The Second Amendment, the God given right of American citizens to keep and bear arms, is as American as apple pie. It's integral. And that was true when it was enshrined by our founders on December 15th, 1791. And it was certainly true five years ago when I first brought you this installment. I would argue it's just as important today when a sitting former vice president threatens to take out his own citizens with a F-35.
00:00:11.000And that was true when it was enshrined by our founders on December 15th, 1791, and it was certainly true five years ago when I first brought you this installment.
00:00:21.000I would argue it's just as important today when you have a sitting former vice president threatening to take out his own citizens with an F-35.
00:00:57.000I don't know which installment this is or what order we'll be going in doing different parts on American history with David Barton of Wall Builders.
00:01:04.000If you're not familiar with him, he has a bunch of artifacts here.
00:01:07.000You kind of like the queue of American history artifacts.
00:01:11.000We'll be doing a few different segments, American, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and today we wanted to get into the Second Amendment.
00:01:17.000So I know you have a lot of historical documents here, some cool old guns, which I assume I can't touch.
00:04:21.000Can you read us some examples of the laws in there?
00:04:23.000Yeah, I'll just read you some example of this law and what's required.
00:04:27.000If you want to get in and get up close, you can do that too.
00:04:31.000So, this is all over the state of Virginia, whatever community you live in.
00:04:35.000It says, in every citizen so enrolled to notify Shell within nine months or after, provide himself at his own expense with a good musket or firelock, with a priming wire and brush, a sufficient bayonet and belt, with a cartouche box, and three pounds of lead, bullets suitable to the bore of his musket or firelock, a good horn containing one pound of powder, and four spare flints, and Shell appears so armed, accounted and provided, when called out to exercise your duty, No, no, no.
00:04:59.000As a matter of fact, one of the fun stories of the American Revolution is a guy named Samuel Whitmore.
00:05:02.000and now here's all the stuff you gotta have.
00:05:10.000Matter of fact, one of the fun stories of the American Revolution is a guy named Samuel Whitmore.
00:05:17.000And what happened was the first battle of the revolution The second is Concord.
00:05:23.000And so after the British have been hit at Lexington and at Concord, they start marching back to Boston.
00:05:28.000And as they're doing so, they're just shooting Americans along the way.
00:05:32.000There were 4,500 Americans lined up along the road on the way back to Boston shooting at them, and they're just taking everything out.
00:05:37.000So the word goes ahead of the British.
00:05:39.000700, 800 British coming, you guys clear your houses because they're just taking people down.
00:05:44.000Old man, 80 years old, Samuel, he said, well not my house.
00:05:48.000So he goes inside, he gets his musket, he charges it, primes it, loads it, he gets two pistols, primes it, loads it, he sticks a sword in his belt, he walks outside, sees 800 British coming at him, ups with his musket, shoots one, drops it, ups with two pistols, shoots them.
00:06:01.000Okay, so now we're left with 700 Still seems like a problem.
00:06:29.000We've shown you don't want to mess with us.
00:06:32.000The neighbors heard the shooting over at old man Whitmore's house and came to look and when they got there, he's lying there in a pool of blood.
00:06:40.000Reloading his guns to get another shot off as a British reliever.
00:07:10.000On the other end, you've got John Quincy Adams, when he's eight years old, is with the Massachusetts Minutemen, performs all the drills, does all the musket stuff.
00:07:18.000So, Lexington Green, all that stuff, he's out at eight years old, getting ready for all of that.
00:07:23.000So, whether you're eight or whether you're 80 or 98, it doesn't matter.
00:07:27.000So that kind of brings us to the next question.
00:07:30.000Everything you've just talked about, muskets or single-shot pistols.
00:07:33.000A lot of people say if the Second Amendment were written today it would be different because they didn't take into account, for example, firearms that might have had higher capacity or were more effective.
00:07:43.000Do you have any answers for those folks?
00:07:44.000Yeah, you remember they had 10-shot muskets.
00:07:46.000Remember the muskets they used back then?
00:08:04.000You're allowed, as a citizen, to own cannons.
00:08:06.000Yes, that was the letter of mark and appraisal to... was it from... Well, you have Madison, you have all the... As a matter of fact... Yeah, was it Madison?
00:08:15.000Well, when you go back in state laws, state laws provide for it.
00:08:17.000So the Founding Fathers talked about it because what they did was say, hey, don't set your cannon off within a mile of town.
00:08:35.000But in case it does, we defend ourselves from anything that comes after us, whether it's from foreign or domestic, whether it's a gang, whether it's the government, whether it's, again, a crazy uncle.
00:09:09.000And actually, there were some 1830 decisions where certain towns said, we're not allowing you to have cannons, we're not allowing you to have these weapons, and the court struck it down and said, you can't do that.
00:09:19.000You can't put a limitation on how people defend themselves.
00:09:21.000Those almost sound like Black Cat laws, like don't light off the cherry bombs on the 4th
00:09:25.000of July if you're on this side of the county line because it's more of a noise ordinance.
00:10:58.000I have a great letter here from John Quincy Adams who talks about how his kids are now 10 years old and I want them trained on the use of guns.
00:11:06.000He says because accidental deaths happen because you don't know how to use guns.
00:11:10.000They don't come from misfiring and firing the wrong stuff.
00:11:12.000And I'm pretty familiar with firearms.
00:11:14.000Wouldn't know the first thing about how to get this to work.
00:12:02.000And what happens is it's not going to fall and create a spark and set it off.
00:12:07.000So you pull it back there while you're loading up with powder.
00:12:09.000So what you start, powder here, then you drop a .78 caliber ball on it, then you put wadding in, cram it down so that when you go up it's not going to roll out the end.
00:12:18.000Then you go right here and you load this with powder.
00:12:21.000There's a little hole that goes inside.
00:13:47.000So they're tough guys, but this is individually, and every single 16-45 year old who is required by law to have one of these, have all the stuff that went with it, have enough ball and powder to shoot.
00:14:01.000Now, is this only if they were actively enrolled in the military?
00:14:29.000It was a natural right, and a natural right, as you said before, it's not given us by government, it's recognized by government, it's to be protected by government.
00:14:37.000But like you said, for some people, they might argue, well, this is something that couldn't be hidden, so it was all open carry, as opposed to being concealed, and they would say... Go back to this, go back to this, go back to these, you can hide this under, you know, you got those long jackets, you put that in, hide it.
00:14:53.000Welcome to Hyde, but there, you know, one of the differences back then was we also had a common set of moral values, and so whether it be the Ten Commandments or something else, we have a record of one of the Founding Fathers.
00:15:06.000His name is Justice Kent, and James Kent is called a Father of American Jurisprudence.
00:15:13.000And he talked about the crime wave that they were having in New York.
00:15:16.000He was the chief legal official in New York.
00:16:53.000Well, what made her a feminist was she advocated for all sorts of women's rights.
00:16:59.000But you don't hear that today because the one riot she said especially, here's what makes men and women equal, the gun.
00:17:06.000If a woman can handle a gun as well as she handles a baby, there's not going to be inequality.
00:17:11.000And so that doesn't line up with modern feminism, but she was the first female superstar in a male's world.
00:17:20.000And she, I mean, what she did, these are targets that she would use.
00:17:26.000In one particular setting, her husband, Frank, they had a launcher.
00:17:31.000It's kind of like a skeet thrower, but it would throw these, and he threw 5,000 of these out, and with a rifle, not a shotgun, with a rifle, she shot 4,772 of these.
00:19:54.000So, PE, and this is from all the way through the 1970s, and oh my gosh, do we have all sorts of sports here.
00:20:00.000If I can get to the front cover of this thing.
00:20:03.000Yeah, we've got angling, and archery, and badminton, and baseball, and softball, and basketball, and bowling, and field hockey, and golf, and gymnastics, and jumbling, and handball, and lacrosse, and Right here, we have an entire section on riflery.
00:20:16.000And so, this is what we're teaching the 70s, teaching kids how to handle the rifle, the parts of the rifle, all the different parts, and it also shows, along with the rifle, targets, how to score a target, and it shows you how to use a sling when shooting.
00:21:17.000So all of this, all the different positions for shooting, standing or prone or sitting or whatever, this is every kid.
00:21:23.000Let me ask you this, because we start with the Second Amendment as we're talking about, and clearly if you go through the historical documents, It's meant for more than just muskets, right?
00:21:32.000Everyone was, constituted the militia.
00:21:35.000And now you've showed us these different examples of people who are very comfortable in firing firearms in the schools up until the 70s.
00:21:41.000When did this sort of phobia of firearms happen?
00:21:45.000Because the entire time that I've been alive, it's not been that kind of a scenario.
00:21:49.000We've always been told that, you know, don't touch a firearm, don't go near it, let a parent know, stay away from it.
00:21:54.000You'll see a massive change in the value system in the 60s and the 70s.
00:21:59.000We started saying, don't tell me what's right and wrong, and you can't tell me what's right and wrong, and we can't let... In 1980, the Supreme Court said, you can't let kids see the Ten Commandments.
00:22:07.000If they saw something like don't steal and don't kill, they might obey it.
00:22:10.000So, I mean, we're even at the point where we're taking down what was in courthouses because there's moral values attached to it.
00:22:17.000With that becomes an increase in lack of self-control.
00:22:39.000I also knew someone who named their son Abel, which sort of seems like you were destining him for failure.
00:22:44.000But we sort of see a bell curve, right?
00:22:46.000Like you talk about kind of the, I would say really the 70s, 80s, 90s, particularly sort of came to a crest in the 90s, the anti-gun sentiment.
00:22:53.000And now we probably have more firearm open carry rights.
00:23:33.000So, where citizens have the right to defend themselves, I mean, in Texas, quite frankly, nobody really wants to break into a house, because most Texans own about 23 guns, and you don't want to face what's on the other side of the door.
00:23:45.000Now, what would you say to people who compare it, and we do have to get going, I know we have other installments, we have to get to freedom of speech, and we have one on the Revolutionary War, pre, well, kind of pre-Second Amendment, but what would you say to people who say, well, internationally, you know, we have the worst gun crime in the world, and so some of them acknowledge everything that you're talking about, but they say, We just got it wrong, because we have more violent and more government here.
00:24:05.000You know, we do have more crime, but we have more freedom than anybody in the world.
00:24:08.000We have less government than anybody else in the world.
00:24:11.000I like the fact that I can have my own property.
00:24:16.000I don't have a 68% tax rate like they do in the Scandinavian nations.
00:24:20.000I like the fact that I can decide what I want to do with my kids.
00:24:24.000If I'm in Germany and homeschool my kids, I will go to jail.
00:24:27.000We have more freedoms, and you know, that's Unfortunately, we don't have the same morals we had for a number of years.
00:24:34.000You know, one of the things I look at with the Great Depression, when you have so much unemployment, crime didn't go up except in Al Capone-organized crime.
00:24:44.000Because everybody had that sense of the Good Samaritan, the Golden Rule, and you know, now today, if we had a downturn economically today, oh my gosh, it'd be who's got the biggest... Yeah, because they often say that crime and poverty are sort of synonymous.
00:24:58.000Yeah, the Great Depression proved that that didn't happen.
00:25:01.000And it is more of a heart issue in so many ways, and we don't deal with good neighborhoods.
00:25:07.000We don't deal with civility and civics and just the responsibilities.
00:25:11.000So I think that's coming back, and I know that there is a lot more of that in certain geographic regions of the country, and you see the crime is down in those regions.
00:25:19.000So where there's less civility, you see a lot more crime.
00:25:22.000And even where you have very stringent fire alarms in San Francisco, they'll just defecate on you.
00:25:31.000Final question, before we end this segment, and happy 4th everybody, what would you say is the biggest misconception, the number one thing that people get wrong about the Second Amendment?
00:25:40.000It is none of the government's business.
00:25:42.000It is an inalienable right given us by God.
00:26:22.000I think that's the biggest misconception is we think we've allowed government to have a role it should never have had.
00:26:27.000I think that's a good point and I think the undergirding history and we'll have some links to some of the other historical documents that I highly encourage you read because there's obviously a lot to brush up on outside of just the Declaration and the amendments.