism, capable of inflicting enormous violence at times, but also likely to evade their responsibilities and even, on some occasions, to cause more troubles than they resolved.

Militias and militiamen were at the heart of every case of insurrection and domestic unrest of colonial America. Sometimes they were the force that put down the insurrection; at other times, militiamen started insurrections, as in the 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion (chapter 5). This ambiguity came with the territory of the citizen-soldier, men who were at once soldiers and citizens. The belief among writers at the time—and it was not without merit—was that soldier-citizens were less likely to blindly follow orders than were paid soldiers. But the choice of whether to participate in an insurrection or to suppress one was rarely random. The most important thing to remember about eighteenth-century citizen-soldiers is that by the laws at the time, most people were not citizens. Even among citizens, some were more equal than others, and not all were eligible to take part in the militias.

There’s a useful contrast to be made here between the 1676 Bacon’s Rebellion and the Stono Rebellion, which occurred sixty-three years later several hundred miles to the south. When Virginia’s colonial governor William Berkeley found himself facing an uprising in the western part of his colony, it took him months (and some lucky breaks) before he could put down the rebellion. Disgruntled fellow colonists had rallied around newcomer Nathaniel Bacon, who in turn declared Berkeley and his allies “Trayters to the King and Country” and began a war that was in part an insurrection against Berkeley’s government and in part a violent incursion into neighboring Indian lands. Berkeley’s recourse as colonial governor was to call out the militia to put down the insurrection. When he did so, though, the men he called out had no interest in fighting their fellow colonists. Berkeley would prevail in the end, but only after Bacon and his men had burned Jamestown to the ground—and after Bacon himself died of natural causes. The Stono Rebellion of 1739 (chapter 7) played out much differently. When the lieutenant governor stumbled upon the rebellion of enslaved Africans, he rushed to call out the militia—“raised the Countrey,” as one description later put it.10 And the country responded. The South Carolina militia jumped into action, tracked the insurgents down, and defeated them in a firefight, all before a full day had gone by. This contrast between the two rebellions showed what these militias were and were not good at. They were best at being repressive domestic forces.

North America’s colonial militias were not unique in being repressive forces. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century societies discussed in this book all found one way or another to keep much of the population out of the militia; these societies also made sure that those they excluded from the militia were unarmed and unable to organize themselves. That had been the rule back in the early days of the Roman Republic, where all soldiers were citizens but only citizens who could afford to arm themselves were soldiers. In England, poor Englishmen were deemed too much of a threat if allowed to carry weapons or participate in the militia. The English added restrictions on Catholics, on Scots, and, above all, on Irish Catholics. When the French began their revolution in 1789, they too began to arm citizens who had property—all while keeping poorer citizens unarmed.11

One quirk of the English colonies in North America was that from their start, richer English colonists were willing to include poorer colonists in their militia. This was a change from the English traditional militia, which had been limited to men of means. While back in England the government was passing laws keeping guns out of the hands of poorer Englishmen, the North American colonies were encouraging poorer settlers to own their own weapons. The colonies’ decision to include poorer citizens in their militias does not mean that these militias were more inclusive than their British counterparts. The American militias let poor citizens in, but only white settlers could be citizens. Native Americans could not be citizens and, for the most part, were not included in the colonial militias. There were exceptions; colonial militias often used men from allied tribes as scouts, for instance. The limitations on African Americans were even stricter. Those living in slavery were forbidden from taking part in the militia or from owning weapons without their owners’ permission; even for free blacks, there were few possibilities for being in the militia or owning weapons. In all of these places the militia was an all-male affair, one more reminder of the proper roles for women and men. Well before the Second Amendment came along, the question was never whether or not there was a right to bear arms but, rather, who had the right to bear arms.

Deciding what to include in a book like this one is never easy, and some readers will have their own views about which events should or should not be here. Some notes, therefore, about the logic behind the choices made. Some of the events in this book are here because of the obvious importance they had at the time. The chapter on Lexington and Concord is about the “shot heard round the world”—and while that phrase dates to the nineteenth century, the importance of Lexington and Concord was clear from the start, in the Old World and the New. Other chapters focus on events or developments that only became important well after they occurred. When Niccolò Machiavelli died, for instance, most of his writings were still unpublished. Their eventual publication and spread, however, would provide the framework for subsequent writing about republicanism and citizen-soldiers. Some of the other events in this book are included less for what happened, or for any changes they brought about, than for what they revealed about the working of the militia system. The 1739 Stono Rebellion, for instance, did not much change the evolution of colonial South Carolina where it occurred. But the way that rebellion played out, and the role that the militia played in suppressing it, showed the role that the militias had come to play in the colonies of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Together, these events explain why, during the eighteenth century, the idea of citizen-soldiers became so popular.

All of which is to say that the goal of this book is to tell the story of ten events that, together, explain how and why the men who wrote the US Constitution came to embrace citizens’ militias and distrust professional armies and why they preferred citizen-soldiers to professional soldiers. These chapters will show why those men believed that these militias were necessary to the security of a free state and why, in the words of several state bills of rights also from that era, peacetime standing armies “should be avoided as dangerous to liberty.” It is a history of why so many leaders of the founders’ generation believed that citizens had an obligation to bear arms on behalf of their society. It is a history of both ideas and actions, of both books and institutions. These ten events are included here in chronological order. At the risk of overexplaining, this is why the account connecting them can be thought of as a “road” leading to the Second Amendment.

It was not, however, the only such road. Imagine a trip from, say, Los Angeles to Washington, DC. There is more than one route to take. Some are more direct, some more scenic. Some spots on the itinerary are more important than others. Tortured though this metaphor may be, it can help explain why some events are included in this book and others are not. Because the goal of driving from Los Angeles to Washington, DC, is to see the country, to learn more about its people and its places—but eventually you have to get to DC. So you make choices. Phoenix or Las Vegas, but not both. The Grand Canyon or Arches National Park but, again, probably not both. St. Louis or Atlanta. And if you’ve got a lot of people on the trip, they won’t all like every one of your decisions.

So it will surely be with this book—not all readers will agree with the choice of events. Chapter 6, about the Scottish writer Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, could also have been about the English writer John Trenchard. The chapter devoted to the battles of Lexington and Concord will seem like a classic topic to some, cliché to others. And academics familiar with the history of civic republicanism might question including a chapter on Niccolò Machiavelli’s work, in the same way that well-seasoned travelers might hope to avoid a stop at Wall Drug or Little America. But the idea—again, as with a sightseeing road trip—is to balance out the well-known landmarks with some that are more obscure and to include some that have received less attention than they warrant. This “itinerary” is also based on the principle that, faced with a choice between several similar sites, it is better to visit just one, but with the leisure to take one’s time and see it well, than to rush through shorter visits to each of them.

There is a method to this madness. The goal is to bring together the different elements that together made it inevitable that once the United States decided to attach the Bill of Rights to the Constitution, the Second Amendment, or something very similar to it, would be included in those rights. So while the chapters are in chronological order, the lessons from each chapter build on each other in ways that are less linear. Some chapters, particularly those dealing with colonial North America, are about the institutional history of militias. Others, including the chapters on Machiavelli, Fletcher, and The Federalist, are about the intellectual history of citizen-soldiers. The chapter on Bacon’s Rebellion shows how the colonial militias could cause trouble for local governments—a story that could also be told with the Regulators or the Green Mountain Boys. That chapter also shows how the colonial context reshaped the militias’ role—or, to put it more directly, how militias’ main task became fighting Native Americans and how brutal, violent, and indiscriminate those militias could be when fighting against Indians. The chapter on the Stono Rebellion tells the next phase in the story of the colonial militias, as the frontier between English settlement and the indigenous population shifted west, while the coastal areas of the southern colonies became slave societies. Here, too, the role of the militias changed, and policing the enslaved population became the militia’s main task. Here, too, the militias could be brutal, violent, and indiscriminate.

Meanwhile, the ideas that would provide the intellectual scaffolding for the militia system were coming to their full development in England in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. These were ideas that the leaders of the American Revolution would know intimately but that had only a passing influence on the militias that existed in the colonies. When South Carolina’s militiamen put down the Stono Rebellion, they were not focused on the dangers of a standing army. During the century or so leading up to the American Revolution, it was almost as if the colonial militias and English theoretical writings on the militia existed in two separate worlds. Yet both strands—the militias’ institutional history in the colonies and the republican ideas that supported it—came together in the Second Amendment.

It was this mutual history of institutions and ideas, along with the colonists’ military situation in relation to neighboring tribes and their need to police the enslaved population, that made the Second Amendment possible. Without the history of republican thought and militia advocacy, without Machiavelli and Fletcher of Saltoun and all of their fellow travelers, there might still have been militias in the colonies. There would have been no Second Amendment, though, at least not one phrased anything like the one that still exists. Without the racial divisions of colonial North America, the militia, as an institution in that society, would not have had the same importance in people’s lives. This confluence of theory and practice, of ideology and institution, of race and republicanism, is the key to understanding the road to the Second Amendment.

This approach differs from that taken by other books on the Second Amendment in a number of ways. The most basic, of course, is that this book ends where the others begin. Beyond that, this book takes a view of the Second Amendment that is not only more long term, but also more big picture, than other books on the topic. In a field dominated by legal historians and historically minded legal scholars, this book uses a decidedly less legally oriented methodology. Again, the goal of this book is to explain why, once the United States decided to attach the Bill of Rights to the Constitution, it was inevitable that the Second Amendment, or something similar to it, would be included in those rights. This big-picture approach necessarily means that some details fade out of focus. This book therefore includes no discussion about how many commas the amendment has. (This debate does exist; there are at least two commas, but there are probably three.) There is no attempt to determine where “regulated” ended and “infringed” began. Nor is there an attempt to determine whether or not the founders intended to create an “individual” right to bear arms. The existence or nonexistence of that individual right is an important political question for the twenty-first century. It was not, however, an important question during the eighteenth century, and as much as possible, this book is focused on the questions that were important at the time of the events described.

This book is also not about the relationship between the amendment’s two clauses. The question of that relationship has been key to all debates Second Amendment for some time now, in popular discussions, among politicians, and in the courts. Focusing on the relationship between the two phrases risks overlooking the obvious: it is one amendment. It is twenty-seven words long. The whole thing matters. The working assumption going into the process of researching this book was that both clauses are important and that the two clauses were related to each other; nothing discovered during the research phase challenged that assumption. To be sure, this book pays more attention to the first half of the amendment than the second. The second half is more straightforward, but the first half is more interesting. For historians, it has more meat on the bone: there is more history behind it, there is more to explain, there is more to understand, and yet, ironically, less has been written about it. Hence the focus throughout this book on explaining why these men believed that a well-regulated militia would be necessary to the security of a free state. This emphasis is an attempt neither to somehow deny that the second half exists nor to minimize its importance. Or, to reassure gun rights advocates: yes, I have read the amendment all the way to the end.

Above all, this is a work of historical research and historical writing. It is history with political stakes and political implications, but the methods used here are historical, and the message is also historical. The Second Amendment was and remains an eighteenth-century text. The best way to understand it is to come as close as possible to understanding it in the conditions and terms in which it first appeared. The most fundamental message is that the men who wrote it lived in a very different world than our own, and they had very different concerns than we do. To those men, the Second Amendment made sense.

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Epilogue: The Long Road from the Second Amendment

IN SEPTEMBER 1791, a tax collector named Robert Johnson was making his rounds in western Pennsylvania’s Washington County. It was a time when it was difficult to be a tax collector anywhere west of the Appalachian Mountains, but western Pennsylvania was especially hostile to men like Johnson. As Alexander Hamilton would later describe it, “A party of men armed and disguised way-laid him . . . seized, tarred and feathered him, cut off his hair, and deprived him of his horse, obliging him to travel on foot a considerable distance in that mortifying and painfull situation.” Johnson could not have been completely surprised. At the time, “the people in general in the Western part of the state” were “in such a ferment on Account of the Act of Congress for laying a duty on distilled Spirits & so much opposed to the execution of the said Act.”

Hamilton had initiated that whiskey tax as a way to raise revenue during Washington’s presidency. Like many economic policies formulated during the colonial era had done, it hit Americans closer to the frontier harder than it did those living closer to the Atlantic, and it hit rural folks harder than those in the cities. In those western communities many people were angry about the tax. That anger had spread to enough of the community that even after Johnson identified his attackers, local government officials had a difficult time punishing them. One man who attempted to serve the papers fared no better than Johnson had and was himself “seized whipped tarred and feathered and after having his Money and horse taken from him was blindfolded and tied in the Woods, in which condition he remained for five hours.”

These attacks on tax collectors were part of the events that, together, would become known as the Whiskey Rebellion—the latest uprising of white citizens from frontier counties against their own governments. The parallels to Shays’s Rebellion were many: both were in the western part of the state, both concerned economic policy, and both were insurrections that the community itself could not—or would not—suppress. Officially, the task of suppressing such rebellions still fell to the local militia, but that militia was made up of men who were taking part in the insurrection. Or, as one of western Pennsylvania’s leading men at the time wrote, the fear was that “government would call out the militia, and we were the militia ourselves, and have to be at war with one another.” It was the same dilemma that the Massachusetts governor had faced in Shays’s Rebellion, and it was the same dilemma Berkeley had faced in Bacon’s Rebellion. Robert Johnson had tried to collect taxes from men who were poor, indebted, discontented, and armed, and it had not gone well. As Saul Cornell notes, the rebels even went to great pains to present themselves as a militia, using militia rituals and rhetoric. Though people outside the region looked at the rebels as a “mob,” the rebels themselves tried to “convince the government that we are no mob, but a regular army, and can preserve discipline, and pass thro’ a town, like the French and American armies, in the course of the last war, without doing the least injury to persons or property.”

It took the national government several years to resolve the problems in the region. Eventually, George Washington would come to the same conclusion that Hamilton had come to years earlier: the national government had to call out troops to put down the rebellion once and for all. In September 1794, Washington issued a proclamation in which he stated that “the moment is now come when . . . every form of conciliation not inconsistent with the being of Government has been adopted without effect.” The “serious consequences of a treasonable opposition” had led him to use the powers he had and to summon into service the militia from not only Pennsylvania but New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia as well.

The subsequent crackdown on the rebels in western Pennsylvania was what the authors of the Constitution hoped for when they’d written the militia clause and then, later, the Second Amendment. Washington gathered an army of over ten thousand militiamen from those states and rode out with them to western Pennsylvania. Most leaders of the rebellion fled further west. Those who remained faced arrest by the men Washington had assembled. There would be no full-scale armed confrontation, though: the scale of Washington’s forces convinced the rebels in Pennsylvania that such a confrontation would not go well for them. Militarily speaking, that was the end of the Whiskey Rebellion. The government would still have trouble collecting the taxes on whiskey, and it would be some time before the reach of its enforcement would extend into Kentucky. But the period of open rebellion was over.6

One goal of the US Constitution had been to put the government in a better position to crack down on events like Shays’s Rebellion, and the Whiskey Rebellion had presented an opportunity to test its new powers. As noted in earlier chapters, the Constitution gave Congress the power “to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrections and repel Invasions.” That federalization of the militia, against which Henry and Mason had fought, had been the law of the land since 1789.7 The Second Amendment, which declared those militias necessary to the security of a free state, had been law since 1791. And the following year, Congress added a Militia Act that gave the president a power that previously only Congress had enjoyed—that of calling forth the militia. The president could invoke that power in case of “imminent danger of invasion from any foreign nation or Indian tribe.” He could also invoke it “whenever the laws of the United States shall be opposed or the execution thereof obstructed, in any state, by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” In those cases, the act continued, “it shall be lawful for the President of the United States . . . to call forth and employ such numbers of the militia of any other state or states most convenient thereto, as may be necessary.”8 President Washington had done just that.

In the immediate aftermath of the Whiskey Rebellion, some of the insurrection’s leaders were arrested. There was no serious attempt to track down those who had fled further west. And as had been the case—eventually, at least—after Shays’s Rebellion, there were few punishments of the men who had taken part in the rebellion. Though some men were arrested, they were subsequently either acquitted or pardoned.9

In describing the militia’s arrival in western Pennsylvania to Congress, Washington was able to take pride in the accomplishment of the men who had heeded his call: “It has been a spectacle, displaying to the highest advantage, the value of Republican Government to behold the most and the least wealthy of our citizens standing in the same ranks, as private Soldiers; preeminently distinguished by being the army of the Constitution. . . . Nor ought I to omit to acknowledge the efficacious and patriotic cooperation, which I have experienced from the chief magistrates of the States, to which my requisitions have been addressed.”10 From there, he took a moment to call for Congress to do something he had been hoping for since his 1783 Sentiments on a Peace Establishment: enact the kind of reforms that would put each state’s militia on a better footing: “The devising and establishing of a well regulated militia, would be a genuine source of legislative honor, and a perfect title to public gratitude. I therefore, entertain a hope, that the present Session will not pass, without carrying to its full energy the power of organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia; and thus providing, in the language of the Constitution, for calling them forth to execute the laws of the Union, suppress insurrections, and repel invasions.”11 Washington’s plea would go unheeded, though—as would a similar plea from Jefferson some years later. The Constitution’s militia clause and the 1792 Militia Act had added a new element to American life—the national government’s ability to call forth the militia and to rely on different states to pitch in. Otherwise, the state militias would continue to be what the colonial militias had been: a domestic police force that could at times cause more problems than it solved.

The Whiskey Rebellion had shown that the new system could better handle such unrest than the old system had; it also showed that the new system would not prevent such unrest from happening. Even the success of Washington’s actions against the Whiskey Rebellion raised the question of how much of that success lay in Washington himself, in his charisma and the respect he had enjoyed ever since the war ended. Washington had thought himself retired following the Revolution itself, until the Constitutional Convention brought him back in. He would go on to serve two terms as president before retiring once again and returning, once again, to his estate. Many of the most ardent rebels were citizens of Pennsylvania’s Washington County. Washington knew his history, and he thought about his legacy. He was the American politician who most easily could have turned Caesar. Instead, he chose—quite consciously—the path of Cincinnatus.12

There would be other rebellions during the early years of the republic, both while Washington was in office and after he left. But not all insurrections were created equal. In 1800, as John Adams’s term as president was winding down, word that there was another rebellion on the way reached the authorities in Virginia, including the governor, James Monroe. This time, though, the echoes were not of Shays’s Rebellion or of Bacon’s, but of Stono. The white population did not sympathize with the rebels, and the government was not lenient in its punishments.

For several years already, the fear of a revolt by enslaved people hitting the United States had been higher than usual. The French Revolution had spread to its Caribbean colony of San Domingue, leading eventually to an uprising there that would end French rule, free all enslaved people, and end with black rule of the independent nation of Haiti. White Americans feared that this spirit of rebellion would reach their shores. Already in 1793, a New York newspaper wrote of South Carolina “that the NEGROES have become very insolent, in so much that the citizens are alarmed, and the militia keep a constant guard. It is said that the St. Domingo negroes have sown those seeds of revolt, and that a magazine has been attempted to be broken open.”13 That was the context for the conspiracy led by an enslaved African American named Gabriel living near Richmond, Virginia.

Gabriel had planned an insurrection, but his plans were thwarted, in part by storms on the day he had chosen for the revolt, in part because several enslaved people informed their enslavers, who in turn informed the authorities. Gabriel fled but was captured. As historian Michael Nicholls notes, “Neither the geographical extent of the plot nor the number of insurgents in the conspiracy was revealed. In fact, the initial task for Republican governor James Monroe, beyond sending out some patrols, was to determine if the conspiracy even existed.” Monroe told Virginia’s General Assembly that he had “endeavored to give the affair as little importance as the measures necessary for de-fence would permit,” in the hopes that “it would even pass unnoticed by the community.”14 But word soon spread. With fears high, the militia responded to the potential, yet thwarted, rebellion by doing everything a militia was supposed to do: springing into action, engaging the rebels, defeating them, punishing them, and restoring order to the colony. Militia leaders in the region “demanded to be called into service,” according to Douglas Egerton, and “for the better part of the month, several hundred men . . . crashed about the county harassing blacks but finding virtually no conspirators. Finally growing tired of this sport, the Twenty-third agreed to be mustered out,” though not before presenting the governor with a bill for their time and services.15

As for the leniency that the men of the other rebellions enjoyed, there would be no such treatment for Gabriel’s men. The local courts tried, convicted, and hanged at least twenty-five men for having participated in the plot. As had been the case since the colonial era, American citizens’ tolerance for violence could extend along the social ladder of white society; it did not extend to Native Americans or to African Americans. The state militias would continue to be what they had been: unpredictable armed military organizations aimed at establishing and maintaining racial domination.

As the republic began, then, there was every sign that its militias were going to continue to be more or less what they had been during the colonial era. The limited ability of the national government to call on the militias of several states when needed had proved useful. But in the aftermath of the Revolution, the armed citizens of the new republic were acting a lot like the armed citizens of the colonies had. Nor was there any sign that the United States would begin to embrace the idea of a standing army any more than it had in the past. When Thomas Jefferson became president in 1801, he brought into the office a genuine sympathy for the citizens’ militia. Jefferson had declared in 1799 that “I am for relying, for internal defense, on our militia solely, till actual invasion . . . and not for a standing army, in time of peace.”16 Like Washington, he had hoped to get Congress to pass a significant restructuring of the militia. He was less concerned than his predecessors had been about the occasional insurrection or “trifling mutiny.”17 In his 1808 State of the Union address, he told Congress that “for a people who are free, and who mean to remain so, a well organized and armed militia is their best security. It is therefore incumbent on us at every meeting to revise the condition of the militia.” Some states, Jefferson noted, “have paid a laudable attention to this object, but every degree of neglect is to be found among others.” But while he urged Congress to “present this as among the most important objects of their deliberation,” Jefferson, too, got nowhere on this. Like Washington, he was unable to get Congress to reform the militia.18 He did succeed, however, in establishing the United States’ first military academy at West Point, as his way of helping ensure that the nation’s military growth took place in as republican a way as possible.19

The United States began the nineteenth century with its vision of a nation of citizen-soldiers still largely intact, even if the militia was not the institution that its advocates dreamed it might become. The permanent army was still small. The militia musters continued to be occasions for men to show their patriotism and demonstrate their citizenship, especially a muster on the Fourth of July.20 Being a citizen-soldier remained at once an idealized status for those who wrote about it and an unwanted burden for many of the men who participated. And in the South, the militias continued to serve as slave patrols, searching the quarters of enslaved people for weapons and policing their movements between plantations.21 This would not be the society of which Fletcher and Trenchard had dreamed. The Federalists had rejected the idea of disciplining the nation, and the nation had shown no signs that it wanted to be disciplined. But it remained a nation that relied on its citizens to serve as its police force and, on occasion, as its army as well. And it remained a nation where most of the political elite still believed that for a nation to be both free and secure, its citizens would have to spend part of their time as soldiers.

The United States of today is a far cry from the nation that emerged out of the eighteenth century. It would be hard to imagine otherwise; human society as a whole has changed more during those two-plus centuries than it had during any previous time. Most of those transformations lie well beyond the scope of this book. Several, however, are worth pointing out because of the direct influence they had on the themes of this book, starting with the abolition of slavery. During the first half of the nineteenth century, slave state militias retained their roles as slave patrols. The Civil War put an end to that. The militia in the southern states would not survive this change, especially since the Militia Act of 1862 not only included “all able-bodied male citizens between the ages of eighteen and forty-five” but specified that this would include “persons of African descent.” In the aftermath of the war, southern whites balked at serving in the militia. Some were barred from serving for having served in the Confederate Army. Others had no interest in serving alongside African Americans. The southern militias, as official state institutions, would never again be what they had been. Instead, white southerners began organizing voluntary, unofficial militias—groups of men who took it upon themselves to continue to “police” the free black population much as their predecessors had policed the enslaved black population before the war.22

The end of slavery and the inclusion of African Americans in the militia were part of a broader movement that changed the nature of American citizenship. At the start of the republic, citizenship was a privileged status to which only whites and males were eligible; most inhabitants of the United States were not full citizens. That is no longer the case. Starting with the Fourteenth Amendment and through the Nineteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act, the laws of the United States now guarantee that that anyone born in the United States is a citizen and that all citizens are equal in rights. The reality of both race and gender relations in the United States, however, has fallen short of equality. And while much of the racial and gender politics of the United States lies outside the scope of this book, guns and gun ownership always played a major role in America’s divisions and continue to do so today. The history of gun rights and gun control has gone hand in hand with racial politics. As long as the laws could, they made this link explicit: the militia codes of the antebellum South, for instance, encouraged white men to have weapons and participate in the militia but forbade most African Americans from both.23 The passage of the Fourteenth Amendment ended such explicit racial laws.24

Those old patterns have not disappeared, though. Gun ownership remains higher among whites than among people of color. It also remains higher among men than among women.25 Nonwhites are expected to justify their possession of firearms in ways that white gun owners are not.26 The American public also continues to react differently to gun violence depending on the race of the victims and to tolerate higher levels of violence when the victims are people of color or when the perpetrators are white.27 Yet even mass shootings that claim white victims, as at Sandy Hook in 2012 or Las Vegas in 2017, have led only to minimal changes in the laws regulating gun ownership. Just as Shays’s Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion did not lead the early republic to abandon the militia system, so too the toll of American gun violence—both the mass shootings that make the headlines and the daily toll of violence that make up the overwhelming majority of casualties—has not led the United States to change its approach to arming civilians. The United States remains an armed society, and citizen gun ownership remains high, as it was during the colonial era, even as that ownership has since become untethered from any membership in the state militia.28

The United States remains an armed society, but it is no longer an organized society. Its citizens are no longer organized into militia units, as they had been during the colonial era and the first decades of the republic. Instead, the United States became the kind of society that the Second Amendment was meant to prevent: a society with a large standing army under the authority of the executive branch, an army that is often segregated from civilian life and an untrained citizenry. Meanwhile, the time when Americans feared a standing army is long gone. The United States’ permanent standing army has become the most powerful fighting force the world has ever seen. The appropriate size of the military budget, military commitments across the world, and engagement in specific wars remain key elements of political debates, but the existence of a permanent army does not. Any politician who proposed eliminating the permanent army would be laughed off of the podium. So, too, would any officer who proposed reinstating mandatory militia duty. Jefferson’s attempt to reorganize the militia might have been its last chance to look anything like the battle-ready unit that he, and other militia advocates, would have liked.

The militia remained an important institution over the course of the nineteenth century, but it became clear that it would never be a full substitute for an external army. Nor would it be a full substitute for an internal police force. Here, too, the nineteenth century saw the growth of professional police forces, first in cities and then across the nation.29 As skepticism toward professional soldiers and policemen declined, so too did acceptance of the idea that most citizens should spend a part of their time in militia training.

The Militia Act of 1903 put the new reality into law by reforming the militia into two categories, only one of which entailed any sort of duty at all. Just as Washington, Jefferson, and others had called for, there would now be a two-tiered militia, where one portion of the citizenry would be trained to a higher standard. The second tier would exist in name only. According to that act, the militia would consist of “every able-bodied male citizen . . . who is more than eighteen and less than forty-five years of age.” But most of those able-bodied men were militiamen in name only; there would be no musters and no registers, and millions of men have lived and died without realizing that they were a part of the militia at all; the 1903 Militia Act simply said of them, “the remainder to be known as the Reserve Militia.” As for the “organized militia,” those citizens would still be part-time soldiers, but their training would be similar to the training that permanent soldiers received. Since 1903, the organized militia of the United States has been called the National Guard.30

In today’s United States, the Second Amendment has come to take on meanings well beyond those intended by the men of the eighteenth century. There has been an enormous shift over these centuries from viewing the amendment as a way to ensure that the state militias remained strong to an amendment that guarantees individual gun ownership. The modern gun rights movement places far more emphasis on the second half of the Second Amendment and its declaration that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” That shift in emphasis reflects the decline of the militia in American life since 1791. In the 2008 DC v. Heller case, the US Supreme Court made this shift from the amendment’s first clause to its second official by ruling that the Second Amendment protected an individual’s right to bear arms. Viewed from this book’s perspective, the Supreme Court’s 2008 ruling was not a return to the amendment’s “original understanding,” as the court claimed.31 Rather, that ruling endorsed the transformations of American society that have occurred since. A Second Amendment limited to its second clause is an amendment tailored for a society where most citizens are not citizen-soldiers and where participation in the militia is the exception.

There is perhaps no better measure of how the meaning of the Second Amendment has changed since 1791 than the way in which organizations who view themselves as protectors of the Second Amendment go out of their way to praise both the armed forces and the police. Professional soldiers have become paragons of patriotism, and politicians of any stripe criticize the army at their own risk. In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, Alexander Hamilton complained about “Republican . . . hostility to an army whatever be their merits.” As a result of that hostility, American society only acknowledged soldiers’ contributions “with unwillingness and . . . reluctance.”32 The men of the eighteenth century who clamored for a Bill of Rights believed in the importance of a citizens’ militia; today, however, people associate the amendment with private gun ownership. The United States has become a society where few people know what the militias of the founding era were, nor does the average American understand why the founders considered those militias to be necessary to the security of a free state. In other words, the United States has become a society where the Second Amendment no longer makes sense.

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@Krunoslav Thanks. Some interesting reading that can expand one's view.

I think what I wrote was very simple though.

The problem with liberalism and libertarianism, as I see it, is there is no foundation from which to proceed as regards a cooperative and coherent society. There is only a catering to individual desires that is supposed to represent freedom for the individual. Because an individual wants freedom to do whatever drug they want they do not see any damage or upset or chaos they create for others when they have that freedom. They damage themselves by trusting drug-pushers and not being properly informed as to what they are ingesting and they lose perspective on how to act in social settings. Freedom without responsibility and reason is a death trap. There is no thought of conservatism. The principles and foundation of a society should be very conservative and hard to change but there must be an avenue for change

Suffice it to say that some things need to be conserved and some things must be allowed to change.
That's how I see liberalism and conservatism. Time and circumstances regulate the balance between the two. Knowledge, reason and responsibility promote the optimal sustainability of a society. Mistakes are made when we lack knowledge with which to reason and only consider our personal freedom without responsibility to others or our environment as well as ourselves.

@FrankZeleniuk Yes. One might say...

“Modern liberalism suffers unresolved contradictions. It exalts individualism and freedom and, on its radical wing, condemns social orders as oppressive. On the other hand, it expects government to provide materially for all, a feat manageable only by an expansion of authority and a swollen bureaucracy. In other words, liberalism defines government as tyrant father but demands it behave as nurturant mother.” ― Camille Paglia, Free Women, Free Men: Sex, Gender, Feminism