No, Ted Cruz, the 2nd Amendment doesn’t protect your right to rebellion

Yesterday, TalkingPointsMemo reported that Texas Senator Ted Cruz sent an email to supporters urging them to send him money to make him president so that he could, as president, protect their right to violently overthrow the president.

As the email read:

The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution isn’t for just protecting hunting rights, and it’s not only to safeguard your right to target practice. It is a Constitutional right to protect your children, your family, your home, our lives, and to serve as the ultimate check against governmental tyranny — for the protection of liberty

Cruz’s assertion was so absurd that Lindsey Graham — sporting an A rating from the NRA — not-so-subtlely compared Cruz to Jefferson Davis, pointing out that as far as armed rebellions go, “we tried that once in South Carolina. I wouldn’t go down that road again.”

The email is a reprisal of a meme normally reserved for NRA forums and first year government seminars at Liberty University, trotted out by gun activists once they’ve run out of arguments for why they so desperately need to keep an arsenal of high-caliber weapons stockpiled in their toolshed.

How historically nonsensical and utterly baseless Cruz’s claim is shouldn’t bear repeating, but if a US senator and declared presidential candidate is taking the argument seriously, it does. Here are just a few reasons why it makes absolutely no sense to say that the Constitution protects your right to revolt:

Citizens have guns to fight for the government

The Second Amendment states, in full, that “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

“Being necessary to the security of a free state” doesn’t mean “being necessary to the citizens’ ability to shoot government officials if they don’t like paying taxes.” When the Constitution was ratified, the United States was an extremely weak country. Having just come off the heels of the Revolutionary War and the disorganized disaster that was the Articles of Confederation, the country had little standing army to speak of and not a whole lot of money available to raise one. With Spain occupying Florida and a number of potentially unfriendly great powers — most notably Great Britain — running trade routes nearby, the country desperately needed to arm itself.

So the Founders deputized the citizens, guaranteeing their right to keep arms for the purpose of organizing into militias that could fight off invaders, as they had done during the Revolutionary War.

As long as you actually read the first 13 of the 27 words in the Amendment, this should make perfect sense. The most definitive answer to this comes from linguist Dennis Baron, who has apparently read the Constitution a bit more carefully than Ted “Nullify the Supreme Court” Cruz.

As he argued in an amicus brief filed for the DC vs. Heller case, the Second Amendment was meant to be read according to the grammar used at the time in which it was written. And in the 18th Century, if you opened your sentence (like this one) with a clause and a comma, everything after that clause pertained only to that clause. So “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed” refers only to “a well regulated militia,” and probably only to the extent that a well regulated militia is an essential component of our national security. If we were to rewrite the Second Amendment in 21st Century English, it would read something like this:

A well regulated militia is essential to the security of a free state. Therefore, the right to keep and bear arms for the purposes of maintaining a well regulated militia shall not be infringed.

So, no, Ted Cruz, the Constitution doesn’t say you can keep your gun in case one too many people sign up for affordable health insurance and you decide that that’s the last straw. It says you can have a gun if the United States Army falls apart and we need to rely on citizen brigades of militiamen to stave off a British re-invasion. That isn’t going to happen for the next ever, so you don’t get to keep your semi-auto just because it makes you feel like more of a man.

Wouldn’t you need a bigger gun?

Ted Cruz at a treason rally, via Creative Commons

But let’s say I’m wrong, and the Constitution does give citizens the right to fire on the police. Why are there any gun restrictions at all?

America’s standing army in 1787 wasn’t exactly intimidating. By contrast, America’s standing army in 2015 is, and I’m sure Ted Cruz would agree, not to be messed with. An AR-15 doesn’t hold a candle to your local police force; starting beef with the full firepower of the American military with nothing more sophisticated than a semi-auto is like bringing a ham sandwich to a gun fight. If citizens really did rise up and revolt with the guns currently available, they would lose and lose badly.

But under Ted Cruz’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, this shouldn’t be a problem. As far as he’s concerned, he’s got the right to the same firepower the military has.

It’s the logical conclusion of his argument. If you really can ignore the whole first half of the Second Amendment, and the Constitution does really guarantee citizens the right to keep and bear arms in case there’s a need for an armed insurrection, then why not Uzis? Why not RPGs? Why not frag grenades and anti-tank missiles and M24 Sniper Weapons Systems (the M24 is a sniper rifle so powerful that apparently the military doesn’t think calling it a “rifle” does it justice)? Hell, why not your own Black Hawk attack helicopter? I’m sure Sikorsky Aircraft, the company that makes them, would sell you one if you could afford it.

As soon as you say that any gun new gun restrictions are off the table because Americans have a universal, comprehensive right to bear arms, you’re also saying that all existing gun restrictions are off the table because Americans have a universal, comprehensive right to bear arms. There is no gray area as to which arms are and aren’t allowed. Combine that with an anti-government itch, and why wouldn’t you be filibustering bills over your God-given Constitutional right to play with your Call of Duty weapons in real life?

Dennis Barron didn’t get his way in DC vs. Heller. The court ruled that citizens have a right to a personal handgun for self defense at home. That may lead to more gun deaths than it saves, but I can at least understand the thought process behind the practical — if not Constitutional — argument for that right. The world has changed a lot since 1787. We don’t rely on militias for national security, and your over the counter handgun can do a lot more damage than the best muzzle loader ever could.

There are gray areas to be ironed out with respect to who should be allowed to own what kind of gun. Those are debates worth having. But we can start by all agreeing that, as an American, we aren’t going to give citizens the right, or the ability, to overthrow America.