Self-defense and pacifism are two distinctly different concepts in human liberty. The former is the notion, in the private sphere, of defending one’s life against initiated aggression. The latter is the material conditions for a self-extinction event. Don’t get me wrong, I agree and admire the base reasons for pacifism but object to the implementation in the real world versus its ideation.
Whether the conscientious objectors in WWI and WWII, draft dodgers in all the wars or the principled religionists in every sect who live by the creed, they go with the Gods.
I think the Amish and the Mennonites are superior examples of peaceful living and I applaud the steadfast refusal for their creed in the US to pay Socialist Security or abide by regulations the rest of Americans are saddled with. But the state is a death cult and eventually, it will manage to threaten the most peaceful among its flock with gulags or murder if compliance is not quick to come in the larger sense.
But self-defense is truly an inalienable right if not the primal right of every human when all others are either stripped away or the origin for their existence is sought. Rights can only be rights if they can be employed to serve an individual without putting a non-consensual burden on the other individuals who may be around him. So the silly construct of a right to work, health care or even a jury trial is nonsense.
The last because the voter pool, for those unfortunate enough to imagine individual voting makes a difference, are conscripted in a lottery by the local or Federal legal apparatus on pain of fining or caging for non-compliance. Once corralled in the courtroom, they suffer more threats from the robed government employee to follow his precise instructions on maintaining government supremacy against the defendant chained in the courtroom.
Rights in a non-aggression principle environment are very narrow indeed. All of a sudden, all the sophistry and magical thinking that the state enchants people with disappears in a flash and everyone is an adult or else. Unlike the pre-adolescent toddler nostrums that inform so much of the American government enterprise, and its economically illiterate mouthpieces among the presstitutes, rights do not descend from or emanate from the state. They are a priori genetic investments every human is coded with in their ancestral inheritance.
The state must work from the start to actually deprogram and reprogram these states of nature that most humans are vested with, excepting the small percentage of the population whose psycho- and sociopathic tendencies make them ideal candidates for the ruling classes in the Lewis Carroll world of Western modernity.
This is why the mandarin class relies so intensely on dismissing any notions of individual self-defense. Once that meme is released, viral and accepted, a large part of the rationale for the state evaporates. Remember that voting is putting the worst people in charge to protect you from a few bad people why have neither the will nor capacity to injure the way the state does on a daily basis. Even the robed government employees concede that the state has no duty to protect individual residents yet they target individual citizens’ time, resources and freedom to build an edifice that allegedly does just that. Only in the mind of a statist would that pass muster as moral or logical. It begs the question that if you concede there is no duty to protect, how can the idiot savant state on the other hand use every means at their disposal to disarm and criminalize self-defense? A foundational notion that all the big “gun rights” organizations have ignored.
“Gun control” is not about protecting citizens, but preserving the safety of the rulers and their roosts. One could go as far as to contend that the connection between self-defense and opting out, the supreme marker of free choice, is intimately wed and that the state is always a clear and present danger to individual choice. This is not only because the brutal police state evident to every American is in full force, but because an armed citizenry, determined to defend against aggression, is every statist’s worst nightmare.
Chris Cantwell and Larken Rose have tackled these questions eloquently and I recommend listening to their arguments.
The philosophical argument from an abolitionist perspective is rather simple: once the state puts your self-defense in jeopardy in a meaningful way, as has been the inexorable march in the USSA, private property is then in constant peril in light of the government desire to monopolize violence.
Individual liberty then simply evaporates.
Butler Shaffer sums it up brilliantly:
It is the nature of fascist political systems to bifurcate the purported ownership of property from its control. Such division generates the conflict that has been destroying America. It has been our politically-driven separation from one another into allegedly irreconcilable interests that has plagued mankind.
Stark choices remain for those who wish to give their children a better world than the Orwellian nightmare they are currently bequeathed by the indolent and cowardly parentage they suffer under today.
If self-defense is trumped, neutralized and destroyed, all is lost.
Resist.
Trial by jury was instilled in our culture by our founders to allow us to control the government!
That is why we have JURY NULLIFICATION! This RIGHT allows “we the people” to control the government by refusing to obey their directions, and set those charged by the government free. By declaring them “not guilty”!
The jury has the Right to ignore the “instructions” of the court and can vote their conscience.