On Resistance to Tyranny in Heller
Jason Kuznicki on Mar 20th 2008
It’s taken for granted, often by some very smart people, that small arms are no match for modern military weapons, and that the Second Amendment is therefore no longer an effective shield against a would-be tyrant. Jonathan Rauch writes,
[In 1790] states’ armed populations could resist and overthrow a tyrannical central government, acting as an insurrectionary militia—much as Americans had recently done in overthrowing British rule. That may have made sense in 1790, but today the insurrectionary rationale would seem to imply a right to keep and bear surface-to-air missiles and grenade launchers, among other things.
This seems to give ordinary citizens far too little credit.
Many of us, after all, have military training of one kind or another. We know chemistry and ballistics. Many of us work with and/or own high explosives. I’d bet that, in the space of only a few days or weeks, private firms would have the capacity to make some pretty impressive improvised weapons, even if most of the military-industrial complex as it is usually understood were to side with the tyrant. If our government went totally off the rails, the ordinary citizen’s handgun would be a stopgap until bigger and better things came along, and these would arrive in short order.
Let’s add to this the fact that the typical person serving in the U.S. armed forces is a decent and freedom-loving individual, not well inclined to follow an outright tyrant, and certainly not well inclined to attack U.S. civilians. It’s a bit of a smear that these scenarios always presume the military’s unquestioning loyalty to state rather than the people.
In any event, I think if the American people demanded it, they would certainly have the material basis for a pretty strong insurgency against a tyrannical government — one that would be significantly weakened without the Second Amendment.
Am I missing something here?
Filed in The Barracks
I think you make a pretty good point. And it’s a point that I, at least, found to be quite a comforting thought. Does that count for something?
Also, I’m not sure how often you read Reason, and there’s a good chance you’ve already seen this, but I’d say Peter Bagge would agree with you.
I agree, although the thrust of the idea behind the Second Amendment (as opposed to the rule it enacts) is somewhat different. If a popular militia is protected, it ought to be used as the primary force for repelling invasions and in extraordinary circumstances for law enforcement. If that is the case, then government has little justification for keeping a large standing army. The point of the Second Amendment isn’t just to allow us to take on whatever standing forces the government has. It is to ensure that those forces are weaker in relation to the people in the first place. That is, it’s designed to prevent the very situation that Rauch is thinks makes this “insurrectionary rationale” obsolete.
[...] Are small arms enough to defend liberty? One counter example, Iraq and COIN (The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual). Iraq had an unbelievable quantity of small arms and explosives (still) just lying around for the taking. And the COIN methods work. [...]
Our military has proved itself to be effective in destroying the apparatus of foreign states, but unless the U.S. government were to institute of a policy of nuclear holocaust against the continental United States, I feel like the professional army wouldn’t stand a chance against a real guerrilla movement (or set of movements) operating in North America. It would be a bloody mess, but I’m not sure how much willpower the trained armed forces would have for such a thing. If Iraq looks ugly, think of fighting in the huge cities and vast, often mountainous, often heavily forested terrain of America.