An armed confrontation with government is not, of course, what Pretti was seeking by coming armed to an obstruction of ICE operations (Vice President Vance to the contrary). Such a confrontation is also not the tone of the Gun Owners’ statement. It’s not even the tone of the Atlantic article, despite Harper’s very explicitly invoking the traditional belief that the Second, and only the Second, puts teeth in the whole Bill of Rights because, supposedly, it enables an armed public to be ready to defend those rights. Neither Harper nor anyone else in serious public discussion is really raising the scenario that gun-culture people like Harper imagine is embedded in the Constitution: armed popular resistance to tyranny.
I think that’s because the whole idea makes no sense and never has—not in 1689, and not in 1791. A government in the process of violating constitutional rights has already gone well past the point where it’s likely to be receptive to a demand that it change its ways or suffer consequences brought about by a public that’s been allowed to collect firearms, and no industrial-strength government is afraid that the public will be well-armed enough to effectively fight government. I used to think “What’s your Glock going to do against tanks and nukes?” but now I also think “What was your blunderbuss going to do against a cadre of dragoons?” Lexington and Concord was a one-off surprise. Achieving independence required a regular army, and General Washington, anyway, found militia participation a headache at best.
I’ve written elsewhere and often about the cognitive dissonances involved not only in gun-culture thinking about the Second but also in the founders’ writing and ratifying the Second, so I won’t belabor them here. I’ve also leaned on the writing of Garry Wills when pointing out that while there may in fact exist a right of insurrection against a government you’ve decided is tyrannical, that right cannot feasibly be enumerated in the constitution that establishes that government. Envisioning the founders, as Harper does, constitutionally enshrining in the Second a right to rebel with force of arms against the federal government adds up to nothing but an exercise of historico-sentimentality of the kind that Ted Widmer also indulges in regarding unrest in 1770’s Boston. Given the coincidence that Pretti was legally carrying a gun when federal agents killed him, Harper, Gun Owners of America, and others seem to want to frame those who legally carry as a newly oppressed minority. To give their complaints a glow, they elevate the Second. But only in aid of their complaints.