On Sunday, SpaceX, X, and Tesla CEO Elon Musk countered Kamala Harris’s ongoing gun control push with an X post that framed “the right to bear arms” as the means of protecting all other rights.

“The right to bear arms is there to protect free speech and stop a tyrannical government from taking your rights away! That’s why the first thing that all tyrants do is disarm the people, just like Chavez did when he was first elected. After that, no more real elections in Venezuela,” Musk said. James Madison, the author of the Second Amendment, contended that Americans own guns in order to defend themselves from an overreaching government.

Writing in Federalist 46, Madison suggested Americans are exceptional because armed and noted that the armed citizenry, together with “the existence of subordinate governments to which the people are attached,” provided the framework in which the people could rally to defend their lives and liberty. The people wound band together in “militias” — officers being “appointed” by those local, “subordinate governments” — and their banding together would be meaningful because the people were armed.

Madison emphasized:

Extravagant as the supposition is, let it however be made. Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the Because of the importance of an armed citizenry, Madison wrote that “the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”