CONSERVATIVE Republican Brett Joshpe thinks the Republican Party has to embrace "sensible gun control" or pay a price at the ballot box. "Gun advocates will be hard-pressed to explain why the average American citizen needs an assault weapon with a high-capacity magazine other than for recreational purposes," he writes. Kevin Williamson calls Mr Joshpe's reasoning "soft-headed":





As crummy as popular militias have proven at defending against "sudden foreign invasions", they've been even worse at defending against "domestic usurpations of power by rulers". There is, I think, not a single case in modern history, certainly not since the invention of the Gatling gun. No popular militia has ever prevented the seizure of power by an authoritarian ruler. In countries with well-established democratic traditions, authoritarian takeovers are rare; when they occur, popular militias do not resist, or are ruthlessly crushed by national armed forces. In countries with weak democratic traditions, authoritarian takeovers sometimes go smoothly, or in other cases touch off periods of civil war, which are resolved when one faction finally defeats the others and imposes authoritarian rule. Name your authoritarian takeover: Germany, Japan, Russia, China, Egypt, Libya, Brazil, Greece, Spain, Indonesia, the Philippines, Iran, Chile, Argentina, Czechoslovakia, Syria—popular militias never resist authoritarian takeover and preserve democracy or civil freedoms. That is a thing that happens in silly movies. It is not a thing that happens in the world.

I don't really understand why Mr Williamson is even making this argument. There is no one in America today trying to argue that Americans should be able to purchase semi-automatic weapons only so long as they are members of a well-regulated militia; such an interpretation of the second amendment would have excluded Nancy Lanza and the vast majority of semi-automatic weapons owners. The Supreme Court has not held that Americans have a right to own semi-automatic weapons to defend themselves against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers, it has held that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defence in the home. If Americans were in fact interested in privately owning weapons that allow them to contend against the US Army, semi-automatic weapons would be as useless as BB guns against a grizzly—just enough to make the opponent angry. At a minimum, they would need fully automatic heavy-caliber weapons, rocket launchers, anti-aircraft missiles and tanks. Those are illegal.

It's worth reading the next few sentences in the passage Mr Williamson cites above, which Story wrote in 1833, to see what he was getting at.


Story was a wispy nostalgic, writing at a time when the growth of the army to fight Andrew Jackson's Indian wars was already rendering his ideas quaint. Within a few decades the Mexican-American and Civil Wars would render this vision of militia-based popular self-defence permanently irrelevant in American history.

Thinking about this question, however, is a useful exercise, because it helps us to picture what it is that Mr Williamson has in mind. He believes that American citizens have the right to engage in violence against the United States' armed forces and state or municipal police forces, whenever they decide that governments are usurping their powers. He believes in a right to insurrection. There is no such right in the American constitutional order. It is illegal for American citizens to decide on their own to attack law-enforcement agents or soldiers, regardless of whether they believe them to be acting on behalf of the "arbitrary power of rulers". In America, the government is chosen at the ballot box, and our representatives make the laws and execute them. What Mr Williamson is saying here is that Americans must have the right to own military-caliber weapons because such weapons are necessary in order to commit treason.

Finally, Mr Williamson argues that Mr Joshpe's Bambi-and-burglars stance has to be an argument for repealing the second amendment, not re-interpreting it. The Supreme Court, as noted above, disagrees. I have a different, somewhat idiosyncratic take on the second amendment: I think the first clause (the "well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State" part) is clearly a logical qualifier, and since history has demonstrated that militias are not necessary but actively pernicious to the security of a free state, the rest of the amendment simply drops. But I also have no problem arguing that the damn thing ought to be repealed. It has nothing to do with any important human freedoms, and any of the founders who thought it did were wrong.