Gun Control and the Politics of Revisionism

The right to keep and bear arms is, and always has been, a function of the American citizen’s right to wage revolution against oppressive government. It has very little to do with keeping guns for sport or for target practice. It has even less to do with defending one’s home against common criminals. The right to keep and bear arms had its origins in the debate over whether the Federal government could establish a standing army. Prior to the constitutional convention of 1787, the states – which were still effectively independent countries – relied upon volunteer militias to preserve liberty. Far earlier, the Declaration of Independence had unequivocally affirmed that whenever a government becomes repressive, denying us our essential rights, it is not only our prerogative, but our duty to “alter or abolish” it. This was stated as a general principle, not merely as a specific justification for rebellion against England.

The constitutional convention wrapped up business in the fall of 1787, and immediately thereafter, as the states debated whether to ratify the new instrument, proponents and detractors of the Constitution began to argue its merits in the press. In its defense were the Federalists, led by Madison and Hamilton. Opposed to them were men like Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, who feared that centralization of Federal powers would lead to the emergence of a powerful standing army and the subsequent disarmament of the populace vis a vis the elimination of the militias.

An anonymous poet, published in the State Gazette of South Carolina on January 28, 1788, put the issue this way:

A standing army! – curse the plan so base;

A despot’s safety – Liberty’s disgrace. –

Who sav’d these realms from Britain’s bloody hand,

Who, but the generous rustics of the land;

That free-born race, inur’d to every toil,

Who tame the ocean and subdue the soil,

Who tyrants banish’d from this injur’d shore

Domestic traitors may expel once more.

So widespread was the fear of a standing army that even the Federalists went to pains to put the right “spin” on their agenda, denying that the creation of a Federal government would in any way jeopardize the continued existence of the free militias. Writing in an article he called “A Citizen of America,” Noah Webster had this to say in defense of the proposed Constitution on October 17th, 1787:

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.

It is altogether clear from his remark that the “well-regulated militia” mentioned in the Bill of Rights, later to become the second amendment, never was meant to refer to the Federal government’s military establishment. A militia, as everyone in 1787 knew perfectly well, was a band of citizens who volunteered their time and energies to fight, if and when necessary, to preserve their liberty. These militias were an outgrowth of the Revolution. Militias had, in fact, defeated the British, and now, as a new threat to civil liberties was perceived in the guise of the new Constitution, it was the militias that became the lynchpin of the Federalists’ argument – they claimed that because the militias would continue to exist, and exist in greater strength than the anticipated Federal army, no threat was inherent in the establishment of a centralized Federal government. Here’s what Federalist James Madison wrote on January 29, 1788:

Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country be formed . . . . the highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield in the United States an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties . . . . It may well be doubted whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the late successful resistance of this country against the British arms will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it.

As the mathematics easily demonstrate, the new country had a population then of only about two and a half to three million persons. At a hundred times that size today, Madison’s militia would have to number almost fifty million men, “opposed” in principle to the standing army of the Federal government. The promise was never delivered upon, and today, the erstwhile, minuscule militias cropping up all across the country are regarded by nearly everyone as dangerous threats to peace and order. In fact, it is a symptom of our times that things like “peace” and “order” are more popular than “liberty” and “independence.” The idea that a private militia ought to be “opposed” to the Federal army, as Madison suggested, is tantamount to sedition.

Proponents of gun control still make the error of assuming that the second amendment’s “well-regulated militia” refers to the Federal government’s military establishment, and that private militias are not what the amendment refers to at all. They claim that because we have an armed military, we as private citizens have no need to own “assault weapons.”

And yet it was Thomas Jefferson who wrote,

No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms. The strongest reason for the people to retain their right to keep and bear arms is as a last resort to protect themselves against tyranny in government. The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive.

Please note that he didn’t say that the American Revolution had rendered any further resistance to government unnecessary. What he did in fact state was that revolution is always our right, and even our responsibility, when government becomes oppressive. And he thought that the ownership of guns – military weapons, not squirrel rifles – was the strongest deterrent to a tyrannical regime. If the government gets out of line, shoot at it. I don’t have any difficulty imagining how Jefferson would have reacted to the murder and cremation of a small religious sect in Waco, Texas, using regular army assault vehicles and Federal FBI goon squads. To say that Jefferson would have called for anything other than all-out armed warfare against the FBI, Bill Clinton, and Janet Reno’s misnamed “Justice” Department would be revisionist. It would rival the balderdash concocted by Stalin about Lenin and Marx to justify his brand of dictatorial “communism.”

Those who would take away private ownership of guns are hard-pressed to cite any remark by any so-called “founding father” that would support their position. With a haughty air, they ask us why we would need a machine gun to hunt deer. They think they are being extremely witty and clever asking things like that. The truth is, we don’t need machine guns to hunt wild game. We need machine guns to hunt down and kill tyrants in our government. Jefferson, Henry, Madison and many, many others tried to guarantee us the right to do so, but paper rights are worthless, as we have seen. We need no one’s blessing to do what is proper and fitting.

The American public, goaded on by slick morons in the whoring press, have come to believe that a mugger in Central Park is more of a threat to them than an Adolf Hitler or a Janet Reno, and stupidly, they are increasingly willing to arm more and more police and to give the Federal government’s cops – the FBI, the BATF, and other agencies – broader and broader powers to “fight crime,” while simultaneously demanding that ordinary citizens give up their guns. Under pretense of fighting for a “safer world,” they wish to deliver everyone into the grasp of thugs like Bill Clinton, a charlatan, a punk and a phony who likes to think of himself as Jefferson’s intellectual heir, but who would, if he had his way, leave citizens with little more than BB guns to defend themselves against the highly-armed stormtroopers and military assault vehicles he is fond of unleashing against private religious groups.

The fact is that the government has weapons far superior to the guns that were around in 1787, and if the men who gave us the Constitution were alive today, they would doubtless tell us we had a right to own ammonium nitrate fertilizer, fuel oil, mercury fulminate detonators, liberated plutonium buttons, and a great many other useful articles as well.

But the impotence of their written laws is now apparent to everyone; wordy constitutions are no safeguard against the designs of wicked men, and ‘rights’ supposedly guaranteed can be swept away with a stroke of the pen when the arbiters of those rights are men like Clarence “Long Dong Silver” Thomas. The “militia movement” in the United States today makes a fatal error in assuming that the response to Federal totalitarianism lies in some legal remedy, or in futile appeals to a Constitution that no one, including a majority of citizens, even cares about. If that document were put to a popular vote today, it would be repealed. Also, the contemporary “militia movement” is led primarily by ignorant fundamentalist Christian zealots who, while likening themselves to the “patriots” of 1776, seem incapable of understanding the militantly anti-clerical deist and agnostic leanings of such great men as Paine, Jefferson and Franklin. Their repugnant, backward Bronze Age religion is a turn-off to tens of thousands who, while thirsting for real political liberty, do not wish to be preached to like hayseeds at a tent revival.

Free men have but one resort, and that is to arm themselves with whatever weapons are both handy and effective: explosives, Ryder trucks, guns, poison gas, gelled gasoline bombs, lethal bacteriological cultures – whatever it takes. That, and to be willing to use those weapons.