One of the truisms of the Internet Age is what has become known as Goodwin’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. Let us turn to the Third Reich in Connecticut.

The reason that Americans permit the tragedy of Sandy Hook to occur year after doleful year has nothing to do with the fear of home invasion. It has nothing to do with cocaine-soaked gangs. It has nothing to do with the love of hiding in a duck blind. It has all to do with George III, Josef Stalin, and Adolf Hitler. This is the half-hidden secret behind the National Rifle Association’s passion and it needs to be judged in its own terms.

The justification for the Second Amendment and the justification for opposition to such real and apparently rational limits on semi-automatic weapons is to keep power in the hands of the people. The local community is a bulwark of democracy. Just as the rest of the libertarian-blessed Bill of Rights is concerned with constraining the heavy hand of state control, so is the Second Amendment. The fantasy is Red Dawn as Groundhog Day. A demand for personal liberty led Charlton Heston to be willing to fight until “they” pry the gun from his “cold, dead hands.”

In the aftermath of Sandy Hook, of Aurora, of Tucson, of Virginia Tech, of Columbine the issue is trust. Can we trust that our American regime (or invaders from Venezuela or Mars) can eschew the temptations of tyranny? Does power corrupt absolutely? Although the National Rifle Association is loath to admit it, gun control depends on political theory. The reason for heavy personal artillery is not to provoke one’s children against a break-in by Spike or José, but to kill Sergeant Spike or Colonel José. We need an arsenal not to hunt Bambi, but Senator Bambi. And if the National Rifle Association did not fear public revulsion, this is the argument that they would make.

In fact, the argument is not entirely crazed. Some seventy-five years . . .

Read more: Sandy Hook and Hitler