Richard Nixon did not like guns, and he resented the power of the National Rifle Association. “I don’t know why any individual should have a right to have a revolver in his house,” he said to aides in May 1972. “Can’t we go after handguns, period?” The NRA would be against it, as would the gun makers. But “people should not have handguns,” he insisted. “Guns,” he always said, “are an abomination.”

He was not alone. In 1973 his attorney general, Elliot L. Richardson, introduced the final report of the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals as “the most important report on crime control ever compiled in this country.” The centrepiece of this document was the demand for the criminalization of handguns in America. A total ban on these instruments of terror, urged Russell Peterson, chairman of the commission and a former Republican governor of Delaware, was long overdue.

These men were not zealots waging war on the American heritage. They were Republicans anxious to save lives, conscious of a difference between regulated and unregulated firepower.

For those who have grown up hearing that firearms are an American birthright, it is hard to appreciate how unprecedented and politically contrived our current norms of gun ownership are. The sea of weapons that now plagues the nation is a recent thing, unleashed by the Republicanism of Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. In 1968 there were an estimated twenty-four million handguns in circulation, and roughly six out of ten Americans favoured a total ban on the weapons. Only 16 percent of American households contained a handgun in 1959. At the time of writing, there are more firearms than people in the United States, and the sale of handguns has outstripped shotguns and hunting rifles. In the early nineties, assault weapons were rare and accounted for less than 1 percent of gun sales. By 2019 they represented a quarter of the civilian market. The conditions we now endure, I want to argue, are the fruit of a false and failed conservatism, as mistaken in its grasp of human nature as in its understanding of American history. A true conservatism, rooted in the tradition of John Adams, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton, would be the first to embrace gun control as a condition of freedom.

Reagan’s embrace of firearms was an expression of a Cold War imagination that saw the world in good-versus-evil terms. For Reagan, arming law-abiding citizens was as logical as arming America against an “evil empire.” There were good people and bad people, patriots and criminals. Any attempt to restrict the availability of firearms to the former was a betrayal of the nation and an invitation to crime. It was a philosophy that ran counter to the wealth of research and criminological data assembled in the 1960s, which revealed that “angry killings by average citizens” accounted for the vast majority of American homicides. But it was an alluring formula, and one that Reagan made his own.

With Reagan’s arrival in the White House, in 1981, the conversation shifted from controlling handguns to protecting gun owners. Addressing the Annual Meeting of the National Rifle Association in Phoenix, Arizona, in May 1983, Reagan delivered the “nasty truth” that criminals are not fazed by gun laws and that every attempt to control firearms is a victory for the “bad guys.” Liberals whined that guns created a violent “shoot-’em-up society.” What they didn’t realize was that most violent crimes were committed by hardened career criminals, not decent “law-abiding citizens.” And locking them up “and throwing away the key is the best gun-control law we could ever have,” Reagan said. In 1986 Reagan delivered on his promise to loosen the nation’s gun laws with the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act. A new era had begun.

“Only a madman could look at the problem we have in this country,” wrote Michael Beard in 1984, head of the National Coalition to Ban Handguns, “and then say that what this country needs is to weaken our handgun control laws.” At the time, fifteen thousand Americans were murdered each year by firearms, 80 percent of them by handguns. A Gallup poll revealed that six out of ten teenagers favoured a national ban on the weapons. But fired up by a vision of good guys mastering criminals, the new conservatives pressed on with an agenda of universal access.

Laws against “going armed” in public were older than the republic and staples of the English common law tradition. As the venerable jurist William Blackstone explained in the eighteenth century, a man could be guilty of “affray” without raising a hand in anger—the mere presence of a deadly weapon enough to confirm his guilt. The crime of going armed, to the “terror” of the people, had been codified in a fourteenth-century statute, a version of which existed in most American states—until the 1980s. It was then that the floodgates opened—first to concealed weapons, then to assault rifles, followed by “stand your ground” and “permitless carry” laws. It was a revolution offered as a restoration. Vetoing a bill that proposed to change the state from a strict, “no-issue” jurisdiction to a permissive, “shall-issue” state in 1993, Governor Ann Richards said that she could not “in good conscience” ask her police force to patrol the streets and face the additional hazards of armed citizens. The concealed weapon law, she said, would bring shame on the great state of Texas “as a place where gun-toting vigilantes roam the streets.”

But history was moving fast. Richards’s veto almost certainly cost her the next election. Her successor, George W. Bush, duly signed the concealed weapon bill into law. “This is a bill to make Texas a safer place,” he promised. It did not. But the gun question was now trapped in a culture war, where truth was relative and facts negotiable. If the liberals were for it, you were against it. That was sometimes the impression. When a mass shooting at an elementary school in Stockton, California, ignited a debate on the availability of military weapons in 1989, defending them became a patriotic necessity. The automatic gunfire that had been all but eradicated by the National Firearms Act of 1934 was reclaimed as part of the American heritage. And when two schoolchildren slaughtered twelve of their peers at Columbine High School in 1999, the new normal revealed its terms.

In a column published in National Review a month after the shooting, William F. Buckley castigated those who would exploit the tragedy to assail America’s traditions of gun ownership. Buckley advised that it was human nature, not the guns, that were to blame. “Guns are valuable hobgoblins in the scene,” he wrote, as if confronting a case of mistaken identity. “Guns were used, after all, to kill students and a teacher.” “If only we could just blame it all on guns,” he continued, with goading irony. But the real problem was in the heart. The “little monsters of Littleton” would have used bombs if they hadn’t found semiautomatic rifles. The massacre was “simply, a tragic anomaly,” and no more to be blamed on the American tradition of gun ownership than on computer games. In Buckley’s rendering, the weapons that left fifteen dead and many more injured are etherealized as the hobgoblins of the liberal mind, and the writer’s fury is trained on the naive reformer who would malign the guns. Sweeping bans of the kind passed in Britain after the catastrophe at Dunblane in 1996, where sixteen primary school children and one teacher were killed by a single gunman, are poetic gestures, Buckley said. They cannot touch the causes.

What Buckley didn’t appreciate, as he defended the American heritage from overzealous reformers, was that he was making history, not preserving it. By defending public access to semiautomatic rifles, and ridiculing the impulse to blame the guns, Buckley was breaking new ground. And while he was right to describe the massacre as unusual, at a time when access to assault weapons was still limited, this refusal to address the problem ensured that such events would be repeated. Buckley scoffed at the British for trying to “exorcise the memory” of Dunblane, by closing the door after the horse had bolted. It didn’t occur to him that Columbine might be the beginning, not the end, of an era of massacres.

The modern conservative’s notion that shootings are tragic anomalies caused by monsters and career criminals, who inhabit a lower plane of existence, is not only contradicted by the prosaic realities of gun violence. It runs directly counter to the historical and philosophical realism that inspired the founders of the American republic. To the architects of the US Constitution, violence was a problem of human nature, not a few bad eggs, and the notion of trying to arm the righteous against the criminal would have been regarded as a fool’s errand. A well-regulated militia, advised one writer, placed “the sword in the hands of the solid interest of the community,” not the burning will of the individual. The difference was important. Republican philosophy aimed to diffuse and distribute power, not concentrate it in the hands of individuals. That is the idea that has been lost.

Why did the American Revolution succeed where the French Revolution descended into anarchy and bloodshed? wondered Massachusetts governor John Sullivan in the early nineteenth century. The answer was “civil liberty” and a grasp of human nature that was at once more hopeful and realistic than the “natural liberty” preached by the Jacobins in France. Civil liberty, argued Sullivan, is as different from the surging currents of natural liberty as porcelain from the unformed clay of the earth. It was, as John Locke had explained in his classic work on government, a “state of peace”—a place of rules and reciprocity, in contrast to nature’s all-too-natural descent into a state of war. It was this civil liberty, a freedom cultured and pruned by the rule of law, argued Sullivan, that distinguished the American Revolution from the French.

This was fair comment and something that was as true of the more sanguine American founders such as Jefferson as the stony realists Adams and Hamilton. Their philosophy, which drew as insistently on the ancient liberties of England as the cautious rationalism of the Enlightenment, feared the “natural despotism” of the individual as profoundly as the tyranny of kings. To these practical and historical thinkers, the division between good and evil was a drama played out in every soul. And government was not so much a necessary evil, or something to be drowned in a bathtub, as a sacred and holy thing.

“What is government itself,” wondered James Madison in the classic statement of American constitutionalism, “but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” Until we have angels, in other words, we must have laws. A lot of them. When modern conservatives ridicule government as a chain on the American soul, they speak for a different tradition. And it was precisely because the American founders distrusted human nature in the raw that they distrusted unregulated force. Their conservatism was a chastened realism, based on a rugged and historical account of human nature. It was for this reason that they could never have endorsed the free and unregulated firepower of today.

From history, concluded Alexander Hamilton, one would have to say that the passions of war hold a more powerful sway in the human heart than the mild and beneficent sentiments of peace. “To model our political systems upon speculations of lasting tranquility,” therefore, was “to calculate on the weaker springs of the human character.” It was a brilliant phrase. Humans were not totally depraved, as the Calvinists so unworthily alleged, just reliably perverse. Anything they could achieve in the scientific and intellectual realm they could ruin in the spheres of politics and personal living. Minds that could divide matter down to “the minutest atom” were thrown back to infancy by the lurching motions of the heart. One had to think the worst of people to do the best for them. That was the beginning of political wisdom. “Remember,” wrote Abigail Adams to her husband in 1776, “all men would be tyrants if they could.”

From Thomas Hobbes to John Locke to John Adams and Thomas Paine, political theory was premised on the instability of human nature and the stark appraisal that reason is no match for passion in the crucible of living. Men, wrote Hobbes, are governed by pride, “the passion that maketh madnesse.” Locke was more hopeful, but ultimately no less realistic about the natural propensity for violence. Men, he wrote, are rational beings, who sink “to a Brutality below the level of Beasts” when their honour is on the table. Freedom arises when they agree to trim their sails, sheath their swords, and “resign” their natural proclivity for vengeance to the sober “umpirage” of the community. Such was the origin of government and the beginning of freedom: security from the “sudden thoughts” and violent whims of our neighbours. “God,” writes Locke, “hath surely appointed Government to restrain the partiality and violence of men.” The “idea of government,” wrote Hamilton in the Federalist Papers, was to substitute the mild influence of the law for “the violent and sanguinary agency of the sword.”

This was not a political tradition inclined to put weapons into the hands of private citizens. The principle behind a “well-regulated militia”—the repository of that constitutional right to keep and bear arms—was the sharing and distribution of power under the authority of the state. A true conservatism would take this tradition seriously. A well-regulated militia was to security what trial by jury was to justice: safety in numbers. It was not something you did on your own. In the Bill of Rights, protections for the militia were placed within a cluster of republican demands that included protections against judicial violence and “cruel and unusual punishments,” which together reflected the same anxiety. There was no liberty outside the law.

This was a generation that either opposed the death penalty outright or demanded its drastic reduction—on account of the sanctity of life and the fragility of human judgment. “I shall ask for the abolition of the Penalty of Death until I have the infallibility of human judgment demonstrated to me,” declared the Marquis de Lafayette with a phrase that highlights both sides of the republican mind. “An execution in a republic is like a human sacrifice in religion,” wrote Benjamin Rush. “It is an offering to monarchy.”

What such men would have made of assault weapons and stand-your-ground laws requires no speculation. Arbitrary power was tyranny, and contrary to the principles of a republic. “Kings,” wrote Rush, “believe that they possess their crowns by a divine right: no wonder, therefore, they assume the divine power of taking away human life. Kings consider their subjects as their property: no wonder, therefore, they shed their blood with as little emotion as men shed the blood of their sheep or cattle.” Republican governments, however, “speak a very different language.” They teach the absurdity of such presumption and assert the dignity of all creatures. “They appreciate human life, and increase public and private obligations to preserve it,” he wrote. The goal of a republic, maintained Rush, was to save, not destroy. “Till men are able to give life, it becomes them to tremble at the thought of taking it away.”

When modern conservatives assert the right to own lethal weapons, and to fire them on their own authority, they are closer to the divine right of kings than the civil liberty enshrined in the Constitution. They are closer to the natural liberty asserted by the Jacobins in the bloodbath of Paris, where Mary Wollstonecraft found herself slipping in the streams of blood flowing from the guillotines, than the ordered liberty of Philadelphia. Why should citizens be discouraged from carrying weapons? wondered an editorial in 1835. Because “no one knows himself. No one knows how easy it is for the mildest nature, inflamed by liquor and passion, to give a blow that may be fatal.” As Russell Kirk argued in a critique of the libertarian strand of modern conservatism, natural liberty is a recipe for violence. True conservatives, he wrote, will agree with Edmund Burke that government cannot be abolished until human nature is either abolished or miraculously transformed. True conservatives know the difference between “civil” and “uncivil” liberty—between the ordered freedom of the law and the passions of the flesh.

Freedom, wrote Burke, requires that “the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection.” That could be done only by a “power out of themselves”—either God or government. This was the thinking that underpinned the fabled checks and balances of the US Constitution, and it is a philosophy that ought to steer conservatives toward gun control.

When their political rivalry blossomed into a deep and affectionate friendship late in life, Adams and Jefferson shared some penetrating thoughts on the human propensity for violence. Why, wondered Jefferson, do intelligent, enlightened men continue to kill? What became of reason? Well, responded Adams, there are such things as reason and conscience, but they are too easily seduced. Our passions, he observed in a passage worthy of David Hume, “possess so much metaphysical Subtilty and so much overpowering Eloquence, that they insinuate themselves into the Understanding and the Conscience and convert both to their Party.” That was why men fight, and that was why “Power must never be trusted without a Check.”

I am no believer in national exceptionalism, but I confess to some excitement in these insights. This was a generation fleeing the spectre of monarchy yet acutely sensitive to its reincarnation in themselves: a generation scandalized by tyranny yet alert to its potential in every heart. Who “can save freedom from ‘freedom’”? wondered the conservative writer Peter Viereck. Not the wise person. Not the strong man. Maybe the person who understands that compound of brilliance and folly we call human nature.