Every time America suffers a mass shooting, I wonder how James Madison would have reacted.Despite the grinding familiarity of gun massacres, today’s America seems to have developed strategies of denial. Many on the right would arm everyone except “felons” and “the mentally ill,” and the left teaches a version of the same dichotomy: The problem is not “firearms themselves,” it is often argued. It is “who gets access to them.”

The founders did not think that way. They did not divide the world into good guys and bad guys, darkness and light. “If men were angels,” wrote Madison, “no government would be necessary.” But they are not. The founders held what may be termed a democratic theory of tyranny: a conviction that anybody is capable of violence. “Remember,” wrote Abigail Adams to her husband in 1776, “all men would be tyrants if they could.”The minds that framed the Constitution had none of the gun culture’s faith in “the law-abiding citizen”: the airy […]