As he admitted in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, the only reason Madison put forward the Bill of Rights was to satisfy the demands of others. He personally believed that the establishment of the Constitution by itself, and so the creation of proper government, should have been enough to guarantee that fundamental rights are protected. Indeed, he admitted that the addition of a Bill of Rights implied that the Constitution was flawed, and could not protect these rights in itself. There was also a risk that defining specific rights would impair protection of rights that were not specified. Moreover, Madison acknowledged that bills of rights had not had a happy history in the United States.

  But there were also strong reasons why a bill of rights might be a good idea. Like most of the Founding Fathers, Madison was nervous of the power of the majority. “A democracy,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” A Bill of Rights might help protect the minority against the mass of the people.

  “In our Governments,” Madison wrote, “the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.” In other words, the Bill of Rights was actually intended to protect property owners against the democratic instincts of the majority.

Shay’s Rebellion in 1786–87 saw a rebel militia seize Massachusetts’s courthouse. Quashed by government forces, it encouraged the principle of strong government in the Constitution.

Madison also had a simple political reason for creating the Bill of Rights. He knew he would not gain support for the Constitution from the delegates of some individual states if he did not. After all, the Revolutionary War had been fought to challenge the tyranny of centralized power, so these delegates were wary of a new central government. They would only ratify the Constitution if they had some guarantee of protection against it. So rights were not natural laws, but the states’ (and property owners’) protection against the federal government.

This is where the Second Amendment came in. Madison ensured that states or citizens would not be deprived of the ability to protect themselves by forming a militia against an overbearing national government, just as they had done against the British crown. Such a situation envisioned a community banding together to resist an army of oppression. The Second Amendment actually says in its final version: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The amendment, then, was about a militia and “the people” (in other words, the community) protecting the state, not people as individuals.

Though Madison believed that the existence of the Constitution would ensure that basic rights were protected under a federal government, he formulated the Bill of Rights as an extra measure to counteract the power of the majority in a democracy.

Madison was not talking about individuals carrying arms to defend themselves against individual criminal acts. Yet that is how his words in the Second Amendment have come to be used, and many Americans now claim that the right to carry guns is enshrined in the Constitution—challenging any move to institute gun controls as unconstitutional.

  Attempts to overturn this interpretation in the courts have repeatedly met with failure, with the insistence that the Constitution upholds citizens’ rights to bear arms in defense of themselves as well as the state. Many argue even further that, regardless of Madison’s intentions, owning and carrying a gun should be considered a basic freedom. A century before Madison’s bill, English philosopher John Locke, in identifying the right to self-defense as a natural right, took his cue from an imagined “natural” time before civilization. Just as a wild animal will defend itself with violence if cornered, so, Locke argues, may humans. The implication is that government is in some way an unnatural imposition from which people need protection. In retrospect, some commentators have put a Lockean gloss on the Bill of Rights, and assume that it is confirming self-defense by violent means as a natural, inalienable right.

  However, it seems possible that Madison and his fellow Founding Fathers were more in tune with Scottish philosopher David Hume’s view of government than with Locke’s. Hume is too pragmatic to pay much attention to the idea of a natural time of freedom before rights were curtailed by civilization. For Hume, people want government because it makes sense, and rights are something negotiated and agreed upon, like every other aspect of law. So there is nothing fundamental about the right to bear arms—it is simply a matter that people generally agree about, or not. According to Hume, freedoms and rights are just examples of tenets on which people concur—and perhaps decide mutually to enshrine in law to ensure that they are adhered to. Taking this view, there is no fundamental principle at stake in the right to bear arms—rather, it is a consensus. And consensus does not necessarily require a democratic majority.

Gun control remains a hot issue in the US, with powerful lobbies—such as the National Rifle Association (NRA)—campaigning against any restrictions on gun ownership at all. Those against gun control appear to have the upper hand, with most states allowing people to own firearms. Still, there are very few states where gun ownership is entirely unregulated, and there are arguments over whether, for instance, people should be allowed to carry concealed guns. The high level of gun crime in the US, and the increasing frequency of mass murders—such as the cinema killings in Aurora, Colorado in July 2012—have led many to question whether unrestricted ownership of firearms is appropriate in a nation that is no longer a frontier state.

  It is remarkable that Madison’s Bill of Rights is still, with only a few changes, at the heart of the US political system. Some, maybe even Madison himself, would argue that a good government would have protected these rights without need of a bill. Yet the Bill of Rights remains perhaps the most powerful meld of political theory and practice ever devised.

Natural self-defence as used by wild animals against attack is cited by exponents of natural law to justify the right of an individual to defend themselves by any means.