Virgil begins the Aeneid with “Arma virumque cano,” I sing of arms and the man, but he had a better character in mind for his poem. Here, I must deal with persons of lesser moral and political worth, namely the tyrants who rise up from time to time with pretensions of leadership and ought to be weeded out lest they take root and suck out the resources of their nations.
Tyrant, as with a number of our foundational political words, comes from the ancient Greeks, it being their term for a usurper who seized power without a hereditary or popular claim, whether this ruler was subsequently good or bad, but quickly earned the disparaging quality with which supporters of free societies use it today. Such, alas, is human nature that rarely will any of us grab power but to employ it for the ill of self and all others—and few who can be granted power without being closely watched without doing the same.
Among those of us who are gun rights supporters, there is a common assertion that we possess our weapons in part to resist tyranny, should it ever arise in our nation—specifically the United States, since we are all but sui generis in combining constitutional protections for personal arms with a revolutionary spirit woven into our national identity, with perhaps the Czech Republic working to join the club. The belief is that were a tyrant to gain control here, tens of millions of gun owners would overwhelm his forces and restore freedom.
But as I am reminded by opponents of guns in private hands who have not checked where I stand in the field of politics, the gun owners of America did not rise up to stop Trump, and they go on to conclude that any notion of personal arms being useful to drive out tyrants is a fantasy.
There are several problems here. First, tyranny is a word that gets tossed about in contemporary political discourse without too much concern about whether or not it has any definite meaning. Obamacare, as much as it feels like a tyranny of the insurance industry, was passed by Congress, signed by President Obama, and found to be constitutional by the Supreme Court. Promoting electric cars, encouraging people not to eat too many trans fats, and requiring county clerks to issue marriage certificates for same-sex couples are not examples of tyranny, either. All of the above can and have been done within the legal powers of various levels of U.S. government. Even mandating vaccines and the wearing of masks during a pandemic is not properly speaking a tyranny. Yes, all of those might be authoritarian, especially if carried to extremes in how they are enforced, but they are not a usurpation of the former political order.
As an aside, I must also point out that “tyranny” is not a synonym for anything I do not like. I could say that the word for that is “communism,” but there is enough disinformation in the world already.
A second problem, one that we shared with many nations that have suffered under tyranny in the past, is that many in this country who have useful weapons for an armed resistance are supporters of Trump. This is not to say that there are no gun owners among Democrats or among the left—my hand is waving hello here. It is simply a recognition that the right wing has made a specialty of supporting—or at least speaking in favor of—gun rights and has thus drawn in many gun owners.
The situation is something similar to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or to Hitler’s Germany, cases in history in which a dictator had an armed faction at his back who made rising up difficult, since his supporters perceived his continued rule as serving their interests and were willing to do battle with his internal opponents until such time as the dictator was secure in power. One thing that saved us in the United States were the facts that while Trump aspired to be a tyrant, his laziness and incompetence prevented him from using the machinery of government effectively and that his bloc of voters were unwilling to commit to the irrevocable plunge into revolution.
And that leads into the third problem in this: Rising up is always hard. It is always risky. It is a jump off the edge of a cliff into the fog, and while those who join in to fight may have been promised by their leaders that an airship will be there to catch them, or they may have a fancy piece of equipment that insists on the ground being only inches below, the line from the American Declaration of Independence about pledging one’s life, fortune, and sacred honor to the cause ought to resound through the mind of every revolutionary.
A successful revolt against a tyrant requires enough popular sympathy to guarantee supplies and hideouts. Enough people must be willing to participate—i.e., to die or to kill—to bring meaningful opposition to however many are on the tyrant’s side. There have to be members of the resistance who know how to conduct such operations, and the rest have to be willing and able to learn. The resistance has to be able to survive the loss of any member and even the loss of most of its members. And it must be able to hang on one minute longer than the tyrant. The failure or success of movements from Spartacus and the revolt of the slaves through the American and French Revolutions to the Maquis in World War II and the MAGA rioters on 6 January 2021 are all illustrations here.
Resistance to tyranny is possible, but it is always bloody, and many attempts do not have good ends. Those of us who possess personal weapons in the United States are potentially the best resistance movement in human history, given our numbers in persons and guns and our access to information. But in practical terms, we have to know how to resist. With regard to moral justification, we would need a cause that is worthy of the cost—neither Obama nor Trump provided a reason, since whatever one may think of either of them, they both entered and left office according to the constitutional routes.
How much better it would be if we preserve the rule of law and the respect for human rights so as never to need to remove a tyrant.
The thing that I consider to be the great paradox of US gun culture is that the majority of gun rights proponents in this country, who cite having the means to resist tyranny as a primary reason for their position, simultaneously support the stripping of freedoms from those who are not part of their in-group, for example people wanting to access abortion services, LGBTQIA+ people, nonwhite immigrants, educators who might wish to discuss historical facts that contradict American mythology, or minority communities seeking political representation via the ballot box.
There is also the matter of the steadfast support that the majority of gun rights supporters have for law enforcement which, arguably, is becoming a paramilitary wing of the state and tends to, as a whole, sympathize with those who advocate for the stripping of freedoms from out-groups.
Many in the “2A community” also profess an unquestioning admiration for the founders, despite their exclusionist conception of who did and who did not constitute “the people,” and their structuring of American government that exempted state governments from the restrictions placed upon the federal government by the Bill of Rights. That, in my mind, brings into question what the guns are really for in the minds of most of these people.
Overall, I worry that this country is headed in a rather ominous direction, especially considering that what passes as mainstream conservatism in 2023 makes 2016-era Trump appear moderate in comparison. Looking at how the far right has successfully consolidated power in key states that would have been considered toss-ups not too long ago e.g. Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and gerrymandered voting districts in many states to grant themselves representation out of proportion to their actual popular support, we are facing a realistic prospect of a permanent far-right majority in Congress.
In my opinion, a cultural shift among the armed element of the American populace towards a position of “all rights for all people” and support for a system of laws that binds and protects everyone equally is desperately needed if American gun culture as a whole truly wants to walk the talk of resisting tyranny, and may even be necessary if we want to continue to resemble a free and open society in the coming years.