William Rawle Quotes
No clause in the constitution could by any rule of construction be conceived to give congress a power to disarm the people.
William Rawle, 1759–1836, Attorney & Constitutional Scholar, A View of the Constitution of the United States, 1825
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
This was written over a decade before the Second Amendment became a part of the U. S. Constitution.
The Southern Rebels who insisted on their right to have guns during Reconstruction, viciously denied that same right to the newly freed slaves. Sickles tried to remedy this, but the KKK and other terrorists intimidated most of the Blacks into not using the right that they had. Later, they would do that with the right to vote.
At that time, ideology was not a driving political force and individual politicians often were hard to classify. For example, Humphrey was at the far left—an ultra liberal. Yet he was a staunch advocate of the right to bear arms. 50 years later there were no liberals who did not want to restrict gun ownership, And at that time, many Republicans were advocates of gun control, an unheard of situation in the 21st century beginning.
It would be more than a decade before the phrase “well regulated militia” would be added into the Constitution as the 2nd Amendment of the Bill of Rights. This resolution was the last of several passed at this meeting by which Maryland endorsed resistance to the British. So these resolations would have been widely distributed throughout the colonies and known by the leaders. In 1788 Alexander Hamilton Published Federalist 29 which also used the phrase. (See {588393}.) Then on September 25, 1789, the Congress proposed the Bill of Rights and the 2nd Amendment using the same key phrase, “well regulated militia.” Whether the drafters of the 2nd Amendment got the phrase from Hamilton’s Federalist 29 or from the Maryland Resolutions is not known but Hamilton’s was much more current. Did he get the phrase from Maryland? Did Congress get it from him? Did Maryland originate the phrase or was there an earlier use that influenced the Maryland drafters? At this point no one is sure, but the phrase is critical to the meaning of the 2nd Amendment because the Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the Second Amandment does not apply to individuals but only to the State’s right to bear arms within the “well regulated militia” and not as individual citizens. The right is that of the State government and that is why a state can control guns including banning them if they choose. So an individual in America does not have the constitutional right to bear arms. He may have a state constitutional right but in other states he may not use a gun in certain places and may not possess certain types of guns like hand guns which are illegal in New York, Washington DC and some other places.
William Rawle was an American lawyer in Philadelphia, who in 1791 was appointed as United States district attorney in Pennsylvania. He was a founder and first president of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, and for 40 years a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania.
