When The Patriots Rise Up

When you talk to your more emphatic gun advocates about the proposition of regulating guns, a similar refrain always arises: we have guns to protect ourselves against tyrannical government. Guns, you see, have the ancillary benefits of being awesome for home defense and hunting (unless you shoot the wrong person or whatever, but that only happens once every vice-presidential hunting trip). But the overarching reason the drafters of the Constitution put the Second Amendment in place was so that you could ultimately shoot those drafters.

If need be.

I don’t want to litigate the meaning of the Second Amendment, and for the purposes of this post, I’ll accept that the above is, in fact, the purpose of the Second Amendment. In fact, I’ll even lay out the principles of the argument:

1) The Second Amendment is a constitutional guarantee against tyrannical government overreach.
2) The Second Amendment justifies armed, violent rebellion against the government when the government intrudes on the rights of its citizens.
3) Those who engage in that armed, violent rebellion will be justified by their opposition to the previously mentioned tyrannical overreach.

Let’s assume all of that’s true. The question, then, isn’t whether we should regulate guns…the question is how, when you start shooting, we determine whether you’re a constitutionally justified patriot or Chris Dorner.