Much less does the Constitution guarantee the right to engage in violent civil disobedience to revolt. and John Lewis learned from the inside of many a jail cell. Our Constitution does not even guarantee the right to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience to press reform, as Martin Luther King Jr. But that is completely different from the claim that the American Constitution itself - our binding positive law - guarantees a right to overthrow the American government. The revolutionaries undoubtedly asserted their right as a matter of natural law to overthrow a tyrannical government. This is true, of course, but also perfectly irrelevant. Raising arms and levying war against the United States can at a certain point become treason under Article III. Today, all 50 states forbid private paramilitary organizations - a reality at odds with the theory that self-appointed private militias or vigilantes can take up arms and start hunting alleged despots or other political opponents. In 1886 the court upheld an Illinois law criminalizing private paramilitary groups as a legitimate measure “necessary to the public peace, safety and good order.” The “militia” is not some reserve power to rebel against the government but the well-organized instrument by which state and federal governments have opposed domestic violence. The Supreme Court has been clear that the Second Amendment’s reference to a “well-regulated militia” means well-regulated by the government. On the contrary, the Supreme Court has emphasized the federal government’s power to enforce the law and quell insurrection.
Nor did the Supreme Court ever hold during the Civil War that the Confederates had a right to overthrow the Union to defeat what they clearly saw as President Abraham Lincoln’s tyranny. It is essential to reject the myth that frustrated citizens have a Second Amendment right to raise arms against the government - an outrageous betrayal of our Constitution.ĭespite all this abundant repudiation of insurrection and rebellion in the body of the Constitution, some House Republicans still parrot National Rifle Association talking points and insist that the Second Amendment - in invisible ink - protects the right of private citizens to overthrow the government by force.īut nowhere did the framers of the Second Amendment profess that idea, much less embody it in the constitutional text, something that might give pause to self-proclaimed originalists and textualists spouting the theory. history, freezes our ability to pass reasonable gun safety legislation and justifies even more deadly political violence. It valorizes the brutality of the worst insurrectionary domestic attack at the Capitol in U.S. Statements such as these were irresponsible enough before Jan. Capitol, Representative Lauren Boebert declared that the Second Amendment “has nothing to do with hunting, unless you’re talking about hunting tyrants, maybe.” Some champions of this insurrectionist theory of the Second Amendment seem to glorify violence against public officials. As Representative Chip Roy, a Republican, argues, the Second Amendment was “designed purposefully to empower the people to resist the force of tyranny used against them.” This purported right to overthrow the government means that the people must enjoy access to weapons that are wholly unnecessary for hunting or self-defense, such as military-style assault weapons. Many Republicans in Congress agree with Representative Matt Gaetz that the Second Amendment “is about maintaining within the citizenry the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government, if that becomes necessary.”
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