Many of the gun rights advocates I come across in my readings make a claim that an armed citizenry places a check on oppressive government.  Public officials, they say, including the police, should fear the population, and worry that armed insurrection is possible.  They especially like the Hitler Used Gun Control to Keep Power myth, though the 1938 Waffengesetz arguably loosened gun laws in Germany and facilitated gun ownership.  Government, they suggest, is not an agent of a citizenry acting as a principal and controlling it through participatory democracy.  It instead has its own agency, independent of the will of the people, with interests opposing that of the people.  In this formulation, the purpose of the Second Amendment, is to ensure that citizens have the tools needed to perpetuate this threat, and to carry it out in the event government becomes oppressive, since citizen participation in democratic institutions is not sufficient to direct government action.

This of course leaves several things unclear.  First, it is not clear what specific government actions might lead to insurrection.  Presumably, potential causes include percieved rights violations, particularly attacks on gun rights.  Excessive taxation might also create popular support for armed rebellion in the US, or declaration of martial law would trigger revolt.  Among certain parts of the population, even cultural change could cause unrest, or broad legalization of abortion.  But potential insurrectionists say nothing about how they define any of this, or why exactly their justice clam should privilege against government institutions in a democratic society responding to the general population.  In any event, actual real life attacks on civil liberties related to fighting terrorism has not generated a response from these people, which suggests that their real concern isn’t oppressive government policies, but government policies they don’t like.  When they cannot get what they want through the political process, they claim rights violations and threaten insurrection.  Since it appears that only government action against certain sub groups (e.g. gun owners) would trigger revolution, and infringement on the rights of other tribes has not inflamed the passions of most Second Amendment supporters, these people look more like sore losers than freedom lovers.

Insurrectionist rhetoric raises a second question: what goals might contemporary revolutionaries seek to achieve, and on what conditions, besides an armed citizenry,  would success depend?

Say for example Congress passed much more restrictive weapons regulations, and even mandated confiscation of certain types of firearms.  However unlikely this would be today, shifts in demographics (e.g. further shift from a rural to an urban population) and social norms about guns (which I predict), could create a large enough constituency for stronger government restrictions on firearm ownership.  This could happen in the context of crime (or terrorism–imagine small al Qaeda bands shooting up shopping malls) control and include restrictions on hand guns or automatic weapons (to home use, for example), or an effort to reduce the number of weapons in circulation, and require owners to surrender all but a certain number or type of gun.  Congress might first act to repeal the Second Amendment, or amend it to make either an individual or collective right to bear arms more clear.  In any event, this could not happen without some consensus among the general population, since without it elected officials would expect and receive rebuke at the polls soon thereafter.

Would gun owners reject the power of Congress to amend the Constitution in this way, despite the clear intent of the Founders, based on a natural right to self defense?  Should their political efforts (courts, elections) prove unsuccessful, what revolutionary goals would they seek to achieve?  Overturned elections?  Revision of the court system?  A new Constitution?  Do they expect the Americans who supported this policy, won at the ballot box and in the political system, and like the result to roll over and surrender their policy victory  at the brandishing of weapons?

Anti-government rhetoric has increased dramatically since Reagan claimed that “government is the problem.”  With tea party partisans and gun rights advocates challenging the legitimacy of government, these are not academic questions.  Large numbers of Americans challenge the legitimacy not only of government, but of the political system we use to set policy and act collectively.

I submit that threatening violent insurrection in the face of political defeat is in fact a treasonous threat to overthrow the legitimately constituted government, and this itself justifies confiscation of firearms.