The Declaration's fourth and final self-evident truth is that when a government destroys rather than secures its citizens' unalienable rights, those citizens have a right to revolution. This follows logically from the preceding principles. Government exists to protect rights; if it isn't doing this, the people should get rid of it and set up a new one.

Two other rights arise from the right to revolution. These rights are unstated in the Declaration but were endorsed by the entire founding generation: the right to keep and bear arms and the right to be governed, in local affairs, by local governments. James Madison wrote in Federalist no. 46: "Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of."