By declaring that Americans would and should have no hope against a tyrannical government, the president disavows a central premise of our nation’s Founding.

At this point in the proceedings, President Joe Biden resembles nothing so well as a cheap, faux-interactive children’s toy from the early 1990s. Pre-loaded with a small handful of vacuous stock phrases, and programmed to repeat them at random whenever the conversation meanders onto familiar ground, Biden has become so predictable, monotonous, and dull that one occasionally wonders whether his doctor is ever tempted to search his lower back for a double-A-battery compartment and a row of rudimentary activation buttons. On the left side of the array, he might find the catchphrases: “Malarkey!” “No joke!” “Literally, folks!” etc. On the right, he might uncover some circumstance-specific clichés, which, though appearing to the uninitiated to be bespoke, are in fact involuntary staples selected from an ever-dwindling list.

Nowhere is this tendency more evident than when the president is discussing firearms. In comes the topic, and out come the chestnuts. Button A yields the false claim that, at the time of the Founding, “You couldn’t buy a cannon.” Button B yields the line, “Deer aren’t wearing Kevlar vests out there.” Button C yields the contention that, “If you want to take on the federal government, you need some F-15s, not an AR-15.” The audience may change, the location may vary, the impetus may shift from time to time, but the bromides will remain as constant as the sun.

In so doing, Biden was inadvertently channeling George Orwell, who proposed in 1945 that, “Ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance.” Orwell, unlike Biden, did not consider this prospect to be either salutary or dispositive. “Tanks, battleships and bombing planes,” he wrote with palpable disgust, “are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic.” And what should people do about this? They should remember that, however badly the citizenry might now be outgunned, the mere fact that it is armed at all raises the cost of oppression. “That rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage or working class flat,” Orwell wrote during the darkest days of World War II, “is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.”

Orwell was correct. Indeed, Orwell is still correct, for to believe with any confidence that a population armed with AR-15s could not resist a government armed with F-15s, one needs not only to ignore the last 50 years of American foreign policy — which, in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan saw cave-dwellers armed with AK-47s outlast the world’s sole hyperpower — but also to assume that the U.S. government would be more aggressive with its own people than it was prepared to be with hostile foreigners. Would it be? That seems highly unlikely. During the American Revolutionary War, many prominent figures within the British parliament were openly skeptical of the King’s position, which by 1781 was being described by no less a figure than William Pitt as “most accursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust, and most diabolical,” and by 1782 was broadly considered to be unsustainable. Would this tendency be more, or less, pronounced, if the tyranny were here at home?

That phrase — “tyranny at home” — often provokes guffaws. It should not. During debates over gun control, those of us who favor a robust right to keep and bear arms are often informed by our opponents that the Founders “could not have imagined the modern world.” Insofar as this is true, though, it is an argument for our position, not our opponents’. Because they were well-versed in history and the classics, James Madison and his compatriots understood that an ostensibly stable nation was just as capable of descending into despotism as any other. But even they could not have comprehended the scale of the depravity that would drench the 20th century in blood. In 1789, it was merely ridiculous for a public figure to propose that the citizenry should relinquish its arms; in 2023, it is downright psychotic.