NYT Gets Second Amendment Backward in ‘Right to Kill’ Story
A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist's claim that the Constitution lacks an explicit individual right to gun ownership has drawn criticism for contradicting historical evidence and constitutional interpretation.
Mike McIntire, a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, recently published a lengthy feature in the New York Times claiming that the Constitution’s text contains no explicit individual right to firearms for everyday self-defence. As David Harsanyi argues in Washington Examiner, this interpretation turns constitutional history entirely on its head.
McIntire’s work, derived from his book examining guns and violence in America, suggests that finding an individual right to bear arms in the Constitution represents the grand project of the modern gun lobby. However, historical evidence and constitutional interpretation point in precisely the opposite direction.
Understanding the Second Amendment’s Structure
The Second Amendment contains two distinct components: a prefatory clause explaining purpose, and an operative clause establishing the actual right. While the text references a well-regulated militia as necessary for security, the operative clause clearly states that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
The amendment explicitly invokes individual rights by using the phrase “the right of the people”—identical language found in the First and Fourth Amendments, both universally recognised as protecting individual liberties. The word “people” denotes individuals, not collective entities.
Historical Evidence Contradicts Collective Rights Theory
The notion of collective rather than individual gun ownership represents a modern reinterpretation unsupported by historical practice. Colonial militiamen were never required to surrender their muskets to the Continental Congress after driving British forces back to Boston, nor to George Washington following victory at Yorktown.
Individual firearm ownership pervaded colonial society and continued throughout American history. No serious debate existed regarding this right during the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, or for most of the twentieth.
Extensive documentation from founding-era intellectual, political, and military leaders demonstrates their commitment to self-defence and individual arms ownership. John Adams, defending British soldiers after the 1770 Boston Massacre, argued that all men possessed an inherent right to self-defence.
Adams invoked British common law in stating that self-defence constituted the primary canon in the law of nature. This sentiment appears repeatedly throughout founding-generation writings and speeches.
Madison and the Bill of Rights
James Madison initially questioned whether a Bill of Rights was necessary precisely because he considered these freedoms self-evident. His concern centred on whether formally enumerating rights might inadvertently limit their scope.
The founders’ support for militias over standing armies further reinforces individual gun ownership—they wanted citizens to possess weaponry capable of deterring tyranny. To the founding generation, “well regulated” meant well-trained, not subject to government regulation.
Property Defence and Stand Your Ground
McIntire’s analysis criticises what he characterises as a distinctly American tradition of defending person and property, suggesting historical doctrine permitted self-defence but not property protection.
Roger Sherman, the only individual to sign the Continental Association, Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, and Constitution, explicitly disagreed. He maintained that bearing arms and resisting attacks upon liberty or property constituted essential citizen rights, regardless of the attacker’s identity.
The investigative reporter describes the castle doctrine and duty to retreat as abstractions increasingly exploited to justify homicide. He cites Tennessee legislation supposedly making it easier to legally shoot someone stealing garden equipment, though his own description reveals the law requires belief that the intruder poses a threat to persons—a significant qualification that undermines his initial characterisation.
The constitutional debate over firearms ownership continues to generate profound disagreement, with critics of modern gun rights advocacy inverting historical evidence to support contemporary policy preferences.
With information from Washington Examiner
