Mises Institute has an analysis up on why we can’t ignore the militia clause of the second amendment.  It’s interesting reading, and I recommend you turn your attention to it for a few minutes.  But I want to issue some warnings nonetheless.

As I’ve pointed out many times before, the context and theoretical framework for understanding the American revolution was and always will be continental Calvinism and covenant theology.  God manages His created order in terms of covenant.

We are all in covenants in every aspect of our lives, all of the time, from marriage, to church, to state and then economics.  If you choose to be unfaithful to your wife and violate the marriage vows, there are consequences and curses for that.   These consequences happen in time and space and also in eternity.

In time and space, your wife will divorce you.  If she doesn’t, the consequences befall her, in time and space.  She has decided to live with an unfaithful man, refusing to avail herself of the remedy God has given her.  In eternity, the unfaithful man will answer for what he did, and so will the woman if she refuses to avail herself of the remedy.

In economics, if you steal you will go to prison.  If a country refuses to avail itself of the remedy for theft, believing that it can rehabilitate criminals to make them better when God has said that is His responsibility, not yours, the country will suffer, as there are consequences in time and space.  Ultimately, the men who made the decisions on national policy will answer to a sovereign God for their recalcitrance.

So too with tyranny.  Tyrants will answer to their people for their tyranny, and if they don’t, the people will suffer in time and space for their recalcitrance, and both will answer to God in eternity.  God will not be mocked.

Turning to the foundations for the revolution, recall that I explained the Christian roots of covenant and its role in the theoretical framework for the war.

In terms of population alone, a high percentage of the pre-revolutionary colonies were of Puritan-Calvinist background.  There were about three million persons in the thirteen original colonies in 1776, and perhaps as many as two-thirds of these came from some kind of Calvinist or Puritan connection.

[ … ]

… by 1776, nine of the thirteen original colonies had an “established church” (generally congregational in New England, Anglican in New York, Virginia and South Carolina, “Protestant” in North Carolina, with religious freedom in Rhode Island, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware and Georgia) … While this did not necessarily mean that a majority of the inhabitants of these colonies were necessarily committed Christian believers, it does indicate the lingering influence of the Calvinist concept of a Christian-based civil polity as an example to a world in need of reform.

[ … ]

Their experience in Presbyterian polity – with its doctrine of the headship of Christ over the church, the two-powers doctrine giving the church and state equal standing (so that the church’s power is not seen as flowing from the state), and the consequent right of the people to civil resistance in accordance with higher divine law – was a major ingredient in the development of the American approach to church-state relations and the underlying questions of law, authority, order and rights.

[ … ]

It was largely from the congregation polity of these New England puritans that there came the American concept and practice of government by covenant – that is to say: constitutional structure, limited by divine law and based on the consent of the people, with a lasting right in the people to resist tyranny.

I say all of this to set the stage for a reiteration of my observation on the second amendment and the militia.

… all the founders needed in order to object to federal control over such God-given rights is to find a single example of such an infringement that would be found unacceptable.  The militia served as this example.  That doesn’t mean that it is, would have been, or must have been, the only example or reason for the amendment.  The amendment clearly states what the FedGov shall not do, not what it can or may do or the sole reasons for its existence.

So a man has a right to the ownership of weapons if he is a paraplegic and unable to serve in the militia.  A people have the right to overthrow their government whether there is such a thing as a militia or not.  I can tell the militia (whatever that is in this context or any future context) to go pound sand and that I refuse to join, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with either [a] my God-given rights to keep and bear arms for self defense or the amelioration of tyranny, or [b] the fact that that right is recognized in the constitution, which is a covenant under which we have agreed to live.

My rights (and duties) flow from the Almighty, the very fountain of liberty.  The constitution is a mere covenant.

This understanding in the antecedent to the constitution and the second amendment, not vice versa.  Never forget that.  The militia doesn’t justify the second amendment – among other things, the second amendment justifies the militia, both organized and unorganized.

And neither has anything whatsoever to do with the justification of the right of resistance to tyranny.  That flows from the Almighty.