Re-evaluating The Second Amendment
James Madison, the point of States' Rights, and how to think about our history
For the longest time, I have been thinking about the second amendment and wanting to properly discuss it, and I can’t think of a more relevant time than right now.
It’s 2026. The streets of America are flooded with ICE performing clear acts of violence against innocent civilians. And supposedly, there’s nothing we can do about it if we want to avoid becoming victims of violence ourselves.
We have what is essentially a mini military force threatening Americans under the authority of an unchecked federal government, while our votes seem to count for less and less. Doesn’t this sound really familiar?
History of the Constitution
Pretty much every American child is taught about the American Revolution by the colonies against tyrannical British rule. Taxation without representation is usually the one thing kids remember from primary school social studies, and we all learned about George Washington’s trek from the Delaware River to the presidency.
At some point, however, students start to tune out the lessons. They forget about the Articles of Confederation, which was the first attempt at self-government for the newly minted United States. Because the threat of an over-powerful federal government still loomed in the distance, this governing document made the states much too powerful and the federal government too weak.
Uprisings such as Shays’ Rebellion and broader national instability revealed the federal government’s inability to respond effectively to the country’s structural failures, so the founders realized they needed a new framework. That new document became the Constitution, which remains our governing document today.
The Constitution laid out the groundwork for a federal government that would represent the people but have the power to actually get things done. In order to convince the states, and mainly New York, to actually ratify this document, the trio of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay published the Federalist Papers, in which they explained to the public why ratifying the Constitution was a good idea.
However, there was a staunch Anti-Federalist movement that continued to fear an overly powerful government, and this is why we have a Bill of Rights. These include a list of ten amendments to the Constitution, particularly thanks to Madison, who understood the Anti-Federalists’ concerns and made a serious effort to address them.
That brings us to the second amendment, which reads as follows:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
For the past two decades, as gun violence has gone insanely off the rails, the meaning of this amendment has been hotly debated. Many proponents of gun control believe that the amendment is simply referring to a national military to defend the people of a “nation-state,” while opponents believe that the Constitution grants everyone the right to literally bear arms, i.e. own guns.
But I don’t think either is the point of the original amendment.
Influenced by Thomas Jefferson, who wanted to make sure that the official governing document would account for rights that no government could take away, Madison set out to draft a list of such unalienable rights.
So if we want to evaluate the second amendment and its purpose, we have to take into account the context in which it was created.
Ask yourself, does it make sense for the Bill of Rights to specifically say you have the right to just own any and all guns willy nilly when the rest of the rights are about minimizing the risk of oppression by the government (such as freedom of speech, right to trial by jury, and states rights)?
Could the founding fathers have imagined the advent of assault rifles that would go on to end the lives of so many innocent schoolchildren, or were they more concerned about a repeat of the British monarchy?
Is it possible the Bill of Rights was ensuring that we had a national-level military to protect the people even though the whole point of the first ten amendments was to ensure protection against national government if that ever became a problem?
Frankly, we don’t need to speculate at all about the purpose of this amendment because the reasoning is already laid out by James Madison himself.
Federalist No. 46
In Federalist No. 46, written about a year and a half before the Bill of Rights, Madison explains why the federal government could never really become tyrannical because the Constitution and the States would be able to prevent it.1
Now before we dive in, it has to be noted that these papers were persuasive in nature. The goal was to convince the people to ratify the Constitution through persuasive rhetoric. However, we can still glean from this paper Madison’s thought process when it came to figuring out a governing framework.
In this particular paper, he confronted head on the idea that the federal government would crush the states by questioning its validity. He wondered if it made sense that the federal government could secretly make a massive military complex without the states and the people knowing over the course of a significant period of time when they voted for the representatives in the first place.
If by some imagination such a thing did happen, he thought, there would be no way the federal militia could be that big compared to how many people there were in the country who could actually take up arms and subdue such a force.
The framework for this conversation is important because he talks specifically about how if the federal government became like the British, then the thirteen states would become like the thirteen colonies, and all the constituents would be on the states’ side because the small number of federal reps would be in opposition to the larger number of state reps, elected by the people of those states.
In other words, he saw the people and the states as one entity in any possible fight against the federal government. This is key, because he wrote the second amendment.
Further in this paper, he expresses the following:
To these [a federal military of 25,000 men] 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.
In other words, if the federal government did decide to stick their military on the people to oppress them, bad luck because there’s about half a million guys with guns commanded by their state governments to fight for their rights.
He also gives a bit more context to the unique position of Americans:
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.
Essentially, he’s saying Americans have the advantage of owning guns unlike people of other nations, but they also have these subordinate governments (states) that they belong to, which would appoint military officers from their gun-slinging constituency in order to challenge an oppressive federal government. That, Madison claims, makes it pretty impossible for any overly ambitious federal government to suppress.
Furthermore, he says the following regarding other nations such as those in Europe:
Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain, that with this aid alone they would not be able to shake off their yokes. But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will and direct the national force, and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments, and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance, that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it.
This means that people in Europe don’t have guns because their governments are afraid, and while we can’t say that they couldn’t overthrow tyranny with guns alone, it would be a MAJOR asset if they had smaller local governments that they voted on who could then collectively represent the whole nation’s populace and appoint military officers that were attached both to the people and these local governments.
The paper basically ends by saying that the federal government would be stupid to go against its own constituents, and if it did, then it would be overthrown by the states, with the support of the people — and therefore, the federal government’s powers are more about carrying out what the Union needs than overpowering the states’ powers.
Given the content of this paper, we can now assert what Madison really meant when he wrote the second amendment.
Does The 2nd Amendment Still Apply?
When James Madison wrote, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” he clearly meant a state-regulated military of citizens with arms in the context of the federal government challenging the state government’s ability to freely do its job and protect its people from tyranny and oppression.
So the right to bear arms is not about some organized national defense; nor is it about random people just owning guns for the sake of owning guns. It’s specifically about the power to overthrow a tyrannical federal government that no longer represents its people the way the British monarch did not represent its colonies and was subsequently overthrown via revolution and war.
Guns, to Madison, were a means to assert control and power in the context of the war he had lived through. He saw the states and their people as a united front that could resist via armed conflict, because he had seen Americans do just that quite recently in a way that other nations or colonies, such as those in Europe, hadn’t been able to.
In a modern context, when we see an entity like ICE going around and doing the bidding of the federal government, we can understand exactly what the second amendment was going for. However, the world has changed a lot since then.
Madison’s World vs. Our World
James Madison could not have conceived the society we live in today. He couldn’t have imagined the federal government’s massive military-industrial complex and surveillance network. He did not foresee that the average person would access the whole world and its many narratives at all, much less through curated media found on a small pocket device. And he certainly didn’t conceive of a world where school shootings were even a thing.
Had he known, what would he say? Would he suggest an amendment to the amendment? Would Madison allow assault rifles for the protection of citizens or would he deem them a danger to innocents and exclude them entirely?
The kind of resistance Madison intended to protect with this amendment doesn’t translate so cleanly into our world, especially since we haven’t seen war on our own soil since the Civil War. Would modern Americans be open to take up arms and march on Washington or stand up to ICE in their own very crowded neighborhoods under the command of their state governments?
How would states form modern day state militias? Or would they simply look to their police forces? How can state governments collaborate together outside of their federal reps in Congress so they have any real chance of challenging federal authority?
What about the fact that our politics is so driven by parties and an outdated Electoral College that we have a roughly equal number of red and blue states, which makes it more difficult to find common ground among these governing bodies and their career-driven representatives, let alone their people?
Or the fact that our representative bodies are so deeply intertwined with corporate spending, private donations, and gerrymandering? Would Madison, who warned about parties to begin with, see such a world and still believe in the power of states and citizens uniting together against tyranny?
Let’s also remember who Madison was during his own presidency. He assumed the role of father to “civilize” his “Red Children” (Native Americans) through schooling, Christian missions, and land treaties negotiated under intense pressure that overwhelmingly benefited U.S. expansion.
He also kept his father’s slaves despite supporting the end of the slave trade and being fundamentally unable to reconcile the concept of slavery with the concept of liberty. As someone who helped shape the now defunct Three-Fifths Compromise, he backed a system that counted slaves not as human beings with their own voices, but as a source of additional representation in government for slaveholding states.
So in all honesty, we have no way of knowing exactly how our 4th president and scribe of the second amendment would have approached either the original Constitution or any laws since enacted from the perspective of someone living in our world. But we can at least ask ourselves if this amendment still applies today.
States and Citizens United
The main point of Federalist No. 46 is that if all the states banded together, as did the colonies, then there’s literally no way the federal government could oppress its citizens. Madison believed that states and citizens could resist unpopular federal actions, and any attempt by the federal government to suppress even one state's authority would be met with concern from all states. Such resistance didn’t necessarily have to be violent but if it did, the second amendment would allow for that.
Does this concept, as suggested by Madison, work with modern society? And if so, how would it work? If our states were able to command and regulate militias to kick out ICE, who’s to say they wouldn’t get run down with tanks and have their budgets slashed in half? But if enough states did agree, might the amendment actually end up helping us as Madison intended?
What would state resistance even look like now? Can state governments and the people truly align or will states just cater to the feds? Do states and the people still have sufficient countervailing power in this day and age, or are we too far gone? Will our state governments exempt us from our jobs while we sit in the middle of our streets and command regional police to protect us from federal militias?
Minnesota has been the main state in recent news to disapprove of the federal government’s employment of ICE. The governor, the mayor of Minneapolis, even the police, are all regional governing entities that have made clear statements against the federal government’s actions. But what more should they do? Will other state governments be willing to step up and take significant action alongside them? And what does this look like in practice?
You or I might not have the answers to any of these questions, but simply being aware of our rights, history, and the purpose of our government is the first step.
The fundamental takeaway from our second amendment shouldn’t be guns — it should be the ability for states and citizens to unite against tyranny.
When we’re able to look at the amendment through that lens, as it was originally intended, then we’re able to ask how it translates into details that guarantee or endanger our freedom.
Laws Are Man-Made
It’s important that our government and our laws are set far enough in stone to not constantly be overturned or challenged. With cases like Roe v. Wade and same-sex marriage coming under fire, the last thing we need is to make it easier to lose our hard-earned rights and freedoms. But America has a history of agreeing to change laws based on what the populace wants. Civil rights, women’s rights, an end to slavery and segregation — these were all once legally impossible.
When Madison and the founders initially constructed the Constitution, they had much different ideas from us about who got to be represented, what the world looked like, and what rules were needed based on their own subjective experiences, biases, and often status-oriented priorities. But at the very least, they agreed that the point of government should be to represent the people and carry out their best interests.
So the best thing we can do now, centuries later, is understand that laws like the second amendment came about within a particular context — written for a world that no longer exists — and recognize that the rules and values of society are not fixed.
At the end of the day, laws are man-made. They are malleable and they depend on us, the citizens, and our chosen representatives. It’s our right and responsibility to continually re-evaluate them, decide what still serves us, and shape them accordingly.
The second amendment was written for its own time; understanding that context is how we decide what it means in ours.