But Madison's key point in Federalist Paper 46 was that when critics cite the Constitution's potential for a tyrannical central government, they miss the point that it would consist of representatives from the states and the people. Madison wrote...
"The adversaries of the Constitution seem to have lost sight of the people altogether in their reasonings on this subject. These gentlemen [the Anti-Federalists] must here be reminded of their error. They must be told that the ultimate authority, wherever the derivative may be found, resides in the people alone. ..."If ... the people should in future become more partial to the federal than to the State governments, the change can only result, from such manifest and irresistible proofs of a better administration. ... And in that case, the people ought not to be precluded from giving most of their confidence where they may discover it to be most due."
Mocking the Paranoia
In Federalist Paper 46, Madison then went on to offer a series of reasons why the Anti-Federalists' fear of the strengthened federal government was absurd, especially since Congress would consist of representatives from the states and those representatives would assert the interests of their states.
Madison also rejected comparisons between the imagined tyranny by the federal government over the states and the violent imposition of authority by the British Crown over the American colonies. He wrote:
"But what would be the contest in the case we are supposing [between the federal government and the states]? Who would be the parties? A few representatives of the people, would be opposed to the people themselves; or rather one set of [federal] representatives would be contending against thirteen sets of representatives [of the states], with the whole body of their common constituents on the side of the latter."The only refuge left for those who prophecy the downfall of the State Governments, is the visionary supposition that the Federal Government may previously accumulate a military force for the projects of ambition. ...
"That the people and the States should for a sufficient period of time elect an uninterrupted succession of men ready to betray both; that the traitors should throughout the period, uniformly and systematically pursue some fixed plan for the extension of the military establishment; that the governments and the people of the States should silently and patiently behold the gathering storm, and continue to supply the materials, until it should be prepared to burst on their own heads, must appear to every one more like the incoherent dreams of a delirious jealousy , or the misjudged exaggerations of a counterfeit zeal, than like the sober apprehension of genuine patriotism."
In other words, Madison judged this alleged danger of the federal government tyrannizing the states as nuts.
It is true that he continues in Federalist Paper 46 to play out what to him was the absurd notion of federal tyranny, noting that this imaginary federal army of oppression also would have to contend with state militias consisting of armed citizenry -- which is the point frequently cited by gun-rights advocates -- but the context of those quotes is that Madison had already dismissed the possibility of such an event as crazy.
The Civil War
Granted, one could argue that Madison failed to fully see into the future as he argued for the ratification of the Constitution, which he had worked so hard to create. For instance, as slavery became a contentious issue in the mid-1800s, Southern states rebelled in defense of the rights of whites to own blacks and then violently resisted President Abraham Lincoln's efforts to bring the Confederate states back into the Union.
To this day, some white Southerners call the Civil War the War of Northern Aggression. In the 1950s and 1960s, the pattern played out again, albeit much less violently, when many white Southerners resisted the federal government's outlawing of racial segregation. To some white Southerners that was another example of federal "tyranny."
You could also say that Madison missed the emergence of the post-World War II Military-Industrial Complex in which military contractors accumulated so much political and economic power both within states and inside the federal government that the American people did "silently and patiently behold the gathering storm, and continue to supply the materials, until it should be prepared to burst on their own heads."
However, it is a gross distortion of history to cite Madison as someone who favored a "libertarian" right for citizens to operate on their own in the killing of police, soldiers and other representatives of the Republic. Rather, his proposal of the Second Amendment was a concession to what he regarded as paranoia among states'-rights advocates within the Anti-Federalist circles.
Indeed, one could argue that the Second Amendment has never been used to protect individual liberty, unless you're talking about the "liberty" of white Southerners to own African-Americans as slaves.
Beyond the language in the amendment's preamble about "a well-regulated Militia" and state "security," that is exactly how the Second Amendment was used. After being approved by the first Congress and ratified by the states, the amendment was given real meaning when the second Congress passed the Militia Acts, which mandated that all military-age white males obtain a musket and supplies for militia service.
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