Second Amendment expert: 'Armed citizenry will deter government from getting tyrannical'

Experts are responding to an attack on the Second Amendment by David Hogg, who tried claiming last week that the right to bear arms is granted to the state and not to individual Americans.

Hogg, 22, was made a mascot of the anti–gun rights agenda after he survived the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018.

On Thursday, Hogg shared with his 1.2 million followers a meme containing a quote from former Chief Justice Warren Burger:

The gun lobby's interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American people by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. 

The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies, the militia, would be maintained for the defense of the state.

The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.

Hogg captioned the meme by saying: “Talked with a Professor at Harvard Law yesterday about this. Can confirm.”

While the remarks do indeed belong to Burger — though they are a collection of separate quotes — Second Amendment experts say they are not the smoking gun Hogg believes them to be.

Burger, who reportedly never participated in a significant Second Amendment case, was not expressing a legal opinion, but personal musings. 

UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh, a constitutional scholar who specializes in the First and Second Amendments, previously clerked for former Justice Sandra Day O’Connor and says it is normal for justices to disagree about the law. Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Justices Thomas, Alito, Kennedy, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, disagree with Burger, while Justices Stevens, Souter, Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, and Sotomayor would agree with his statement.

“It seems to me quite clearly a matter of good-faith disagreement about constitutional interpretation, among Justices who have actually read the briefs in the cases and had to decide them,” Volokh told Frontline News.

A crucial part of the discourse surrounding the Second Amendment is why it was created, which was to establish a bulwark against a tyrannical government, a notion that Volokh says was accepted even in late-1700s England.

“Naturally, everyone understood that a government (whether tyrannical or not) will do all it can to suppress rebellion; but the thought was that the existence of an armed citizenry will deter the government from getting tyrannical, and will give a majority the tools that it could use to overthrow an oppressive minority that has taken over the government,” he says.

And that was exactly what Americans had done right before the Second Amendment was written, which provided important historical context as to what was motivating America’s Founding Fathers at the time.

If there was still any doubt, one need only look at what the Constitution’s Framers had to say about an armed citizenry.

Guy Smith, a Second Amendment aficionado and founder of Gun Facts, shared with Frontline News the prevailing sentiment around the time the Second Amendment was written.

Thomas Jefferson:

What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms.

St. George Tucker, a judge and officer in the Virginia Militia:

In America we may reasonably hope that the people will never cease to regard the right of keeping and bearing arms as the surest pledge of their liberty.

Tench Coxe, a Patriot and delegate to the Continental Congress:

As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their right to keep and bear their private arms.

“He spells it out quite plainly: Because of A and B, we have C,” Smith commented on Coxe’s statement. 

The gun researcher painted a portrait of the historical milieu surrounding the Second Amendment: 

“The people, having just fought a revolution, largely with private arms, maintained the militia structure for civil defense prior to the revolution. Revolutionary leaders were of the people, and the representatives in Congress who drafted the amendments were representing the thinking of the people.”

Therefore, Smith says, “It would be disingenuous for someone to claim that [at least] part of the intent of the Second Amendment was not armed resistance to government overreach.” (emphasis original)

One facet of the Second Amendment that remains to be explored, however, is how tyranny is defined and whether Americans have the right to use the arms that they bear. The Founding Fathers, fresh from a victory against tyranny, knew Americans must be prepared to fight against a tyrannical government, but did not explain exactly when they must do so.

Frontline News will continue to further explore the Second Amendment with experts and constitutional scholars.