On James Madison and Federalist Paper #46

Feb 26 2014

ON JAMES MADISON AND FEDERALIST PAPER #46
Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger.
I think Abraham Lincoln and US Grant made that observation obsolete 150 years ago. I would say it is more obsolete today
But - that aside - should the militia be regulated, but personal armaments not be? Should any citizen have a constitutional right to own any weapon he/she can afford? Does local government have no legal remedy to keep dangerous arms out of its jurisdictions? Is that the true intent of those 'founders' who we know disagreed with each other as much as they agreed? Because it doesn't make sense to me that the awkwardly worded second amendment was intended to sanction every home and hearth to be a potential armory. If that was their intent then it was based on a misunderstanding of the functional military capabilities of privately owned weapons.
Many people revere the Federalist's papers. They serve as a model for civilized political debate - it was a lively set of conversations among an unusually bright and well intended group of men as they tried to build a government. But they were no more authoritative than any editorial you read today.
If you put yourself into the 1790s, Madison's supposition makes some sense particularly in North America. A group of men marching with muskets could possibly stand up to regular army - although I would estimate that by Austerlitz, about 20 years after the Constitution's ratification, Napoleon had shown that fact to no longer be true. Military professionals quickly learned the lessons required to enable a modern force to roll over well armed but poorly lead citizens with advanced planning and tight precision. The late 18th century was the last time one man (like Jefferson or Hume or Liebnitz or Franklin) could know most of what was known - science, mathematics, philosophy, economics, history etc. (If you knew Adam Smith you knew Economics, Newton you knew math and physics, Gibbon late Roman history, etc). These authorities were soon to be annotated and revised to make total mastery of all knowledge impossible for any individual - bureaucracies were now required.
General staffs the world over applied the new knowledge that exploded in the 19th century to the task of killing large numbers of people efficiently and controlling those that remain.
Specialization destroyed Madison's theory of citizen soldier as a real threat to perceived tyranny.