The Republican Theory of The Second Amendment and Its Ironies

The (civic) republican theory of the Second Amendment holds that the citizenry's right to bear arms is necessary to prevent tyrannical governments from abridging liberty. The Second Amendment is a fail-safe; if the central government becomes oppressive, or if a conquering or colonizing force takes power, the citizens can band together in militias to overthrow the government. In the alternative, they can provoke the oppressive government to expend resources in putting down the rebellion, in the process weakening or delegitimating it. Thus, for example, the Boston Tea Party led Britain to clamp down on Boston, and this may have had the perverse effect of drawing more people to the side of the revolutionaries.

Of course, the civic republican theory is premised on a romantic notion of militias made of sturdy yeoman farmers determined to protect their families and their homeland in the name of liberty. Civic republican theory assumed that in the face of oppression the People as a whole would rise up-- that is, that when militias exercised their right of revolution, they would succeed only to the extent that they more or less represented a broad spectrum of popular discontent with a tyrannical government. But in practice, militias do not always consist of the whole people, but rather of particularly angry and aroused segments and factions of the population. And, perhaps more to the point, often the militias that arise to contest a hated government are not always composed of people with particularly admirable aims. Think of Honduras and El Salvador in the 1980's. Indeed, you might say, at the risk of hyperbole, one person's militia is another person's death squad.

In any case, before our very eyes, we are witnessing a demonstration of the republican theory of the Second Amendment, and the role of firearms in contesting a hated government in Iraq. That government, unfortunately, happens to the the provisional authority run by the United States. It is not clear whether the various Sunni and Shiite factions that are momentarily making common cause against the government in place-- that is, the United States of America-- truly represent the People of Iraq. There may, in fact, be no such thing as the People of Iraq. But there are people in Iraq, and many of them seem to hate the provisional authority (and the United States) very much, to the point that they are willing to take up arms against it. Or to put the point more piquantly, one person's minuteman is another person's mujahideen.

One of the interesting features of the new Iraqi Interim Constitution, as I have previously noted, is that it conspicuously does *not* guarantee the right to bear arms: Article 17 states: "It shall not be permitted to possess, bear, buy, or sell arms except on licensure issued in accordance with the law." That provision makes perfect sense if you are the occupier who wants to stabilize the country. The first thing you need to do is disarm the population. So you can see why the Americans don't want anything like the Second Amendment in Iraq. Nor does any occupying power. Nor, for that matter, does any tyrant or illegitimate regime. But the whole point of the civic republican theory is that the government doesn't get to decide whether it is legitimate or tyrannical; that decision must be left to the people themselves. That's why they need the right to bear arms.

Meanwhile, back at home, we see the Republican (with a capital R) theory of the Second Amendment in operation:

When the National Rifle Association opens its annual meeting here on Friday, it will do more than celebrate hunting, weaponry and the Second Amendment. It will also kick off a vigorous campaign to whip up support among its nearly four million members for President Bush's re-election.

Before tens of thousands of gun owners at the Pittsburgh Convention Center, the association's leadership plans to label Mr. Bush's likely Democratic opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, as a liberal threat to gun ownership. It is a message they will repeat again and again until Election Day, using the Internet, mailings, television advertising and their formidable nationwide network of gun clubs.

Now you may wonder why the NRA thinks that the Second Amendment is so necessary to democracy in the United States, but doesn't think it necessary in Iraq. After all, to quote President Bush himself:

Some of the debate really centers around the fact that people don't believe Iraq can be free; that if you're Muslim, or perhaps brown-skinned, you can't be self-governing or free. I'd strongly disagree with that.

I reject that. Because I believe that freedom is the deepest need of every human soul, and if given a chance, the Iraqi people will be not only self-governing, but a stable and free society.

It couldn't be, could it, that the NRA thinks that brown-skinned people in Iraq can't be trusted to have the basic civil rights that Americans have?

Well, perhaps there's a better way to make sense of the NRA's support for Bush. Perhaps it's not that brown-skinned people will misuse the right to bear arms. Perhaps its that you don't want people to have the right to bear arms when there is a serious chance that they will use it to overthrow the wrong government. That is to say, an armed populace may mistake the guardians of peace, democracy and security for an oppressive and tyrannical regime and exercise their Second Amendment rights in the wrong way.

But if that's so, then the Republican theory of the Second Amendment clearly isn't the republican theory of the Second Amendment.