This is quite a backwards view of things by someone named Dominic Erdozain who apparently teaches at Emory School of Theology.

Tyranny is not too strong a word. Guns have begun to define the American experience, from small decisions about where you might travel to the massacres that haunt the news cycle like the visitations of a malevolent deity. Sold as freedom, they have created the very conditions that the liberal state was designed to prevent.

The singular idea behind the emergence of democracy was the protection of life from arbitrary power. What is liberty? wondered John Adams. Freedom from “wanton, cruel power”—from “imprisonments, whipping posts, gibbets, bastenadoes and racks.” Kings shed blood with little emotion, wrote Benjamin Rush, because they believed they governed by divine right. Republican governments spoke a different language. They taught the absurdity of the divine right of kings and asserted the sanctity of all life. This was not achieved through individual force but by collaboration and consent. In a democracy, power is diffused, and layers of restraint are placed between the restless will of the individual and the capacity to harm others. That was the “social contract.”

[ … ]

Unlike today’s gun advocates, who think of danger as other types of people, the founders understood tyranny as a universal propensity—a problem larger than monarchy or the more obvious villainies of history. The hard truth was that violence lurks in every heart, and “all men would be tyrants, if they could.” Such was the foundation of American constitutionalism and the elaborate checks and balances that defined it.

[ … ]

Everything in the American system—from bicameral legislatures to nervous protections against “standing armies”—reflected this shrewd and skeptical psychology. Power was dangerous and always looking to expand its franchise. The virtue of a representative, as opposed to a direct, democracy was that it was broken up, shared, and delegated.

This was the principle behind the well-regulated militia named in the Second Amendment. A militia placed “the sword in the hands of the solid interest of the community,” not the burning will of the individual. The militia was to defense what trial by jury was to justice: safety in numbers. It was protection against anarchy, insurrection, and the “hand of private violence.” The notion that, in providing for a militia, the founders were also providing for that hand of violence reveals a profound misunderstanding of their philosophy. Gun laws, as we now know them, enable the very brutalities that the political process was designed to contain.

So you can read the rest of this silly, trivial missive for yourself if you want to. For the founders, who had just spent their fortunes and risked their own lives and the lives of their wives and children to take on a tyrant, and who used guns to do it, he turns the whole affair around to be fear of tyranny by the individual rather than the king. Only someone who graduated from Oxford and Cambridge with no history or understanding of the American system or cultural milieu could manage such a thing.

So let’s rehearse this one more time. The term well-regulated, in common parlance of the day, meant that the gun functioned correctly, the sights were set and zeroed at the appropriate distance, the machine ran “like a clock,” as it were, and the shooters knew how to shoot. It had nothing to do with words in the code of federal regulations, which didn’t exist then.

The very revolution to which he is referring was precipitated by British gun control. He needs to read David Kopel more carefully. He isn’t the scholar he things he is. Kopel is a scholar.

On the whole, his essay is such a mess that it would take a day of writing to fisk the errors. Suffice it to say that he needs to go back to the drawing board and answer this question: has he fully addressed the number of innocent men, women and children who were disarmed and then killed by their own governments in the 20th century? See also here. Stephen Halbrook has a higher number.

The answer might shock him. If it doesn’t and he is already aware of all of this, he’s advocating for the extermination of innocent people at the hands of wicked governments, and he knows it.

That’s the point of the second amendment – not disarming individuals. Finally, whatever theological excuses he has for his advocacy of gun control, I’ve answered all of them. If he wants to give me new ones, I’ll gladly answer those too.