Devotees of the Second Amendment often advance it by saying it was created with the view in mind of allowing, if not encouraging, people to resist the government. If "the people" don't like the government, if they deem it to be tyrannical, they can disobey it or even overthrow it. They might argue that the right of insurrection is a "natural right," that it is explicit in the Declaration of Independence and is the foundation on which the edifice of government is built. It proceeds the Constitution and therefore trumps it. The purpose of government is life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and that if any government becomes destructive of those ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it. In short, we are to believe that the government's mandate to govern is conditional. If I don't like something, I can take my musket from off the mantle and "rise up." If I don't like the traffic camera near my house or if I don't want to pay the postal increase, or "Obmamacare," or the way somebody else reads the Second Amendment, my drinking buddies and I can do something about it.
In short, they are saying that the government gives people the means and, presumably, the authority, to overthrow the government.
Now why in the world would they do that? But it really doesn't say that.
There is only one crime mentioned in the Constitution: treason. It is defined as waging war against the United States or giving aid and comfort to its enemies.
So, then, according to these folks, one part of the Constitution gives us the authority to commit something defined as treason by another part of the constitution.
I don't think so.
So we have a non sequitur. The government, we are told, gives the right to the people to fight against the government, to overthrow it and, should they fail in the attempt, to be tried by the government for treason and, perhaps executed.
Yup.
So, when John Brown attempted a slave insurrection, slave owners called it treason and made sure that he was brought to trial, convicted and executed. But when a few years later, they started their own rebellion, that was "the second American Revolution," and therefore honorable.
What about the part of the Second Amendment that speaks about "a well regulated public militia"? Doesn't that mean that the military is to be a people's military and that defense should not be the monopoly of professionals?
The Constitution gives us the weapons to defend ourselves if the government becomes unable to protect us, collapses entirely, or if it calls upon us to protect the government from "all enemies, foreign or domestic," we can join the militia. The government has no authority to leave us defenseless, but no, we don't have the right to rebel. If we don't like something, we have the right to petition for redress of grievances. We have elections and courts.
The Second Amendment is about Minute Men, not rebellion or duck hunting. And it doesn't give us the right to commit treason.