Well-Regulated Arms

By Thomas Gangale
17 June 2008

A couple of weeks ago, I happened to see a gun nut rant about the Second Amendment passed around via email. It was little more than a string of sound bites thrown together in no particular order, which is a poor substitute for a logical progression of statements in support of a conclusion. In any case, one of these slogans was the less-than-clever rhetorical question, "What part of 'shall not be infringed' do you not understand?" I forwarded this and the whole set of goofiness to a few people, with my own commentary.

I would like to ask, "What part of 'well-regulated Militia' does the NRA not understand?" Conveniently ignored is the concept of regulation, which is explicit in the Second Amendment. Furthermore, there is the premise of a "Militia being necessary for the security of a free State," which defines the context of "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms." The Second Amendment establishes the right of a free state to maintain its security by providing for itself the capability for organized use of force in the form of a "well-regulated Militia;" it says absolutely nothing about individual citizens providing for their own security through the use of force. To claim that an assault rifle is necessary to the security of a free citizen is a ludicrous misconstruction. It should also be understood that the Second Amendment, along with the other nine in the Bill of Rights, were written and ratified with the intent of limiting federal power over the states; accordingly, states reserve the right to regulate their militias, and to regulate the conditions under which its citizens may keep and bear arms for the purpose of maintaining the state militias.

Rights must always be understood in a specific context; they are never absolutes, because each government--federal, state, and local--and each citizen is a sovereign, and if sovereignty were absolute, there would be anarchy. Anyone who fails to understand this is most certainly unarmed in the intellectual sense, and ought to be disarmed in the interest of the security of a free state. Anyone who does not wish to be considered in this category can begin by reading and comprehending one complete sentence in its historical and legal context: "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."

One response I received was, "I've been educated and proud to be a gun owner. I believe you forgot 'Guns Don't Kill People, People Kill People!'"

Great, I thought. Here's a guy whose only reading material is on the freeway at rush hour.

Yes, you certainly dazzle me with your intellect by repeating what you read off of someone's car bumper. I'm happy for you that you are a gun owner and that you are very proud of that! I happen to own a firearm as well, but I don't go around patting myself on the butt about it, I simply exercise my constitutional right quietly. What you apparently fail to understand is that this right, like all rights, has limitations, because other people have rights as well. Their rights end where yours begin, don't they? Then the reverse is also true.

But really, there's nothing like a nuclear weapon for home defense. I separated from active duty at the end of the Cold War, when a number of strategic arms treaties were negotiated. I found it incredibly easy to convince neighbors that I, a former air force officer, had been entrusted with basing a nuclear warhead in my garage to avoid it being reported as required by the treaties. If you ever saw the clutter in my garage, you would immediately realize that there was no possibility of either verifying or falsifying this claim. It was my grandparents' house, so there was stuff all the way back to the 1930s. No one threw anything away during the Great Depression, nor afterward either. The Site Selection Team's inspection report gave it an "outstanding" rating. For some reason, during training for the program, we didn't refer to the warheads themselves, but to the keys, I suppose because it sounded so innocuous. During the Cold War, the nuclear strategy was called Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. The program I participated in to clandestinely re-base warheads was called Basing Of Nuclear Keys to Evade the Reporting System, or BONKERS. I recall that my neighbors accorded me a certain deference. You see, security is not necessarily a matter of firepower, but of deterrence.

Have a nice, bright day.

Then a neighbor wrote, "Tongue in cheek, right?"

I mulled this over. "Could have been, in which case I own him an apology. I took him seriously... seriously stupid."

"No, I meant to ask if your answer was tongue in cheek --- basing a nuclear warhead in your garage, etc."

Not to worry. The site was inactivated several years ago and the "key" was relocated. When I was debriefed from the BONKERS program (and, for that matter, when I was briefed into the program), I was not required to sign a nondisclosure statement. "Tell anyone anything you want. Most people will think you're having them on, but eventually your story and those of others who are participating or who have participated in the program will get picked up by our potential adversaries, and it will introduce an element of doubt in their minds." Sun Tzu wrote, "All war is based on deception." Make the enemy think you are in his front when you are not, make him think you are elsewhere when you are in front of him. Always give him cause to doubt your capabilities and intentions. Perhaps this was the real "key" to the BONKERS program. It could be that the program gave me no warhead at all, just an empty reentry vehicle. After all, in a number of strategic weapon systems there are decoys that deploy among the actual weapons to ensure their survivability, so it makes sense to me that some BONKERS sites were decoys. I suppose that we will never know for certain until the program is declassified someday and someone files a Freedom of Information Act request for program documentation.