The Virtues Of A Heavily Armed Citizenry
Defend gun rights like your life depends on it, because it
does
Dear Colleague in
Liberty,
It is time the gun grabbers put up and
repeal the Second
Amendment or shut
up about violating it because their efforts to disarm and
short-arm Americans not only violate the U.S. Constitution in Merriam
Webster’s first sense of the term—to “disregard”
it—but they also violate the Constitution in every other sense of the
term: to “break,” “rape,” “profane” and
“interrupt.”
Hard cases make bad law, which is why
they are reserved for the Constitution, not left to the caprice of
legislatures, the sophistry and casuistry of judges or the despotic rule
making of the chief executive and his bureaucracy. And make no
mistake, guns pose one of the hardest cases a free people confronts in the
21st century, a test of whether that people cherishes liberty
above tyranny, values individual sovereignty above dependency on the state
and whether they dare any longer to live free.
A people cannot
simultaneously live free and be bound to any human master or man-made
institution, especially to politicians, judges, bureaucrats and faceless
government agencies. The Second Amendment along with the
other nine amendments of the Bill of Rights was designed to prevent
individuals’ enslavement to government, not just to
guarantee people the right to hunt squirrels or sport shoot at targets, nor
was it included in the Bill of Rights just to guarantee individuals the
right to defend themselves against robbers, rapers and lunatics or to make
sure the states could raise a militia quick, on the cheap to defend against
a foreign invader or domestic unrest.
Defend gun rights like your life
depends on it, because it does
The Second Amendment was designed to ensure that
individuals retained the right and means to defend themselves against
any illegitimate attempt to do them harm, be it an attempt
by a private outlaw or
government agents
violating their trust under the color of law. The Second Amendment
was meant to guarantee individuals the right to protect themselves against
government as much as against private bad guys and
gangs.
That is why the gun grabbers’ assault on firearms
is not only, not even primarily an attack merely on the means of
self-defense but more fundamentally, the gun grabbers are engaged in a blatant attack on the very legitimacy
of self-defense itself. It’s not really about the guns;
it is about the government’s ability to demand submission of the
people. Gun control is part and partial of the ongoing collectivist
effort to eviscerate individual sovereignty and replace it with dependence
upon and allegiance to the state.
Americans provisionally delegated
a limited amount of power over themselves to government,
retaining their individual sovereignty in every respect and reserving to
themselves the power not delegated to government, most importantly the right and power to abolish or
replace any government that becomes destructive of the ends for which it
was created. The Bill of Rights, especially the Second and
Ninth Amendments, can only be properly understood and rightly interpreted
in this context.
Politicians who insist on despoiling the Constitution
just a little bit for some greater good (gun control for “collective
security”) are like a blackguard who lies to an innocent that she can
yield to his advances, retain her virtue and risk getting only just a
little bit pregnant—a seducer’s lie. The people either have the
right to own and bear arms, or they don’t, and to the extent
legislators, judges and bureaucrats disparage that right, they are
violating the U.S. Constitution as it was originally conceived and as it is
currently amended. To those who would pretend the Second Amendment
doesn’t exist or insist it doesn’t mean what it says, there is
only one legitimate response: “If you don’t like the
Second Amendment, you may try to repeal it but short of that you may not
disparage and usurp it, even a little bit, as long as it remains a part of
the Constitution, no exceptions, no conniving revisions, no fabricated
judicial balancing acts.”
Defend gun rights like your life
depends on it, because it does
Gun control advocates attempt to avoid the real issue
of gun rights—why the Founders felt so strongly about gun rights that
they singled them out for special protection in the Bill of Rights—by
demanding that individual rights be balanced against a counterfeit
collective right to “security” from things that go bump in the
night. But, the Bill of Rights was not a Bill of Entitlements that
people had a right to demand from government; it was a Bill of Protections against
the government itself. The Founders understood that
the right to own and bear arms is as fundamental and as essential to
maintaining liberty as are the rights of free speech, a free press, freedom
of religion and the other protections against government encroachments on
liberty delineated in the Bill of Rights.
That is why the
most egregious of the fallacious arguments used to justify gun control are
designed to short-arm the citizenry (e.g., banning so-called “assault
rifles”) by restricting the application of the Second Amendment to
apply only to arms that do not pose a threat to the government’s
self-proclaimed monopoly on the use of force. To that end, the gun
grabbers first must bamboozle people into believing the Second Amendment
does not really protect an individual’s right to own and bear
firearms.
They do that by insisting on a tortured construction of
the Second Amendment that converts individual rights into states
rights. The short-arm artists assert that the Second
Amendment’s reference to the necessity of a “well-regulated
militia” proves the amendment is all about state’s rights, not
individuals rights; it was written into the Bill of Rights simply to
guarantee that state governments could assemble a fighting force quick, on
the cheap to defend against foreign invasion and domestic
disturbance. Consequently, Second-Amendment revisionists would have
us believe the Second Amendment does little more than guarantee the right
of states to maintain militias; and, since the state militias were replaced
by the National Guard in the early twentieth century, the Second Amendment
has virtually no contemporary significance. Gun controllers would, in
effect, do to the Second Amendment what earlier collectivizers and
centralizers did to the Tenth Amendment, namely render it a dead
letter.
The truth is, the Founders understood a “well
regulated” militia to mean a militia “functioning/operating
properly,” not a militia “controlled or managed by the
government.” This is clearly evidenced by Alexander Hamilton’s
discussion of militias in Federalist #29 (http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa29.htm)
and by one of the Oxford Dictionary’s archaic definitions of
“regulate;” “(b) Of troops: Properly disciplined" (http://yarchive.net/gun/politics/regulate.html).
The Founders
intended that a well-regulated militia was to be the first, not the last
line of defense against a foreign invader or social unrest. But, they
also intended militias to be the last, not the first line of defense
against tyrannical
government. In other words, the Second Amendment was
meant to be the constitutional protection for a person’s musket
behind the door, later the shotgun behind the door and today the M4 behind
the door—a constitutional guarantee of the right of individuals to defend themselves against any and
all miscreants, private or government, seeking to do them
harm.
Defend gun rights like your life depends on it, because it
does
The unfettered right to own and bear arms
consecrates individual sovereignty and ordains the right of
self-defense. The Second Amendment symbolizes and proclaims
individuals’ right to defend themselves personally against any and
all threatened deprivations of life, liberty or property, including
attempted deprivations by the government. The symbolism of a heavily armed
citizenry says loudly and unequivocally to the government,
“Don’t Tread On Me.”
Thomas Jefferson,
the author of the Declaration of Independence said, "When governments fear
the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is
tyranny."
Both Jefferson and James Madison, the Father of the Constitution, also knew that their government would never fear a people without guns, and they understood as well that the greatest threat to liberty was not foreign invasion or domestic unrest but rather a standing army and a militarized police force without fear of the people and capable of inflicting tyranny upon the people.
That is what
prompted Madison to contrast the new national government he had helped
create to the kingdoms of Europe, which he characterized as “afraid
to trust the people with arms.” Madison assured his fellow
Americans that under the new Constitution as amended by the Bill of Rights,
they need never fear their government because of “the advantage of
being armed.”
But, Noah Webster said it most succinctly and most
eloquently:
“Before a standing army can rule, the people must
be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme
power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole
body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band
of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United
States.”
That is why the Founders looked to local militias as
much to provide a check—in modern parlance, a
“deterrent”—against government tyranny as against an
invading foreign power. Guns are individuals' own personal nuclear
deterrent against their own government gone rogue. Therefore, a heavily
armed citizenry is the ultimate deterrent against
tyranny.
Defend gun rights like your life depends on it, because it
does
A heavily armed citizenry is not about
armed revolt; it is about defending oneself against armed government
oppression. A heavily armed citizenry is not about overthrowing the
government; it is about preventing the government from overthrowing
liberty. A people stripped of their right of self defense is
defenseless against their own government.
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