A Check Against Big Government

Kevin Williamson at NRO makes the naked, if not quaint, case for the civil right known as "keep and bear arms":

There is no legitimate exception to the Second Amendment for military-style weapons, because military-style weapons are precisely what the Second Amendment guarantees our right to keep and bear. The purpose of the Second Amendment is to secure our ability to oppose enemies foreign and domestic, a guarantee against disorder and tyranny. Consider the words of Supreme Court justice Joseph Story - who was, it bears noting, appointed to the Court by the guy who wrote the Constitution:

The importance of this article will scarcely be doubted by any persons, who have duly reflected upon the subject. The militia is the natural defence of a free country against sudden foreign invasions, domestic insurrections, and domestic usurpations of power by rulers. It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in time of peace, both from the enormous expenses, with which they are attended, and the facile means, which they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers, to subvert the government, or trample upon the rights of the people. The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.

"Usurpation and arbitrary power of the rulers" - not Bambi, not burglars. While your granddad's .30-06 is a good deal more powerful than the .223 rifles that give blue-state types the howling fantods, that is not what we have a constitutional provision to protect. Liberals are forever asking: "Why would anybody need a gun like that?" And the answer is: because we are not serfs. We are a free people living under a republic of our own construction. We may consent to be governed, but we will not be ruled.

While Mr. Williamson is absolutely correct in his radical, frankly fundamentalist reading of the Constitution--I said "quaint" above because the leftist-liberalist pols and media types have seem to forgotten that the Bill of Rights isn't a Bill of Suggestions--his article misses how arms in the hands of the people serve to check the growth of government before it gets started. Not by threatening violence against agents of an over-large Leviathan, a proposal that, while true, makes nanny state liberalists wet their pants, but by ensuring that there is no "need" for a large security apparatus in the first place. The people themselves take care of their own security, not police (who are minutes away when seconds count), and not police at schools, the asinine and expensive idea that Mr. LaPierre of the NRA floated last week, apparently thinking that recycling big-government Democrat ideas make for sound public policy. Much harder to justify calls for more security and safety when sheepdogs protect the flock from the wolves.

Then there is the age-old question, quis custodiet ipsos custodes?, not a trivial query when the security state, being peopled as it is by people, is so easily corruptible, as Mr. Williamson himself noted on page 2 of his article.