As the Supreme Court prepares to hear a major case on AR-15 style rifles, a writer at the New Republic has dismissed the idea that the Second Amendment exists to let citizens check government tyranny, calling it a “pop constitutional concept.”
The comment came in a New Republic piece titled “The Mother of All Assault Weapons Cases is Coming,” which examined a brief filed by the National Association for Gun Rights (NAGR) in the case now before the Court. NAGR’s brief argues the Second Amendment exists in part for “deterring tyranny,” and that this check “is not obsolete” unless the government is permitted to “ban the arms that make it credible.”
New Republic writer Matt Ford pushed back on that argument directly. “I have written before on this pop constitutional concept, which is essentially a purported Second Amendment right to murder civil servants and assassinate elected officials,” Ford wrote.
Breitbart News, which reported on Ford’s remarks, countered by pointing to Federalist Paper 46, in which James Madison laid out why an armed citizenry mattered to the framers. Madison argued that Americans were distinct from Europeans precisely because they were armed, and that this gave them a check on federal overreach that unarmed populations lacked.
Madison held that an armed citizenry was one of the strongest checks — possibly the strongest — against federal tyranny. He argued that Americans could unite against a federal government attempting to use military force against the states, an option unavailable to disarmed Europeans.
In that same essay, Madison described how the armed citizenry combined with “the existence of subordinate governments to which the people are attached” to form the structure through which the people could organize to defend their lives and liberty. That structure took the form of militias, with officers “appointed” by local governments — and the arrangement carried weight only because the people themselves were armed.
The exchange highlights the core disagreement now before the Supreme Court: whether the constitutional right to keep and bear arms is fundamentally about self-defense and lawful use alone, or whether it also serves as a structural safeguard against government overreach, as NAGR and gun-rights advocates argue and as Madison’s own writings describe.
