In honor of July 4th, I decided to do a post on Thomas Jefferson’s opinions on the Second Amendment, the militia, and guns in general. There are hundreds of Jefferson biographies out there. This will only do some small justice to one topic of a very full life.
Jefferson’s thoughts on the right of citizens to keep and bear arms does not overlay modern Supreme Court decisions on the meaning of the Second Amendment, which emphasize the individual right of self-defense and glosses over the well-regulated militia aspect of the amendment. Jefferson was in France during the drafting on the Constitution and the subsequent debates surrounding its ratification and the later adoption of the Bill of Rights. He seems to have supported an individual right to own firearms for citizens to some extent, and for a citizen militia to eliminate the need for a standing army. In short, his preferences were for a militia-based interpretation of the Second Amendment.
Unsurprising, as Jefferson is a study in contrasts for much of the rest of his life, his thoughts on this topic are the same way. Let’s start off with his most famous quote on the topic. Almost all of the pro-gun rights crowd can point to a Jefferson’s most pro-gun opinion, written to his nephew in 1785, well into his retirement:
“Give about two of them [hours], every day, to exercise; for health must not be sacrificed to learning. A strong body makes the mind strong. As to the species of exercise, I advise the gun. While this gives a moderate exercise to the body, it gives boldness, enterprise, and independence to the mind. Games played with the ball, and others of that nature, are too violent for the body, and stamp no character on the mind. Let your gun therefore be the constant companion of your walks. Never think of taking a book with you. The object of walking is to relax the mind. You should therefore not permit yourself even to think while you walk; but divert your attention by the objects surrounding you. Walking is the best possible exercise. Habituate yourself to walk very far.”
For the pro-gun rights crowd, they make this out to be a mic drop moment. But in reality, all it shows is that Jefferson thought marksmanship was a good skill to develop in the same way that fencing, or sport Judo might be a good skill to cultivate. It has the combination of developing the mind and body, because it’s based on technique and not, as he imagined, brute force, with a predilection for injury. Doing some digging, the sports played will the ball in 1785 in Virginia might be cricket (first played in 16th Century England) and a sort of proto rugby (modern rugby wasn’t established until the late 19th Century) called folk football that had been played since the middle ages. King Edward the III once attempted to ban it in 1363 order to get people practice more with the longbow. It was noted by prominent writers to have been violent to the point of brutality. There is also the possibility, for anybody who remembers the scene from The Last of the Mohicans that he was referring to Lacrosse, a native stickball sport, but this isn’t likely in Eastern Virginia.
Regardless, any sports fan can tell you that even the best professional athletes in the world retire from the sport in their 30s because it takes longer to recover from inevitable injuries. Now imagine a world without good orthopedic medicine and you can appreciate Jefferson’s opinion. In France after the Revolutionary War, he fell hopping a fence and broke his arm, which was never set properly, and it pained him for the remainder of this life. On this pro-gun quote from Jefferson, it can only be taken as evidence that he supported private ownership and carriage of firearms to at least some extent, for marksmanship at least. No mention is made here of self-defense.
Moving on, I’d like to “debunk” another Jefferson quote on guns that is taken as his personal support for owning them. Writing to Washington in 1796 he wrote “One loves to possess arms, though they hope never to have occasion for them.” In full context, this quote comes from a dispute between him and Alexander Hamilton, the “arms” he was referring to were arguments and documents to be used to support his side in the dispute. To be fair to the use of this quote to the pro-gun crowd, it shows that the literary and allegorical mind of Jefferson was comfortable with the use of firearms, and he viewed the possession of them as a deterrence. But it cannot be used for any 21st Century ideas of gun rights. Of course, who expects nuance in the gun debate?
How Jefferson felt then about individual self-defense, the primary reason the Courts in America give for the Second Amendment? We have at least one clue. In his legal common place book where he put famous quotations from items he was reading (think of it as bookmarking a tweet) he wrote out a quote from the Italian Enlightenment criminologist Cesare Beccaria from his 'Essay on Crimes and Punishments,' originally published in Italian in 1764:
“Laws that forbid the carrying of arms … only disarm those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes … Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they are served rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”
That Jefferson was enamored of something enough to copy it longhand isn’t exactly the cut and dried evidence that Jefferson was pro-gun in a 21st Century conception of the idea of individual level self-defense. Jefferson also edited his own Bible, taking out all the parts of Christianity he disagreed with. His quoting of Beccaria shows that, at the very least, he thought the quote was interesting enough to copy, and thus to some extent must have agreed with it. We can infer he’d be against some forms of gun control.
Moving on from Jefferson’s own views on the personal use of firearms, there is strong evidence that Jefferson did support a right to revolution from an armed populace, which from there we can deduce that he would support a general collective right to keep and bear arms, though it appears he supported this in the context of a right to a citizen militia. Jefferson expressed sympathy for Shays’ Rebellion (a small post-Revolution uprising over taxes and debt that helped spell the end of the Articles of Confederation) writing from Paris in 1787:
“What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
Jefferson supported, in general, an armed populace. While in Virginia after drafting the Declaration of Independence, he helped write the new state constitution, he proposed the inclusion of a provision to promise “a freeman’s right to use arms while forbidding standing armies.” (Encyclopedia of Gun Control & Gun Rights, 2nd ed, page 167). This is along the line of the other provisions he supported, such as habeas corpus, freedom of the press and religion, and restrictions of monopolies, and thus deserves no special emphasis. But when it came to the topic of arms, he focused on trying to limit the use of a standing army which he felt, like other Founding Fathers, was a dangerous instrument the government can use against the people.
I’ll note here that Jefferson, in typical fashion of slaveholders at the time, supported restricting all sorts of rights to non-slaves, and men. If Thomas Jefferson did not want his slaves to vote, why would he want them to have guns so they could shoot him and run away to freedom?
In summary, while Jefferson may have supported a sort of generalized right of the people to keep and bear arms for marksmanship, and by arguable extension for self-defense, the primary reason he thought bearing arms was important was for a citizen militia service, lending support for the militia-based interpretation of the Second Amendment that we do not see from courts in the 21st Century.