Rabb on Abolishing Police: Founders Didn’t Know What Policing Was

August 6, 2026
12:34 pm

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Chris Rabb’s claim that the Founders “didn’t know what policing was” is a convenient rewrite of history that ignores the very militia system the Second Amendment was written to protect. Colonial and early-American towns relied on citizen constables, night watches, and—most importantly—the “well-regulated militia” of able-bodied men who were expected to keep order without a standing army of government agents. Those militias were the original neighborhood watch, armed with privately owned muskets and empowered by local communities, not by distant bureaucrats. When Rabb waves away that tradition, he’s dismissing the constitutional architecture that made self-policing possible long before modern police departments existed. For the 2A community, the stakes are straightforward: abolish cash bail and shrink the police, and you create the vacuum that only an armed citizenry can fill. Historical data from the 19th-century frontier shows that towns with ready access to firearms and strong norms of personal responsibility experienced lower rates of violent crime than contemporary Eastern cities that relied on nascent police forces. Modern examples—from the 2020 “CHOP” zone in Seattle to rural counties that reduced sheriff patrols—demonstrate the same pattern: when government retreats, lawfully armed citizens become the last line of defense. Rabb’s rhetoric would disarm that line while simultaneously releasing repeat offenders back onto the streets. The deeper implication is cultural. By pretending the Founders were clueless about law enforcement, Rabb’s faction hopes to sever the link between the right to keep and bear arms and the duty of citizens to maintain order. That link is the philosophical core of the Second Amendment: an armed populace is both a check on tyranny and a substitute for overweening state power. If Democrats succeed in persuading voters that policing is an alien, post-Founding invention, they will have manufactured a pretext to regulate, restrict, and eventually confiscate the very tools that allow communities to police themselves. The 2A community’s task is to remind the public that the Founders didn’t need modern police departments precisely because they trusted an armed, responsible citizenry to do the job.

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For the 2A community, the stakes are straightforward: abolish cash bail and shrink the police, and you create the vacuum that only an armed citizenry can fill. Historical data from the 19th-century frontier shows that towns with ready access to firearms and strong norms of personal responsibility experienced lower rates of violent crime than contemporary Eastern cities that relied on nascent police forces. Modern examples—from the 2020 “CHOP” zone in Seattle to rural counties that reduced sheriff patrols—demonstrate the same pattern: when government retreats, lawfully armed citizens become the last line of defense. Rabb’s rhetoric would disarm that line while simultaneously releasing repeat offenders back onto the streets.

The deeper implication is cultural. By pretending the Founders were clueless about law enforcement, Rabb’s faction hopes to sever the link between the right to keep and bear arms and the duty of citizens to maintain order. That link is the philosophical core of the Second Amendment: an armed populace is both a check on tyranny and a substitute for overweening state power. If Democrats succeed in persuading voters that policing is an alien, post-Founding invention, they will have manufactured a pretext to regulate, restrict, and eventually confiscate the very tools that allow communities to police themselves. The 2A community’s task is to remind the public that the Founders didn’t need modern police departments precisely because they trusted an armed, responsible citizenry to do the job.

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