The Wrongly Read Right: Insurrection and the Second Amendment Right to Bear Arms

Several judges and scholars have interpreted the Second Amendment as creating a right to bear arms to facilitate armed resistance against the government whenever it threatens to impose tyranny. These arguments have been made in books, scholarly articles, and court decisions. Many of the proponents of the pro-armed insurrection interpretation of the Second Amendment root this point of view in the history of the right to bear arms in the Anglo-American legal tradition. This Article argues that the Second Amendment does not create a right to bear arms to resist government authority because such a right is inconsistent with several provisions of the Constitution. Interpreting the Amendment to create such a right ignores 18th-century conceptions of natural rights and the relationship between the citizen and the state held by many in the Founding Generation. The Article advocates for a more coherent view of the Second Amendment: that the Amendment represents an attempt to commit the United States to a model of defense with broad citizen participation, not the creation of a constitutional right to armed resistance to federal and state governments.