If Iran Had a Second Amendment, the Regime Would Already Be Gone
If the people of Iran had the right to bear arms, the regime that oppresses them would no longer be in power. That’s not far-fetched speculation. It’s a reality we can see by looking at how power works inside the Islamic Republic of Iran. When only the state has weapons, only the state has power. Defenseless citizens cannot rise up against a brutal regime. (RELATED: Trump’s Pakistan Card and Iran’s ‘Paranoid Inertia’)
I directed Guns & Moses, a film about a community forced to defend itself when no one else will. I’m also a member of Magen Am, a volunteer organization that trains and licenses Jews to protect our synagogues and schools. We take our security seriously because we live in an age when threats to our people are no longer theoretical. I don’t approach this question as an abstraction; I approach it as someone who has spent years thinking about what happens when violence meets vulnerability.
I am profoundly grateful to live in America, where citizens have the right to bear arms. I also advocate for extensive and ongoing training to maintain the perishable skills required for defensive firearms use — God forbid we should ever need them — but that’s another topic.
When Iranians protest, they don’t face dialogue, critique, or investigation. They face bullets.
Here I’m talking about what happens when an entire population is stripped of firearms. And let’s be clear: this is not about “Iran” as a nation or a people. The Persian people have one of the great civilizations in human history — rich in poetry, philosophy, and courage. Again and again, they’ve shown a willingness to rise up against oppression. (RELATED: Confronting Iran Is a Necessary Step to Protect Women and Christians)
The problem is the regime that rules them. When Iranians protest, they don’t face dialogue, critique, or investigation. They face bullets. (RELATED: Why Iranians Have Unified Around Reza Pahlavi)
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Basij — armed, organized, and loyal to the regime — are deployed not to protect the people, but to control them. Protesters are shot in the streets. Countless Iranians have been killed in crackdowns — most likely 30,000+ this year alone. Many more have been arrested, tortured, or disappeared into prisons. Women who defy compulsory hijab laws have been beaten, imprisoned, even killed. Young athletic champions who spoke against the regime have been executed. (RELATED: The Women Who Would Not Kneel)
Think of the African American athletes who lifted a fist on the podium after winning Olympic medals in 1968. A gesture like that in Iran means suicide by the terror police. This is not governance. It is organized terror against an unarmed population.
And that last part, unarmed, is not incidental. It is the point. Tyranny thrives where citizens are defenseless.
Strip a population of its means to resist, and you don’t eliminate violence. You concentrate it in the hands of the state. The regime holds a monopoly on force. The people have their voices, their courage, their willingness to march — and nothing else.
That is not a balance of power. It is a permission structure for repression.
Imagine, for a moment, a different Iran. Not a utopia. Not a country without conflict. But a country in which ordinary citizens had the means to defend themselves against a regime that fires into crowds. Would the security forces still open fire so readily if the risk were mutual? Would mass killings be as easy to carry out? Would the regime feel as secure in its ability to crush dissent?
We can’t know exactly how history would unfold. But we do know this: unarmed protests can be crushed. Armed populations must be negotiated with.
This is the part of the conversation that makes people uncomfortable — especially in America, where the Second Amendment is often debated as if it were about a hobby, culture, or partisan identity. Stripped to its core, however, the right to bear arms is about something much more fundamental: it is about whether the people retain any ultimate check on the power of the state. (RELATED: The Spiritual Roots of the Second Amendment)
That’s not an abstract concern in Iran. Right now, as tensions escalate between the United States and Iran, the world is once again focused on external pressure — sanctions, blockades, military maneuvers. There is endless discussion about negotiations, ceasefires, and the possibility of regime change imposed from the outside.
We’ve seen this movie before. External pressure can weaken a regime. But it cannot liberate a people. Real change — durable change — has only ever come from within. And the Iranian people have shown, time and again, that they are willing to rise. In recent years, protests have spread across hundreds of cities, fueled by a simple demand: dignity. The response has been predictable. The regime shoots. Arrests. Executes. Intimidates.
Because it can.
There is no meaningful cost imposed by those it oppresses. People can be brave. They can be organized. They can be morally right. But if they are entirely at the mercy of a regime that holds all the weapons, courage alone is not enough. Power matters. Not slogans. Not hashtags. Not even courage, by itself.
Power.
And right now, in Iran, all of it is held by the state. When Americans argue about gun rights, they are often arguing at the margins — about policy details, public safety, competing risks. Those are real concerns, and they deserve serious discussion.
But what Iranians are living through is the core question underneath all of it: what happens when only the rulers have guns? The answer is playing out in real time. The tragedy of Iran is not just that it is oppressed. It is that its people were first disarmed. Same playbook used by the Nazis who in Germany, Stalin in the USSR, and the Chavez/Maduro regime in Venezuela — consolidate power by outlawing firearms.
The people rise. The regime shoots. The world debates. And the one thing that might change the outcome is forbidden.
Salvador Litvak directed Guns & Moses, a mystery thriller starring Mark Feuerstein, Neal McDonough, Christopher Lloyd, and Dermot Mulroney, now streaming. Learn more at GunsandMosesMovie.com.
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