Josh Zeitz has taught American history and politics at Cambridge University and Princeton University and is the author of Lincoln’s Boys: John Hay, John Nicolay, and the War for Lincoln's Image. He is currently writing a book on the making of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Follow him @joshuamzeitz.

It’s a curious feature of American life that when four innocents are killed by a gunman in Chattanooga, or when a young white supremacist opens fire inside a historic AME Church in Charleston, we talk about loosening gun safety laws.

In the aftermath of this week’s murders, Donald Trump managed the near-impossible—sounding like a mainstream Republican politician—when he argued, “Get rid of gun free zones. The four great marines who were just shot never had a chance.” He is hardly alone in proposing this solution to the epidemic of gun violence. “These terrible tragedies seem to occur in gun-free zones,” said Rand Paul in January. “The Second Amendment “serves as a fundamental check on government tyranny,” Ted Cruz has said.


But if these Second Amendment-purists really think that guns make places safer, if they really think that guns are an important check on government and safeguard of liberty, then why do so many of them keep their workplace—the U.S. Capitol—free of firearms?

For almost two centuries and until very recently, ordinary citizens had free run of the Capitol. Ironically, as Congress has become less hospitable to gun safety laws, and as conservative Republican legislators have grown more strident in their desire to see citizens carry open and concealed weapons everywhere—in churches and schools, on college campuses, at bars and restaurants—the one venue that has grown more gun-free, more secure and more restrictive is the building they work in.

Until 1983, there were no metal detectors at the entryways to the Capitol. No staff and member identification badges. No requirement that American taxpayers reserve advance tickets, queue up in a subterranean visitors’ center and be guided through a select few rooms of the complex. The only areas truly off limits to non-credentialed individuals were the Senate and House floors, though in extraordinary times, even these rooms became public space.

When Union soldiers converged on Washington in the spring of 1861, the Sixth Massachusetts took refuge in the new House and Senate chambers. John Hay, Abraham Lincoln’s young staff secretary, ventured over to inspect the “novel” scene. “The contrast was very painful between the grey haired dignity that filled the Senate Chamber when I saw it last and the present throng of bright-looking Yankee boys,” he observed..” Hay reclined on a leather sofa toward the rear of the chamber and gazed at the “wide-spreading skylights over arching the vast hall like heaven blushed and blazed with gold.” He thought it a fitting place to quarter the troops.

It took extraordinary circumstances for armed militiamen, citizens and congressmen to mingle freely on the House floor. But the stark contrast between now and then raises a poignant issue: Why should Congress be the only gun-free zone in America?

***

At exactly 2:32 on the afternoon of March 1, 1954, gunfire emanating from multiple points in the gallery interrupted legislative business on the crowded House floor, where 240 members of Congress were debating an immigration reform bill. The assailants—four Puerto Rican nationalists armed with German Lugers—created instant bedlam. Bullets “crashed through the table of the majority leader and chairs around it,” reported the New York Times, “and struck near the table of the Minority Leader and beyond.” At first, many House members mistook the gunfire for firecrackers. When they realized the gravity of their situation—they were sitting ducks, easy targets for unidentified gunmen who enjoyed a direct line of site—members dove behind their seats and crawled their way to the cloakrooms.

Capitol Police officers, with the aide of several spectators and one congressman, worked to subdue the attackers, while teenaged House pages dodged bullets to carry Rep. Alvin Bentley, a 35-year-old Republican from Michigan who had been gravely wounded, off the floor. Against odds, Bentley survived his injuries.

Remarkably, the attack in 1954 spurred no fundamental changes to Capitol security. The same cultural traditions that made the Capitol a natural dormitory for Civil War soldiers made it unthinkable that Congress would bar citizens from freely accessing and wandering its halls. The democratization of American politics from the 1830s onward reinforced a widely held conviction that, no matter how unrepresentative the makeup of the House and Senate might be of society at large, the national legislature was a people’s body, and its buildings belonged to everyone.

That began to change amid the turbulence of the late sixties. In 1967, with civil rights and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations assuming an increasingly strident tone—including several disruptive protests from the House and Senate galleries—Congress passed a new measure stipulating, among other provisions, that it be made a criminal offense, punishable by up to five years in prison, to carry or discharge a firearm in the Capitol. Still, even after the Weather Underground detonated a bomb in the Senate wing in the early morning hours of March 1, 1971, ostensibly to protest U.S. military operations in Laos, Congress took few precautions. As late as 1983, visitors were required to pass through metal detectors at the doors to the Senate and House galleries, but not upon entering the building itself, where they remained free to walk most corridors and inevitably happened across dozens if not hundreds of congressmen on days when either chamber was in session. At most, they were asked to open their handbags and purses for a manual inspection.

The status quo changed on the evening of November 7, 1983, when a bomb tore through the walls of the Senate Republican cloakroom and also badly damaged the office of Senate Minority Leader Robert Byrd. Fortunately, no lives were lost.

In response to the attack, Congress finally tightened Capitol security in a significant way. Whereas visitors had been able to access the building through 10 doors, now the Capitol Police only allowed the general public to use four, each outfitted with a metal detector. In later years, x-ray machines were added. Furthermore, staff members were now required to wear official badges that would allow them access to newly restricted areas. Reporters, accustomed to enjoying free run of the building, found themselves limited in their movement.

“There were a lot of older staff people and members around who thought it was just terrible to have metal detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs around,” recalled former House Clerk Donnald K. Anderson in an official oral history.

Indeed, even in the immediate aftermath of the bombing in 1983, many members balked at the idea of restricting access and tightening security, particularly where representatives of media outlets were concerned. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, warned that “to cut off access—free, spontaneous, adventitious and often calamitous—between senators and the accredited members of the press gallery would be to change our institution. It would begin to cut us off from the people who send us here.”

“It’s a sad day for the American government when any constituent has to go through a security guard to see a Congressman,” said Robert H. Michel, the House Republican leader.

In the days just after the attack, the New York Times captured Congress’ dilemma: “Many argue that the Capitol, the workplace of the people’s elected senators and representatives, should be open to all,” one of its writers explained. “For most of its 183-year existence, it has been the most open of all of the three branches of Government. Yet, there are times in the tourist season when the Capitol is so jammed with visitors that lawmakers and their staffs find it hard going as they seek to move from one place to another. An estimated million and a half people tour the Capitol yearly, and hundreds of thousands of nontourists attend committee meetings or conduct business in and around the Capitol complex.”

In the years following 9/11, the Capitol has become even less free to the public. Not only must one undergo metal detectors and x-ray inspection of bags, purses and coats, the new U.S. Capitol Visitors’ Center serves as a means to corral and regulate access even to such once-public spaces as the Rotunda or Statuary Hall. In part, these new measures are a response to very real security threats, though in the postwar decades, as congressional staff sizes grew and as the Capitol Complex expanded its footprint to include multiple House and Senate office buildings and annexes, members of Congress have grown more distant—literally, in a physical sense—from ordinary citizens who come to Washington on business or pleasure.

It would have shocked John Hay, or Daniel Moynihan, or Robert Michael, to think that ordinary citizens can no longer walk through a doorway to the Capitol and take a leisurely stroll through its public rooms.

***

One can make a tidy case for enforcing gun control in the Capitol. But what’s troubling is that this trend emerged in tandem with another: the intrusion of high-powered, semiautomatic guns almost everywhere else in American life, often at the behest of conservative congressmen who don’t often acknowledge the contradiction.

Many Republican politicians, like Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, argue that America should arm schoolteachers, principals and security officers with firearms in order to avoid future tragedies like Sandy Hook. “Instead of putting up a sign in front of the school that says ‘No Guns Here,’” he recently argued, “I would have put up a sign that said, ‘Protected by Smith and Wesson.’” In a separate interview he further elaborated, “I can't imagine … my kids being shot at school … . When you see these tragedies, the emotions tend to say, gosh, lets just ban guns, but then the more you talk about it, the more you can understand … that it’s in the gun-free zones where the greatest danger is.”

Marco Rubio, the Republican senator from Florida, voiced the same argument when he told an enthusiastic audience: “The next time you drive through your neighborhood, count how many of your neighbors have signs announcing that their home is armed with a security system, and then I want you to compare that to how many of them have signs declaring their home to be a gun-free zone. … The risk of announcing our lack of preparedness is obvious.”

It begs the question: If guns make us safer, not less safe, why hasn’t the GOP-controlled Congress removed the metal detectors from the U.S. Capitol and allowed armed citizens, including congressmen, staff members, lobbyists and tourists, to protect their lives and property while visiting the building? (While they’re at it, they could actually let people visit the building, rather than compel them to enter it through a separate visitors’ center and submit to guided tours.)

Of course, the question answers itself: because members of Congress, no less than anyone else, don’t want to be shot. They may not admit it, but there is no other plausible explanation for the discordance between the safety that they demand for themselves and the risk they wish to impose on the rest of the country.

This point begs another question. An increasingly popular trope among conservative opponents of firearm control is that the Second Amendment secures the right of citizens to raise arms against their elected representatives. Do they really believe that? If so, why not show, rather than just tell?

Ted Cruz, one of several Republican presidential contenders who benefits from going to work each day in a gun-free zone, recently excited the passions of Republican activists in New Hampshire when he intoned, “The Second Amendment is not designed to protect hunting or sport shooting. … It is fundamentally about a check on tyranny from government and the protection of liberty. … The New York Times today said that that notion, Live Free or Die, that the Second Amendment is a check on tyranny, they said that it was strange, it was silly, it was absurd. It’s the New York Times that is silly!”

When discussing gun-free zones on military bases in April, Ted Cruz said, “I think it’s very important to have a public discussion about why we’re denying our soldiers the ability to exercise their Second Amendment rights.” But is it then OK to deny that right to taxpaying citizens who want to protect themselves from “tyranny” in the Capitol Building?

Steve King, the House firebrand from Iowa, would appear to concur with this sentiment. “It’s here,” he said of the Second Amendment, “our founding fathers put it in place, not [for] hunting, target, and self defense and collecting—those things are all extra benefits, but we have a Second Amendment so that we’re an armed populace that defends us from potential tyranny, and that’s why I’ll continue to defend the Second Amendment.”

The funny thing about tyranny is that, often, it’s in the eye of the beholder. For New Hampshire GOP primary voters, tyranny might express itself in the imposition of onerous taxes, economic regulations and gun safety measures. But when Republicans attempt to restrict the right of women to control their own medical decisions, or the ability of self-employed workers to access affordable health care without being pre-screened and disqualified for existing conditions, some of those Americans might perceive these efforts as tyrannical. Come to think of it, when elected representatives create an artificial physical distance between themselves and the people whose taxes fund their salaries, that might also be perceived as tyranny.

It’s a dangerous rhetorical game. Which is why Congress would be better advised to keep its metal detectors.

But if Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Steve King and so many of their Republican colleagues truly believe that guns make us safer—if they are earnest in their fear of gun-free zones and honest in their ardor for a popular (and potentially violent) democratic check against government tyranny—isn’t it time that we took them at their word?