A few years before the Revolution, the Scots-Irish settlers of south central Pennsylvania marched on the colonial legislature on Philadelphia, outraged by its apparent disinterest in protecting them from attack by the local Indian tribes and its refusal to provide them the adequate representation the colonial charter provided for. A group of Philly muckety-mucks met them at Germantown, then well outside the city.  One of them, a printer named Ben Franklin, stepped forward and defused the situation by offering to print up a manifesto of their grievances at his expense and have it read aloud in a legislative session.

“The Apology of the Paxton Boys”, as the tract was titled, among other provisions claimed the settlers’ right to keep and bear arms for “the defense of themselves and their nation”. That language eventually made it to the Pennsylvania state constitution, where it remains, and the constitutions of many other states.

It is an important qualifier to the notion, so recently writ into law by our Supreme Court, that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. I have never disagreed that it does, but “themselves and their nation” reminds us that that individual right is inextricably bound up with a collective responsibility to society and the state. By exercising the former, one must assume the latter. There is no out.

In our time, the conservatives who anoint themselves the heirs to our Founders have interpreted this very broadly. In the wake of every school or shopping center mass shooting, they loudly and determinedly shout down all the handwringing about the increasing level of gun violence in this country with reminders that the Founders meant for us to keep and bear arms that we might be able to offer armed resistance to tyrannical and unconstitutional actions by our state and federal governments. This position is widely held among conservatives, as indicated by pages supporting it at the Heritage Foundation, the Trump administration’s policy workshop, and the administration’s own Office of Justice Programs.

Which is what makes it so curious that the MAGA community has not raised up these well-regulated militias it has for so long gotten so starry-eyed about when faced with what is incontrovertibly the sort of tyrannical governmental behavior it claims to stand ever on guard against: the wave of ICE raids across the country. Purportedly to keep us safe from criminal illegal aliens, they have instead primarily targeted people with no criminal records who work on our farms, construction sites and retail stores. The “agents” involved have shown complete disregard for due process, wearing masks and sunglasses but nothing identifying themselves or even their agency, rather like the many foreign secret-police agencies we are told repeatedly that our vast national firearm stockpile inures us from.

One wonders how our storied Founders would see us, looking down the centuries (Emphasis down). I imagine we could only be diminished in their eyes, if they could even bear to look.

It does not have to stay this way, of course. They would perhaps smile on us again if we took the occasion of this Fourth to meet ICE with arms, perhaps even wearing tricorner hats and the other Continental Army drag the right likes to prance around in (Although we should bring assault rifles, not muskets; this is the 21st century, not the 18th). “Thus be it ever ... where freemen shall stand”, as the less-sung second verse of our national anthem reminds us. One can only hope that some of the MAGA crowd, too, will recognize the need to put their weapons where their mouths and keyboards have long been if they are to ever be taken seriously again.

This is, of course, not a call for unjustified violence. The ICE “agents”, once properly outnumbered and outgunned, should once they surrender unconditionally be subject to citizen’s arrest and escorted to the nearest police station that they be formally charged as traitors to the Constitution. It would be the sort of civilized, democratic behavior the Founders would have expected of us, in contrast to the unprincipled thuggery of the current administration.