Originally posted on C. Richard Archie‘s Substack: The Truth of the 2nd Amendment in TN.
In 1870, the powers that controlled Tennessee after the Civil War, took the chains and shackles off their black slaves and put them on the entire population under the guise of “safety”, selling to the public the “new” version of the right to arms, which in reality was no right at all.
The original constitution recognized (in part) the unalienable right of the people to bear Article 11 § 26
That the free men of this State have a right to keep and to bear arms for their common defence. (sic)
Wrongly couched in “common defense” as a reason, it should have simply recognized the God-given right to arms that preexisted the ratification of the Republic in 1791 and the state of Tennessee in 1796.
More important from that first version of our state constitution was Article 10 § 4:
The declaration of rights hereto annexed is declared to be a part of the constitution of this State, and shall never be violated on any pretence whatever. And to guard against transgressions of the high powers which we have delegated, we declare that everything in the bill of rights contained, and every other right not hereby delegated, is excepted out of the general powers of government, and shall forever remain inviolate.
Strong words from our ancestors who bled and suffered to bring forth on this bit of soil a state, a government if you will, as noted in the Preamble to that document, the government, that necessary evil is codified by that original. Life, Liberty and property sacrosanct to the People, but not to government, it must take your property to feed its all-consuming, voracious appetite for growth.
Vain and aspiring men in the legislature set about tearing from the moorings of Liberty the fruit of the promises made in writing, inked in blood and we, later generations, sit idle and allow their successors to whittle away Liberty one rule at a time.
From inception, the People had a right to bear their rifles for all lawful purposes and this was codified in the dicta from the most important Civil Rights case of our state Supreme Court in 1871, (notice this occurred after the Jim Crow re-write of our constitution in 1870). Scalia reasserted the intent of the Founders when he copied that understanding into his dicta in Heller:
“In Andrews v. State, the Tennessee Supreme Court likewise held that a statute that forbade openly carrying a pistol “publicly or privately, without regard to time or place, or circumstances,” 50 Tenn., at 187 (1871), violated the state constitutional provision (which the court equated with the Second Amendment). That was so even though the statute did not restrict the carrying of long guns.” – District of Columbia et al. v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 629 (2008)
Still today, the General Assembly sits resolute in its desire to make it a crime to bear arms protected by the Second Amendment. Once again we turn to Andrews:
“What, then, is he protected in the right to keep and thus use? Not every thing that may be useful for offense or defense; but what may properly be included or understood under the title of arms, taken in connection with the fact that the citizen is to keep them, as a citizen. Such, then, as are found to make up the usual arms of the citizen of the country, and the use of which will properly train and render him efficient in defense of his own liberties, as well as of the State. Under this head, with a knowledge of the habits of our people, and of the arms in the use of which a soldier should be trained, we would hold, that the rifle of all descriptions, the shot gun, the musket, and repeater, are such arms; and that under the Constitution the right to keep such arms, can not be infringed or forbidden by the Legislature.” – Andrews v. State, 50 Tenn. (3 Heisk.) 165, 8 Am. Rep. 8 (1871).
Regardless of statements to the contrary by some legislators, today we need no further clarification by a “higher court” than the one that recently ruled in the Hughes et al. v Lee et al. case. The Governor and Attorney General’s appeal is nothing but political theater, every discerning citizen can read for themselves the rules, all it takes is looking at the state’s highest court’s layout of their “holding’ that arms used for the protection of the Peoples lives and property and defense of the state itself when it is called for is a charge laid on the People by their ancestors, to keep “government” in awe of its true masters.
We are told in Article 1 § 2 of our Declaration of Rights that to accept such overreach by the elected or appointed employees is “slavish and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.”
