Over the weekend Rep. Sean Casten (D-IL) suggested militia service is the litmus test for gun ownership and noted that “having small genitals is not sufficient reason to own a gun.”
Casten’s comments were captured by his challenger, West Point graduate Jeanne Ives (R).
Ives posted video of Casten making the comments during a webinar:
Ives responded to Casten’s comments, “Maybe [he] thinks overgrown frat boys are cool…[but] on behalf of women everywhere: overgrown frat boys are not cool. They are pathetic, and they can’t be trusted to make sound decisions on other people’s lives. It is clear he is not the moderate we were sold in 2018. It’s well past time that Sean Casten answered for his deeply concerning rhetoric and radical policy positions.”
It is a hallmark of the left to equate the right to gun ownership with militia service. But on February 1, 2018, Breitbart News noted that the Second Amendment’s mention of a “well regulated Militia” is foundational to the individual right to keep and bear arms.
For example, we must understand that the individual right to keep and bear arms is not in spite of the mention of a militia but because of it. In other words, because the militia played a key role in the Founders’ minds, and is intended to play a key role even now, the right to possess arms, with which to gather in militia, “shall not be infringed.”
If the people come together to fend off a tyranny, but lack arms, what shall they do, throw stones?
Consider the words of Founding Father James Madison, who used Federalist 46 to explain that the American citizenry had within itself the authority to band together for purposes of repelling tyranny. He clearly stated that “ultimate authority … resides in the people alone.” And he explained that even a federal government fitted with a standing army will find itself unable to overcome the people, armed and banded together: “Extravagant as the supposition is, let it however be made. Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger.”
But if the people are not armed, the militia has no teeth. Therefore, because a “well regulated Militia [is] necessary to the security of a free State, the right to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
In other words, the right to keep and bear arms is a surety that the militia will always pose enough resistance to keep the state and its citizens free.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange