It also argues that Ukrainian peasants could have defeated the Stalinist regime, backed by the NKVD and the Red Army, if they had possessed individual firearms. It suggests, for example, that the Holocaust could have been avoided if Germany's miniscule Jewish population had been better armed. The second pillar has fewer scholarly pretensions, but it employs even more historically dubious arguments. Other nations built on English common law have all enacted strict regulation of gun ownership, with no perceptible diminution of political liberties. It also ignores the fact that the common law evolves and is subordinate to acts of the legislature. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has given some credence to this view: In his majority opinion for Heller, he asserted that 'the Stuart Kings Charles II and James II succeeded in using select militias loyal to them to suppress political dissidents, in part by disarming their opponents.' This line of reasoning ignores the fact that, in 21st century America, the prospect of monarchs and their select militias oppressing the populace is reasonably remote.

The first is a cottage industry of academics and lawyers who have scoured ancient political tracts and common law to establish that in the distant English past that there was a constitutional right to bear arms as a defense against tyranny. There are two primary pillars to this shaky intellectual edifice. Just this month, a Rasmussen poll reported that 65 percent of Americans see gun rights as a protection against tyranny.

But many otherwise sensible people seem willing to concede that gun ownership could one day play some role in preserving democracy. Even individual Americans armed with military-style assault rifles could hardly pose any serious resistance to any future tyrannical central government supported by overwhelmingly powerful military capabilities. It is easy to ridicule such rhetoric as just overindulgence in Red Dawn fantasies about resourceful and brave citizens resisting a modern army with nothing more than small arms and their wits. As Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma put it just last week, 'The Second Amendment wasn't written so you can go hunting, it was to create a force to balance a tyrannical force here.' And if this is insufficiently incendiary, one only need look to the doctrine of the 'Three Percenters,' with its ominous warning that 'all politics in this country now is just dress rehearsal for civil war.' However, in recent years, the belief in widespread gun ownership as a defense against tyrannical government has become an alluring idea, gaining traction with members of Congress as well as fringe conspiracy theorists.

But the Heller decision also makes it clear that this is not an unlimited right, and that it may be subject to extensive government regulation.ДЄ citizen uprising today would probably not involve like-minded constitutionalists taking up arms to defend democracy and liberty. Heller a majority of the justices found an individual right to gun ownership, unrelated to membership in a state militia. Under our constitutional form of government, the Supreme Court has the authority to decide what the Constitution means, and after decades of judicial ambiguity, in District of Columbia v. There is, we all know, a Second Amendment right to gun ownership. It would more likely be a larger scale reenactment of the 'Bleeding Kansas' revolt of 1854 to 1861, when small bands of armed zealots unleashed an orgy of inter-communal violence, unbounded by any laws of war or human decency. If America experienced a widespread political uprising today, it would bear little resemblance to Lexington and Concord in 1775, with well-disciplined minutemen assembling on the town square to defend liberty against the redcoats. Given its defiance of history and common sense, though, what should be surprising is that it's survived to remain so widespread. Given its apparent validation in the Second Amendment of the Constitution itself, it's not surprising that the notion has survived in some way through to the 21st century. The notion that an individual right to bear arms guarantees the American people against government tyranny is of course an old one. A detail of the Minutemen statue in Lexington, Massachusetts (Tim Grafft/Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism/Flickr)

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