The Second Amendment was supposed to protect us from government by dispersing its coercive power among the people. We still adhere to this system, both in letter and in spirit, in three ways: an armed citizenry, a military of citizen soldiers, and the National Guard.
To my knowledge, the closest that the Founding Fathers got to discussing all of this in detail was in The Federalist, No. 46, where the Father of the Constitution himself, James Madison, addresses the role of the state governments as counterbalances to the federal government. As a last resort, he contemplates the prospect of a tyrannical federal government using the army to impose its will on the states.
Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the state governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence. It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it. Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.
Let’s update Madison’s numbers. A federal army at 1 percent of the population today would be an army of 3 million troops. Our regular armed forces are currently less than half that, about 1.3 million. Against that, the National Guard and reserves—those under the command of the states or dispersed among the civilian population—are about 850,000. Then there are about 22 million veterans among the civilian population, and while the World War II and Korea vets might seem a bit too elderly to be threatening—though I wouldn’t exactly count them out, if I were you—about 7 million veterans served from the Gulf War on.
That’s a very large population with military experience and training. The civilian population as a whole owns somewhere around 300 million guns, of which roughly half are probably owned by 3 percent of the population. If that seems like a small number, reflect that this means there are nine to ten million heavily armed people out there, and it’s likely that there is a significant overlap between Americans who own multiple guns and those who have served in the military. So the dispersal of coercive power through the American population today is considerable and makes the imposition of tyranny from above impossible to contemplate.
The point of The Federalist No. 46 was not to game out the details of this kind of conflict between a federal army and state militias allied with an armed citizenry. Madison’s point was to demonstrate how the whole constitutional system was designed to prevent such a conflict. The point was to set up a system where a revolution would never be needed in the first place, by ensuring that there is as little distance as possible between the coercive power of government and the people it governs. An armed citizenry and state militias, along with a military of citizen soldiers, are all part of that system.
