In an article ostensibly written to provide an overview of the Supreme Court’s upcoming AR-15 ruling, the New Republic claimed that the idea that citizens are armed to fight tyranny is a “pop constitutional concept.”
Titled, “The Mother of All Assault Weapons Cases is Coming,” the article zeroes in on a brief filed by the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR) which contends that the Second Amendment is in place for “deterring tyranny.”
The New Republic noted that NAGR contends that “the constitutional check on tyranny” provided by an armed citizenry “is not obsolete” but may become so if the government is allowed to “ban the arms that make it credible.”
Matt Ford, author at the New Republic, responded to NAGR’s claims by noting, “I have written before on this pop constitutional concept, which is essentially a purported Second Amendment right to murder civil servants and assassinate elected officials.”
He later added:
This principle also runs counter to other Second Amendment precedents that emphasize how the right to bear arms only extends to lawful purposes. The lawful-purposes framing can itself be slippery—a constitutional right conditioned on statutory lawfulness is a half-right at best—but is even trickier if imposed as a defense against tyranny.
Perhaps it would be wise to look at Federalist Paper 46. Breitbart News pointed out that James Madison used that document to explain that Americans are exceptional because they are armed, and that such exceptionalism provides them an ultimate check on federal overreach.
Madison contended that one of the strongest checks on federal tyranny–if not the single strongest check–was an armed citizenry. He boiled down differences between Americans and their European counterparts by explaining that Americans could unite to stop a federal government intent on using military force to topple State power; disarmed Europeans had no such option.
In Federalist 46, Madison showed that the armed citizenry, together with “the existence of subordinate governments to which the people are attached,” provided the framework in which the people could rally to defend their lives and liberty. The people would band together in “militias”– officers being “appointed” by those local “subordinate governments”– and their banding together would be meaningful because the people were armed.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News 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 and the director of global marketing for Lone Star Hunts. He holds a PhD in Military History with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. He enjoys reading Philosophy and novels by Jack Carr and Nelson DeMille. He is a lever action man in an AR-15 world. Follow him on X: @awrhawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.