Gun owners are second-class citizens in America viewed with severe derision and contempt by the elites in both the halls of political and media power in the US. Much like rednecks and pit-bull members, they are rhetorical punching bag that gets knowing sneers from the freedom-phobic salons at the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Department of Fatherland Security alike. They have been tucked into a rhetorical cubbyhole with preppers, private food gardeners and other such miscreants for whom self-reliance is a watchword if not a lifestyle.
The modern American gun owner is in the same position as the Irish and blacks of yore who not only suffered official sanction as less than equal but were subject to penalties up to death in both government and private hands.
ALL governments despise private gun ownership because it is not only a primary threat to their ability to control and harness subject populations but existentially all collectivist are perversely uncomfortable with the atomistic ability to not only a threat but to make that neutralization lethal. The battle at Lexington and Concord that inaugurated the divorce from Great Britain was over weapons and munitions ownership – nothing less and nothing more. Not only was the fight about guns, it was about that ultimate divorce proposition marrying guns and secession. One can suppose that the rulers in America have an abstract fear of the individuated ability to defend and also project power but the true fear on their part is the self-reliant aspect. If the singular American can defend himself then the most important cog in any political machine, the cop, becomes irrelevant if not an anachronism and without cops, no nation can sustain tyranny and enforce bad laws.
James Yeager, an outspoken gun trainer in TN, recently had his CCW suspended because he dared to exercise his free speech rights. The police spoke-mouth was priceless:
James Yeager, 42, had his permit suspended based on a “material likelihood of risk of harm to the public,” the department said in a statement.
Col. Tracy Trott of the Tennessee Department of Safety said it didn’t take him long to reach a decision after viewing the comments on the Internet.
“I watched it twice to make sure I was hearing what I thought I heard,” Trott said.
“It sounded like it was a veiled threat against the whole public. I believed him. He had a conviction in his voice, and the way he looked into the camera, I believe he’s capable of a violent act,” Trott said.
This from a privileged and badged member of the praetorians for the nomenklatura yet this is the modus operandi for cops everyday. The current discussion on guns is a curious house of mirrors where the individual American gun owner must be wary day after day for new depredations against his right to defend himself yet the talking heads make no mention of the sanctioned government murder of innocents on a daily basis by cops in America and the imperial machine abroad.
The other irony is not only that Yeager is a former small town police chief himself but this great advocate of revolution and tactical savvy submitted and compromised by getting the permit in the first place so the line in the sand may be more mercurial than he lets on.
Many gun rights advocates make the critical mistake that the argument must rely upon the Constitution and the Second Amendment as the touchstone for preserving the right yet the very same documents have given the rhetorical nod to such rights atrocities as the 1934 National Firearms Act, The 1968 Gun Control Act, the 1986 McClure-Volkmer Act and the raft of anti-armament nonsense that has been endorsed by ALL the political entities in Mordor on the Potomac. The Constitution is to the protection of individual gun rights what the crucifix is to the vampire; the Second Amendment has the same teeth that Scalia applied to the Heller decision when he discussed “dangerous and unusual weapons”, the asteroid sized loophole the government can use to ban the possession of any weapons it considers injurious to its safety and existence.
It is fortunate the drug-addled (official government sanctioned psychotropics, of course) young man who gunned down the children and their state stewards in the government school in CT did not employ a hammer or pipe wrench, otherwise carpenters and plumbers would be rubbing their hands in angst at the possible loss or confiscation of their tools. Joe Biden would be discussing the valorous and critical legislation necessary to prevent any more such holocausts.
This national discussion frames the argument incorrectly. The trope concerning the need for such weapons in private hands being a question by the government is a chimera; the state is not in the business of safety of the population; its business is the safety of government interests and nothing else. This is not about high capacity magazines and cosmetically offensive weapons, these are merely the tools of last resort that make very citizen a peer in lethality and self-ownership.
And the government will have none of that.
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A small, but important, point: there was something “more” to Lexington and Concord than just gun confiscation. As I explained it briefly here, it was an operation to crush an insurrectionist group: https://militialaw.com/2013/01/12/open-letter-to-chuck-baldwin/
Also, I am in full agreement with Mr. Spooner in re: the Constitution (and I paraphrase) it either gave us this govt or failed to prevent its existence, in either event it is completely worthless.
Thank you for the keen observation but I would tell you in this case, the munitions and weapons were the causus belli employed by the Crown to substantiate the insurrection. The weapons that formerly defended the frontier were perceived by Gage et al to be a means to influence the Crown’s behavior. I would suggest that before 19 APR 1775, very few colonists even imagined a divorce from the Crown only a redress of grievances. Both parties accidenatlly started a conflict that would lead to a secession; a very real analog to what I suspect will happen in the US in the next few years. All the manifestations of a divorce are in place but have yet to be actualized or acknowledged by all the aggrieved aprties inclusing the Federal government. Remember that the Feds have a moral imagination that is tremendously narrow and envisions no retreat on power and sees ALL malcontents, skeptics and refuseniks as a real AND existential threat. The Feds have two planes of vision: the immediate need to violently stop any resistance to their authority and the longer term project of shaping the citizenry into Homo Sovieticus hence the emphais on a media comple and the need to monopolize all education venues.
Terrific observations and thank you. I would urge you to vist our forum and join the conversation.
Spooner is the patron saint of this site. I am in the process of establishing a Lysander Spooner Foundation.
Bill