Supporting Your Enemies

I have been a member of The National Rifle Association off and on since I was about twelve years old and a Life Member for about the past twenty years. The management of the organization takes the members for fools. There are better and more aggressive organizations such as Gun Owners Of America and Jews For The Preservation Of Firearms Ownership to name two, but as somebody said years ago, gun owners are like fleas on an elephant and must go where the elephant goes because the other organizations don't have the clout of the NRA.

Wayne LaPierre once famously referred to agents of the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms as “jack-booted government thugs.” I don't know about their footwear, but they are thugs. The problem with the NRA and many other organizations is that they think certain agencies are bad, but the government overall is good. They're all thugs. Many issues of The American Rifleman will have some kind of laudatory article about some cop, military man, sheriff, FBI agent or some other government hack who is trained to follow orders. The BATF is the bogeyman because it is the agency charged with enforcing the firearms laws. If it were the FBI, the FCC or the EPA that enforced the laws they would be the ones wearing the jack-boots.

The February 2014 issue of The American Rifleman has an ad on page 73 seeking bequests to the NRA with the caption, “Where Do You Want Your Estate To Go?”: “To the government?” (with a very unflattering picture of Obama and Biden) “Or freedom's future?” (with a picture of a guy coaching a woman with a shotgun). This is all fine, but why is “the government” bad when it's Obama, but good when it's Sgt. Doright of the First Cavalry or the Podunk Sheriff's Department? Obama is not the one who is going to kick down your door for violating a gun control law; it's Sgt. Doright that will handle that. You are probably never going to be in any danger from Obama. It will be one of his agents who kills you, seizes your property, breaks into your house, hauls you off without charge, prohibits you from flying, spies on you, prevents your leaving the country, and on and on. Almost all of these outrages will be perpetrated by a person wearing a government uniform of some kind.

It's not just the NRA that propagates this sort of Zoroastrian/dualist view of the government; it's the gun manufacturers and advertisers too. One manufacturer has an ad for its product that shows an entry team of cops preparing to break in a door with the caption in boldface type, “BUILT FOR THOSE WHO REQUIRE NO INTRODUCTION.” Well, actually they should require an introduction, otherwise called a search warrant issued upon “oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Hardly any “dynamic entries” are ever justified. When the police are confronted with real danger, they usually cordon off the area as in school shooting cases or burn the place to the ground as in the case of Christopher Dorner, Gordon Kahl, MOVE in Philadelphia or the Branch Davidians in Texas.

There seems to be broad support for the military even though the Founding Fathers feared a standing army and would not even authorize funding for one for longer than two years at a time.

It is easy to see why a standing army is a danger to society when you consider how easy it is to get ordinary people to obey authority with very little coercion. This was demonstrated by Stanley Milgram in his experiments and chronicled in his book Obedience To Authority. If ordinary people are so easy to command, it is a fortiori the case that young boys who have been through obedience training known as boot camp or police academy will follow commands like trained dogs after their personal judgment and individuality have been reduced or destroyed.

There are plenty of products sold only to government agencies that John Q. Public is not allowed to have. Why manufacture a product – other than for money, or course – that is going to be turned against you? Why, in a nation founded upon the idea of unalienable rights and popular sovereignty is the government permitted to have weapons that are prohibited to the individual? This is exactly backwards; it is the government that should be prohibited certain weapons. The government is the agent, not the sovereign.

Remington used to market a folding stock for the 870 shotgun that had “For law enforcement only” stamped into the side of it. Why? There was nothing illegal about anybody having it. Why provide your government customers products that you deny to non-government buyers?

I used to joke about – although not entirely in jest – forming a company that sold weapons and equipment that stated in its ads, “Civilian sales only.” We would all be better off if the government feared the people instead of the other way around.

Disarming Peasants

Every time there is a shooting at a school, shopping center, city council meeting or other location where innocent people are shot or killed by a private citizen and not a government employee, the Left immediately calls for civilian disarmament, maybe not all at once, but certainly by degrees.

What is odd about this is that not a day goes by that MoveOn.Org doesn't send out some kind of alert about banksters or corporate bogeymen who are up to no good. They probably are, but these people never see any danger from omnipotent government, only private cabals that operate for gain, but have no arrest or taxing power and no history of setting up gulags and murdering people en masse.

It's as though they have upended Jefferson's admonition, " in questions of power then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution."  Instead of mistrust of government officials they have mistrust of the citizen and instead of binding down the government they want to free the government and bind the citizen. They don't trust John Q. Public, but they do trust Obama, Bloomberg, Stalin, Hitler, Castro or Robespierre. Even if we had virtuous men currently in office, which we don't, it would be pure folly to expect that always to be the case. Carroll Quigley, who has the distinction of being mentioned approvingly by Bill Clinton, says in his magnum opus Tragedy & Hope that when the citizen can have the same weapons or nearly the same as the government, it favors popular government, but when the government has superior weaponry it favors authoritarian government.

All the arguments I have seen on both sides of the question are utilitarian arguments. I have not seen anybody take up an intransigent position of principle and contend that even if it could be shown that private ownership of weapons causes higher rates of violence it would not be justification for controlling weapons for the simple reason that owning weapons is an inalienable right and isn't susceptible to statistical arguments.

We don't have free speech because it can be shown that it's a good thing, but because it is a right, not a privilege. It doesn't make any difference that many people tell lies or make inflammatory comments; when a right is abused it does not negate it for others. For years the NRA has prattled on about "firearms freedoms" as though a freedom is the same thing as a right - it isn't. Your neighbor may have the freedom to come into your house at will, but not the right to. The latest bit of claptrap is that we're having a "conversation" about gun violence or protecting children or some other focus group-think. Formerly the correct term was "dialogue," but that has fallen into desuetude.

It seems that most of the "conversation" is directed at people's feelings, not thoughts. This is very much on display with the Charlatan-in-Chief surrounding himself with children and acting as though he cares what they think. As long as he has their attention, maybe he should ask their opinion of drone strikes against innocent people or saddling future generations with oppressive debt. They're probably too young to form an opinion about such things.

Under our system of government - theoretically - the citizen is the sovereign and the government is the agent or instrument. How can the agent have rights that the sovereign doesn't have? No one can give what he does not have. If the sovereign has no right to possess arms, certainly his agent cannot have such a right.

It isn't violence that the government objects to so much as it is private ownership of guns. When Julio Gonzalez burned 87 people to death at the Happy Land disco in New York, nobody called for stopping the sale of gasoline in cans. That would have been absurd and would not have furthered the cause of civilian disarmament.

Back in the '70s, the angle of attack on gun ownership was the "Saturday Night Special," a term that no gun enthusiast used, but was thought to be useful by the forces of control. For the past 15 years or so, it's been "assault weapons," another made up term with no definition. It sounds really menacing so it's likely to be around for quite a while. It seems to be derived from the term "assault rifle" which was supposedly coined by Hitler (it probably wasn't) to describe a selective fire (i.e. capable of both semi-automatic and automatic or "fully automatic" fire) rifle that fired a low-powered rifle cartridge.
These rifles had more power than the submachine guns, which fired pistol cartridges, but less than a regular infantry arm of the day, such as an M1, Lee Enfield, Mauser, Springfield, etc.

Some advocates of disarmament have resurrected the claim that the Second Amendment refers to ownership of muskets. The founders were aware that technology is not static and had they thought nobody should ever have anything more advanced than a musket they could have said so, but had they done so the Constitution would probably not have been ratified. A musket was comparable to anything the army of the day had, so by that reasoning the citizen should now have sophisticated military equipment.

The founders wanted to guard against "combinations of ambitious men," but the disarmament lobby puts unlimited faith in such men and views the common man warily. It's as though the Bolsheviks can be trusted, but the peasants can't be.