There Is No Constitutional Right to Treason

       I am far from being a liberal anti-gun activist. I believe that the Second Amendment gives all Americans the right to own firearms, to go hunting, to shoot targets, and, in the gravest emergency, to protect our lives and our homes. In two recent decisions, the Supreme Court has made it clear that the Constitution protects the right to self-defense through firearm ownership on both the state and the federal level. I'm cool with that.

       What the Constitution does not give us, however, is the right to commit treason. There is no Second Amendment right to armed insurrection, just as there is no Tenth Amendment right to secession or revolution. Unfortunately, this distinction has been all-but lost in the current debate over gun violence. Take, for instance, this much-forwarded post from the Libertarian supersite, “The Daily Paul” titled “Why Do I Need an Assault Rifle?”:

To put it bluntly, I need an assault rifle in the event that I might have to declare my independence from a tyrannical government. I'm statistically unlikely to ever shoot an intruder in my home. I'm statistically unlikely to ever be in the position to stop one of these rare mass killings at a school, as these things happen far less often than the media would have you believe. However, whether you are Democrat or Republican, you can easily find countless instances of the government stepping all over your rights, whether it be on social issues (marriage, gay rights, religious rights, etc.) or fiscal issues (taxation, property rights, business regulations, etc.)

       Just last week, Fox News Infotainment superstar Andrew Napolitano took this seemingly extreme view mainstream, writing in the Washington Times that

The historical reality of the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms is not that it protects the right to shoot deer. It protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon us.

To support this assertion, Napolitano creates a tortured argument from the Declaration of Independence and from a patently false argument from history (that the reason the Colonists won is that their firepower was equal to that of the British). He does not incorporate any discussion of the original public understanding of the Second Amendment because he cannot. It simply isn’t there. Providing the apparatus for their own violent overthrow is not the sort of things that Constitutions do.
       But it is the sort of thing that people throughout American history have always thought that the Constitution should do. And, unsurprisingly, such people have always believed that they had the sole discretion to determine who was a tyrant and who was a legitimately elected President of the United States. This, ultimately, is the great fallacy of the position. Tyrants don't exactly wear T-shirts advertising the fact, and many of the people who feel qualified to determine who is and who isn't a tyrant happen to be crazy.
       In their own time, both Washington and Lincoln were denounced as tyrants and opposed by armed citizens who felt that they had the Constitutional right to take up arms against the government. Washington himself put down the rebellion by Pennsylvania farmers outraged at Hamilton’s direct tax on distilled spirits. In Lincoln’s case, more than 600,000 people died testing the proposition that the Constitution contained the implements of its own destruction. And when John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln in the head, his words (sic semper tyrannus!) indicate that, in his own mind, he was simply exercising a Constitutional right that, according to Napolitano, all Americans have by the laws of nature. 

       If the time ever comes when the government of the United States really is a tyranny those who rise up against it will have to do so outside of the Constitutional order. That’s what revolution means. If you are a "revolutionary," you don't get to be a "law-abiding citizen," period. None of the Founding Fathers thought they were being “good British Subjects” when they signed the Declaration of Independence. Those few benighted souls today who believe that they are following in the footsteps of George Washington need to stop pretending that they are “good American citizens.”
       In the mean time, the rest of us need to have serious conversations about guns and about what Constitutionally permissible restrictions we can place upon them. The recent Heller and McDonald decisions by the Supreme Court make it very clear that, while outright gun prohibition is unconstitutional, many, if not most, limitations on guns DO NOT violate the Second Amendment. Limitations on who can own guns, how they should be licensed, where they can be carried, etc., fall well within the scope of the normal political process.

        However, all of the discussions that we need to have must start with the presumption that the right to bear arms flows from the right to defend oneself, and one's family, from direct and lethal threats. If we are going have anything like a productive discussion about gun violence in America, we are going to have to call out, as the nonsense that it is, the notion that the Constitution conveys upon all Americans, the right to carry out an armed insurrection against the government.