CONSERVATIVE Republican Brett Joshpe thinks the Republican Party has to embrace "sensible gun control" or pay a price at the ballot box. "Gun advocates will be hard-pressed to explain why the average American citizen needs an assault weapon with a high-capacity magazine other than for recreational purposes," he writes. Kevin Williamson calls Mr Joshpe's reasoning "soft-headed":

The purpose of having citizens armed with paramilitary weapons is to allow them to engage in paramilitary actions. The Second Amendment is not about Bambi and burglars — whatever a well-regulated militia is, it is not a hunting party or a sport-clays club. It is remarkable to me that any educated person — let alone a Harvard Law graduate — believes that the second item on the Bill of Rights is a constitutional guarantee of enjoying a recreational activity. 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.

He goes on to cite Joseph Story, a Supreme Court justice from 1811 to 1845:

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.

Obviously, Joseph Story was wrong. Militia are hopelessly inadequate as a means of defending a free country. While "people's war" militia-based strategies have been employed to wear down invading armies in numerous countries over the past century, not one of those countries (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, southern Lebanon, etc) is "free". This is not an accident of history. Freedom is the product of orderly democratic governance and the rule of law. Popular militias are overwhelming likely to foster not democracy or the rule of law, but warlordism, tribalism and civil war. In Lebanon, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mali, Colombia, the Palestinian Territories and elsewhere, we see that militias of armed private citizens rip apart weak democratic states in order to prey upon local populations in authoritarian sub-states or fiefdoms. Free states are defended by standing armies, not militias, because free states enjoy the consent of the governed, which allows them to maintain effective standing armies. Like every other free country apart from Costa Rica, the United States has a standing army in times of peace, and has since 1791, when the founding fathers realised a standing army would be necessary to fight the irregular popular militias of the continent's Native American peoples. (Guess who won?)

As crummy as popular militias have proven at defending against "sudden foreign invasions", they've been even worse at defending against "domestic usurpations of power by rulers". There is, I think, not a single case in modern history, certainly not since the invention of the Gatling gun. No popular militia has ever prevented the seizure of power by an authoritarian ruler. In countries with well-established democratic traditions, authoritarian takeovers are rare; when they occur, popular militias do not resist, or are ruthlessly crushed by national armed forces. In countries with weak democratic traditions, authoritarian takeovers sometimes go smoothly, or in other cases touch off periods of civil war, which are resolved when one faction finally defeats the others and imposes authoritarian rule. Name your authoritarian takeover: Germany, Japan, Russia, China, Egypt, Libya, Brazil, Greece, Spain, Indonesia, the Philippines, Iran, Chile, Argentina, Czechoslovakia, Syria—popular militias never resist authoritarian takeover and preserve democracy or civil freedoms. That is a thing that happens in silly movies. It is not a thing that happens in the world.

I don't really understand why Mr Williamson is even making this argument. There is no one in America today trying to argue that Americans should be able to purchase semi-automatic weapons only so long as they are members of a well-regulated militia; such an interpretation of the second amendment would have excluded Nancy Lanza and the vast majority of semi-automatic weapons owners. The Supreme Court has not held that Americans have a right to own semi-automatic weapons to defend themselves against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers, it has held that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defence in the home. If Americans were in fact interested in privately owning weapons that allow them to contend against the US Army, semi-automatic weapons would be as useless as BB guns against a grizzly—just enough to make the opponent angry. At a minimum, they would need fully automatic heavy-caliber weapons, rocket launchers, anti-aircraft missiles and tanks. Those are illegal.

It's worth reading the next few sentences in the passage Mr Williamson cites above, which Story wrote in 1833, to see what he was getting at.

And yet, though this truth would seem so clear, and the importance of a well regulated militia would seem so undeniable, it cannot be disguised, that among the American people there is a growing indifference to any system of militia discipline, and a strong disposition, from a sense of its burthens, to be rid of all regulations. How it is practicable to keep the people duly armed without some organization, it is difficult to see.

Story was a wispy nostalgic, writing at a time when the growth of the army to fight Andrew Jackson's Indian wars was already rendering his ideas quaint. Within a few decades the Mexican-American and Civil Wars would render this vision of militia-based popular self-defence permanently irrelevant in American history.

Thinking about this question, however, is a useful exercise, because it helps us to picture what it is that Mr Williamson has in mind. He believes that American citizens have the right to engage in violence against the United States' armed forces and state or municipal police forces, whenever they decide that governments are usurping their powers. He believes in a right to insurrection. There is no such right in the American constitutional order. It is illegal for American citizens to decide on their own to attack law-enforcement agents or soldiers, regardless of whether they believe them to be acting on behalf of the "arbitrary power of rulers". In America, the government is chosen at the ballot box, and our representatives make the laws and execute them. What Mr Williamson is saying here is that Americans must have the right to own military-caliber weapons because such weapons are necessary in order to commit treason.

Finally, Mr Williamson argues that Mr Joshpe's Bambi-and-burglars stance has to be an argument for repealing the second amendment, not re-interpreting it. The Supreme Court, as noted above, disagrees. I have a different, somewhat idiosyncratic take on the second amendment: I think the first clause (the "well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State" part) is clearly a logical qualifier, and since history has demonstrated that militias are not necessary but actively pernicious to the security of a free state, the rest of the amendment simply drops. But I also have no problem arguing that the damn thing ought to be repealed. It has nothing to do with any important human freedoms, and any of the founders who thought it did were wrong.