“Everything he can to build a standing army that he can use domestically”

Earlier this month, Prof. Noah Shusterman, author of Armed Citizens: From Ancient Rome to the Second Amendment, shared an essay through H.N.N. titled “Deploying Federal Troops to U.S. Cities Is a Second Amendment Issue.”

Here’s a taste:

The Second Amendment was meant to prevent events like the Boston Massacre… The amendment was meant to prevent the government from turning its military into an occupying force, as the British were doing when they began stationing troops in Boston. It is also what our current president is trying to do when he sends federal troops into Los Angeles. Or Portland. Or Chicago. Or, eventually, New York and Boston.

The courts have been treating those deployments as Tenth Amendment issues, or as potential violations of the 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, but back when the Bill of Rights was written, the domestic deployment of federal troops was the Second Amendment issue. And if the courts understood that, we would be in much less of a mess right now. In 2025, the amendment might be about privately owned guns, but when the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, it was about the military — specifically, the threat that a nation’s military could pose to its own people, as it had in Boston during the 1770s, when the British government began stationing troops there. . . .

In the years immediately following independence, neither the state militias’ shortcomings on the battlefield during the Revolution, nor the Continental Army’s successes, made Americans any less wary of peacetime standing armies. Leaders of the founding generation still believed that because a professional soldier relied on his job for his livelihood, his allegiance was to his commander, not his nation. (The current commander-in-chief recently endorsed this view, albeit unknowingly, when he told an audience of military leaders that “if you don’t like what I’m saying, you can leave the room. Of course, there goes your rank, there goes your future.”) . . .

In Second Amendment terms, this president is doing everything he can to build a standing army that he can use domestically against his own population. If the Second Amendment’s self-proclaimed supporters both inside and outside the courts appreciated the significance of these policies, and how contrary they are to the amendment’s original goals, the nation might be in a better place right now. In deploying federal police and military units as an occupying force, the president is doing precisely what the amendment was meant to prevent.

I write this from Washington, D.C., where the President has summoned over 2,600 National Guard troops from multiple states. While traveling to libraries, I see small groups of young people in uniform pulled away from their homes and jobs to stand around in subway stations and parks. Courts have disagreed about the constitutionality of that order and others, with the President getting even more deference than usual in the federal district.

The President claims this authority based on laws speaking of “invasion” and “rebellion,” neither of which applies, and he also claims he’s acting against “crime.” This same President is a convicted criminal who pardoned about 1,600 people for attacking the U.S. Capitol on his behalf in January 2021.