Can the US Federal Government be considered to hold a State Monopoly on Violence?

Question

I came upon the political science topic of State Monopoly on Violence and was ruminating on past and contemporary political structures, curious what a system where no party was afforded this monopoly would look like.

At first thought I instinctively felt that the US Federal Government held this monopoly on behalf of the American People. However, as I thought about it more I became curious whether this is actually the case under the Constitution.

In this answer on a decomposition of the 2nd Amendment, I found it interesting that the Court's definition seems to say (paraphrased in plain terms): In order to ensure that a truly free country remains so, it is important that all able-bodied men in the country be allowed to own tools of violence and employ them in a structured fashion.

This seems to imply that the Constitution forbids that the Federal Government hold this monopoly on violence for the specific purpose of ensuring the continued freedom of the Country's inhabitants.

There are some arguments that the 2nd Amendment's purpose was mainly to allow people to defend themselves, from whatever threat, through the use of these tools of violence.

Does the US Federal Government currently hold this monopoly?

Have they always, since its founding, held this monopoly?

If the answers to these two questions are different, what has changed this and why?

Answer 1

Does the US Federal Government currently hold this monopoly?

No, but only because, as a federation, the individual states also have the monopoly on violance within their jurisdiction. It could be said that the United States (and Canada, Australia, India etc.) has a duopoly on violence.

However, as a collective whole, the "state" does have a monopoly on violence.

Have they always, since its founding, held this monopoly?

No, see above.

Monopoly on violence

The concept was articulated by Max Weber in 1918 to distinguish what he thought was conceptually different from the modern Whestphalian State from the feudal European powers that preceded them. His definition of a state was a “human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.”

The Westphalian system (which is what we have today) treats each nation as sovereign within its own borders, that is, each nation is free to decide what its laws are and no other nation has the right to interfere (directly, indirect interference is tolerated). The government of this type of state (whatever form it takes) decides when it is legitimate to use force.

The feudal system was based on the concept of liege and vassal with a complicated hierarchy which, massively simplified, went empire -> kingdom -> principality -> duchy -> county -> landholding. Under this system, the vassal's owed duties to their lord including implementing the law of the land as well as their own local law. Each individual vassal could decide when it was legitimate to use force.

So, by that definition, the United States of America through it's Federal and State governments has a monopoly on violence. They enact laws that specify when violence is legitimate and illegitimate, the enforce those laws through law enforcement and the courts and punish those who use force illegitimately. Obviously, they don't do this with 100% efficiency - some murders go unsolved for example - but, in principle, even if perpetrators are never identified or punished, such violence is illegitimate.

So, while the second amendment restricts the government in regulating the means of violence, the government(s) still decide when violence is legitimate.

Answer 2

The concept of the government having a monopoly on the legitimate use of force is one of the criteria that separates sovereign states from failed states. So that's a reason why this topic would be discussed.

Though it's commonly misunderstood that the Second Amendment was intended to grant gun rights to all citizens, the Federalist Papers clarify that the intent of the Second Amendment was to prohibit the federal government from confiscating guns from state militias.

In Federalist No. 46, Madison wrote how a federal army could be kept in check by state militias, "a standing army ... would be opposed [by] a militia." He argued that state militias "would be able to repel the danger" of a federal army, "It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops."

From the OP's point of view, if the federal government's military and state militia's equally share a license on the legitimate use of force, then this invalidates the notion that the United States is a sovereign state, because of the lack of a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

Some state militias still exist (some of the militias in this list are still active, like the California state guard, but some are inactive, like the Arkansas state guard). However, these state militias have negligible force and rarely engage in exercising any authority. So, from a practical standpoint, I don't think state militias challenge the federal military's authority at all.

But there's also a second layer to this question. The "monopoly on legitimate use of force" criteria generally isn't considered invalidated just because government authority is shared between the federal and regional level, or shared between the military and the police. Generally the state lacks a monopoly on the legitimate use of force when warlords or drug cartels exert enough authority to challenge the state, i.e. by intimidating judges, overpowering the military, etc. In other words, this type of condition is not reflected in the United States, and the United States does not fit the criteria of a failed state. You can find which countries are closest to being failed states by checking the Fragile State Index. The United States is ranked in the "very stable" bracket (the third most stable bracket overall, and the 26th most stable country overall). However, the United States's stability has worsened by 3.7 points since 2016.