Another must read by Second Amendment scholar David Kopel.
Scholars of the American Revolution and of the Second Amendment are used to looking at the closest intellectual ancestors of the Founders—especially at John Locke and Algernon Sidney, and also at the many other English authors from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who articulated a right to armed revolution in order to vindicate the natural right of self-defense. Although King George III reportedly denounced the American War of Independence as “a Presbyterian rebellion,” it seems that American principle of justified revolution has very strong Catholic roots. When Pope Gregory launched the Papal Revolution, he had no idea that there was an American continent, let alone that he was unleashing ideas which, after centuries of development, would mature into an American Revolution. One of the values of understanding the debt that the Declaration of Independence and the Second Amendment owe to the Summa Theologica, to Policraticus, and to the other great works of Catholic resistance theory is that we can better understand that the American principles of revolution and the right to arms are not novelties that spontaneously arose in 18th-century America or in 17th-century Great Britain. Rather, they are the natural results of an intellectual tradition that was in many ways far older and broader—and much more Catholic—than the American Founders may have realized.