Why let the people decide?

According to gun control advocates, it is pointless for Americans to own rifles like the AR-15, since owners could never realistically defeat the U.S. military with personal small arms — though they do not often know that word and instead refer to such weapons as toys. What follows is endless quibbling over definitions and arguments over the history of asymmetrical warfare, along with suspicions that people who have semiautomatic rifles are secret insurrectionists.

But there is a foundational point to be considered here, namely the role of individual and popular agency in relation to the government and society as a whole. The inevitable end of the line of reasoning offered by gun control advocates is that government is beyond our reach, that its power is categorically above us.

This is not unique to guns. When tax season shows up or the traffic officer is lurking in the median, it feels like our reality. And given how inattentive our elected politicians are to the needs and progress of ordinary Americans, the observation, attributed to Mark Twain, among others, that if voting changed anything, it would be illegal sounds right.

The point about voting is important. In the discussions about the type of government we would have in the United States, one of the concerns was over a fear of the founders of democracy, a system that they understood to…