The Smallest Minority |
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The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. - Ayn Rand "I don't just want gun rights... I want individual liberty, a culture of self-reliance....I want the whole bloody thing." KdT
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Wahabism Delenda Est   
Hey, FEC!  BITE ME! I'm a Member of the McCain-Feingold INSURRECTION!   "Jeez, Kevin... calling you an asshole would be a huge understatement, wouldn't it?" -Jack Cluth, The People's Republic of Seabrook (Coming from you, Jack, it's an honor.)  email: gunrightsAT comcastDOTnet INVITATION: If you have never shot a firearm, regardless of your position on the right to arms, and if you live near or visit the Tucson, AZ metropolitan area, I invite you to go shooting for a day. I will provide the arms, ammunition, targets, safety equipment, range fees and instruction. All you have to do is show up. 4 Takers To Date DO YOU LIVE SOMEWHERE ELSE and want to try shooting? Click HERE  Proud Gun-blogging member of the Pajamahadeen since May, 2003!
Debates: "The Commentary" A OLD discussion on gun control between me and an Irishman living in London Start here. UPDATED! Now with archive! Post #1 by Alex, a Guest A multi-post discussion hosted here at TSM My short exchange with Professor Saul Cornell of the Second Amendment Research Center Best Posts: The "Rights" Discussion: What is a "Right?" What is a "Right"? Revisited, Part I Part II Rights, Morality, Idealism & Pragmatism, Part I Part II Part III Part IV The United Federation of Planets Is the Government Responsible for Your Protection? Part I & Part II 1975 in Washington, D.C. vs. 2004 in Canton, Ohio Go Ahead, Rely on the Government for Your Protection The Other Side Liberal vs. Conservative: Both are Necessary The Blog that Ate Poughkeepsie Updated and restated as: Of Laws and Sausages Militias A Mistake a Free People Get to Make Only Once This is NOT What I Wanted to Read TRUST The Lying "News" Media, Pt. II Say WHAT? Bias? What Bias? Agenda? What Agenda? The Church of the MSM and the New Reformation Let's See if I Can "Germinate an Intelligent Thought" Here The ACLU Hasn't Changed its Tune They Never EVER Stop It is Not the Business of Government Five Reasons Why It ISN'T They Keep Making Better Fools Five Month Investigation, 10 Tracer Rounds, Two Felony Convictions That Sumbitch Ain't been BORN! On Guillotines and Gibbets England Slides Further Towards Bondage Pressing the "RESET" Button Freedom's Just Another Word for Nothin' Left To Lose A Terrible Resolve The Courts Will Not Save Us Trilogy: The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions "Game Over, Man. Game Over." An Important Question And the denouement: Hudson Was Wrong The Dangerous Victims Trilogy: "(I)t's most important that all potential victims be as dangerous as they can" Violence and the Social Contract Governments, Criminals, and Dangerous Victims In the same vein: Those Without Swords Can Still Die Upon Them The True Believers Trilogy: True Believers March of the Lemmings Reasonable People Also in the same vein: Tough History Coming Technical Dissertations Why Ballistic Fingerprinting Doesn't (And Won't) Work Spin, Spin, Spin Speaking of Teddy Kennedy... This is the Kind of Thing That REALLY IRRITATES ME Questions from the Audience?
BLOGROLL:
PROTESTWARRIOR Some people who are taking the fight to the Left. And some GREAT T-shirts, too. DAILY READS I need a longer day! Day by Day InstaPundit Lileks' The Bleat Kim du Toit Mostly Cajun View from the Porch Of Arms and the Law TFS Magnum Ravenwood's Universe Irons in the Fire Say Uncle TRUE EXCELLENCE American Digest The Belmont Club The Volokh Conspiracy Michael Yon Varifrank Eject!Eject!Eject! Eternity Road Oleg Volk Personal Effects ON INDEFINITE HIATUS USS Clueless The Safety Valve Ipse Dixit The Lopsided Poopdeck Acidman (RIP) Skywritings Publicola D.C. Thorton Smoke on the Water OTHER GUN/RIGHTS BLOGS Airborne Combat Engineer AlphaPatriot Alphecca American Dinosaur A Day in the Life of an Ambulance Driver The Anarchangel The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler Argghhh! The Bitch Girls Boots and Sabers The Breda Fallacy Call Me Ahab Carnaby Fudge Clayton Cramer Cogito Ergo Geek Countertop Chronicles Cowboy Blob Critical Mastiff Cryptic Subterranean FreedomSight From the Heartland Fun Turns to Tragedy!!! The Geek with a .45 Gunwatch Heartless Libertarian Hell in a Handbasket Individ Justin Buist's Blog The LawDog Files Lead and Gold Les Jones Mad Ogre The Michael Bane Blog Moral Flexibility Mr. Completely Murdoc Online The Munchkin Wrangler Ninth Stage No Looking Backwards No Quarters Oscar Poppa Outrageous Malfunction Pass the ammo Posse Incitatus Random Nuclear Strikes Reasonablenut Resistance is Futile! Sandcastles and Cubicles SlagleRock's Slaughterhouse Snowflakes in Hell Surly Curmudgeon Texican Tattler The Ten Ring South Park Pundit Triggerfinger The View From North Central Idaho Vox The War on Guns Weck Up To Thees! Wince and Nod Xavier Thoughts .45 Caliber Justice BLOGGERS I'VE MET Cowboy Blob Kim du Toit Mrs. du Toit Serenity Smoke on the Water The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler On the Patio Fodder of Ride Fast & Shoot Straight Rivrdog Say Uncle JimmyB, The Conservative UAW Guy KeeWee Mr. Completely Og the Neanderpundit USCitizen of Traction Control World Examiner Joe Huffman Chris & Mel John and Beth Donovan Sebastian of Snowflakes in Hell DirtCrashr of Anthroblogogy Rob of The Kitchen Maj. Chuck Ziegenfuss of From My Position... On the Way! Matthew of Triggerfinger Sarah of Carnaby Fudge KevinP who maintains this excellent Wikipedia entry on the Joyce Foundation Dave Hardy Clayton Cramer Primeval Papa FURRINERS Kiwi Pundit The Policeman's Blog Free Market Fairy Tales Samizdata Musing The Second Version OTHER GOOD READS Baby Troll Blog The Winds of Change Sense of Events The Everlasting Phelps Knowledge is Power QandO Blog Radio Blogger THE PSYCHE BRIGADE Dr. Sanity Dr. Helen One Cosmos ShrinkWrapped Neo-Neocon Sigmund, Carl, and Alfred OTHER AZ BLOGS Useful Fools Zonitics Jackalope Pursuivant Primeval Papa DEPT. OF OUR COLLAPSING SCHOOLS Joanne Jacobs EducatioNation Teacher, Teacher The Irascible Professor OTHERS KIND ENOUGH TO BLOGROLL ME Adding to the Noise America's North Shore Journal Anthroblogogy Atomic Nerds Baboon Pirates Bad Dogs and Such The Bastidge Blognomicon Charming, Just Charming Chublogga! Classical Values Common Sense and Wonder Combs Spouts Off Conservative Scalawag The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns damnum absque injuria David Drake Digital Retrograde The Dougout The Emigre with a Digital Cluebat Empire of Dirt Ether Mind The Fabulous Mint 400 The Freeholder Heinleinblog Impearls Interested-Participant Isaac Schrödinger Josh's Weblog Keith Devens Kill Righty Libertopia The Liberty Zone The Liberty Papers Living in the Surreal World Mike's Eyes Miss O'Hara The Mind of Mog The Ministry of Minor Perfidy MonkeyWatch Adam Lawson NashvilleFiles Near the Salty City PervasiveLight Pierre Legrand's Pink Flamingo Bar Practical Penumbra The Passing Parade Right As Usual Rough Diamond Rules for Rulers Sharp as a Marble She Who Will Be Obeyed! The Speculist Sperari Striderweb A Trainwreck in Maxwell Upbeat Cynicism (Ian Hamet) The Warren Warthog's Rants Wasted Electrons Wheels within Wheels Wicked Thoughts  
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Tuesday, June 08, 2004 Governments, Criminals, and Dangerous Victims (This is Part III of a series. Please read Part I, "It's most important that all potential victims be as dangerous as they can", and Part II, Violence and the Social Contract before proceeding.) Alexander Tytler is credited, perhaps apocryphally, for this quotation: A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by dictatorship.I don't know who actually said it, or when, but it echoes well Alexis de Tocqueville's contemporary comment, The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.Benjamin Franklin, it is said, when asked what form of government the Constitutional Convention had settled on in Philadelphia in 1787 responded, A republic, if you can keep it.The eighteenth century saw the rise of the first truly representative government in the modern world. At the beginning of the nineteenth century the United States was one of the very few democratically-based governments in existence. Almost all others were hereditary monarchies or just plain dictatorships. Great Britain was a titular monarchy, but with legal restraints, and subject to the votes of the populace and the peerage. By the first quarter of the 20th century, the dominant model of government was some form of democracy - defined as a government that listens to and accomodates the populace which it serves through some form of popular vote. Colonialism was, for all intents and purposes, dead. What made that possible? Democracies had risen in history before, but had fallen back into tyranny. Greece and Rome are but the two most famous examples. Democracy had never gained a solid foothold before, but suddenly (historically speaking) it sprung up worldwide. Industrialization had something to do with it. The world model of agriculture as the dominant economic engine had been replaced with industrial manufacturing and its supporting industry, mining. The natural resources needed now expanded beyond mere land. Now much more of what was beneath that land was valuable. And, as always, men fought to acquire that which was valuable. The industrial revolution came to the aid of that, too. With the invention of useable, effective, inexpensive firearms, the professional soldier caste no longer held an advantage over the meanest serf - so long as that serf had a gun. All the training in swordsmanship and archery and the best plate mail were useless against a man with a matchlock and the meager skills required to use it. As technology progressed; the rifled musket, the Minie ball, the percussion cap, the metallic cartridge, the repeating arm, each step made it easier for the individual to be as lethal as his martial forebears. More lethal, in fact. A peasant with a scythe is an irritant to a landowner who commands a knight with a charger and a lance. When many peasants are angry and outnumber the knights, you have to pay attention to them, but one peasant with a musket is a problem of a different order entirely. When the victims are dangerous, it changes the balance of the equation of power. The more dangerous they are, the more the balance changes. After the American Revolution, and just a few years after the ratification of our Constitution, American jurist St. George Tucker wrote a review of American law called Blackstone's Commentaries. It was first published in 1803, and on the topic of our Constitutionally recognized right to arms, Tucker had this to say: This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty. . . . The right of self defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction. In England, the people have been disarmed, generally, under the specious pretext of preserving the game: a never failing lure to bring over the landed aristocracy to support any measure, under that mask, though calculated for very different purposes. True it is, their bill of rights seems at first view to counteract this policy: but the right of bearing arms is confined to protestants, and the words suitable to their condition and degree, have been interpreted to authorise the prohibition of keeping a gun or other engine for the destruction of game, to any farmer, or inferior tradesman, or other person not qualified to kill game. So that not one man in five hundred can keep a gun in his house without being subject to a penalty."It seems that even then the English ruling class understood the problems that a dangerous victim represented. Well, it was understandable, given the results of the little dust-up that started in 1776. It is, I believe, the firearm that is responsible for the level of individual freedom enjoyed in this modern world. It is, without a doubt, the tool used to inflict huge volumes of death and misery, but huge volumes of death and misery are historically unremarkable, from long before there were firearms. As someone once noted, before there were firearms the world was run by large men with swords, and it was neither fair nor democratic. The difference is, firearms made the peasants dangerous. It's much less expensive to conscript peasants, instruct them in organized drill, teach them to load, aim, and fire a gun and send them off to battle than it is to pay for a professional mercenary army - especially when your conscripts, properly lead, can beat that professional mercenary army. But there's a drawback to that, if you happen to be the Head Muther%&$er in Charge - once you train those peasants, you can't untrain them. And guns are not a particularly difficult technology. That's what makes them so attractive in the first place. That makes tax collecting a bit more sporting as it were. So the next time you want to raise their taxes, or take their property (or their daughters), you have to consider how they feel about that. Unless you can disarm them. The same condition holds true if your intention is merely to steal retail, as an individual, rather than wholesale, as a government. If your victim isn't dangerous, you needn't take his objections into consideration. Representative government is the result of dangerous victims. The ability to object - and make that objection hurt, is the source of the power of the individual within the State. Guns gave that power to the previously powerless, no other technology, and that power was used to build governments that listened. Governments that don't listen still exist, and use guns to maintain their own power. Mao's famous quote is absolutely on the money: Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.And it explains precisely why totalitarian governments are very careful about who they allow to possess arms, and who they don't. The pacifist philosophy holds that non-violence is the moral choice, that violence is wrong. But violence exists, everywhere. It is violence that leads us to organize politically, for only through organization can we effectively resist the predation of others. It is through violence that society exists, for as Rev. Sensing noted, "government stays in power by violence or its threat and the threat is meaningless unless it can be and is employed". If the government cannot threaten arrest, trial, and incarceration (or worse) for violation of the laws of society - and carry that threat out - then there is no society, there is anarchy. The anarchy we join into societies to counter. We, the citizens, agree to the laws of our society and follow them because we believe them just. We condone the use of violence to enforce those laws because - in the main - the government serves to protect our rights and our property against those who would usurp them. In any group of people, however, there are always those who will not follow the rules of the society - the criminals. Certainly, if those criminals are armed they are more destructive that they would be unarmed, but there is no way to disarm the criminals without disarming the whole populace. Even then the level of success in disarming the criminal is only one of degree. It may be possible to deny a criminal a firearm, but that simply puts the society back at the "large men with swords" level. The pacifist philosophy that attempts to disarm the populace "for its own good" does no such thing. It merely renders that society more at risk, not less. And more, it places that society back at the mercy of a government that may or may not protect the rights and property of its citizens. Because the victims won't be dangerous any longer. St. George Tucker was right: The right to self defense is the first law of nature, and the right to arms is the palladium of liberty, against both criminal and tyrant. And Tytler may be correct that the pattern of history is for a free people to give up their freedom and descend once again into bondage, but so long as the people retain their arms, they may retain their liberty, or at least make their objection hurt. It is the deterrent effect of an armed populace that causes tyrants to pause and reconsider the balance of power equation. Ninth Circuit Court Justice Alex Kozinski wrote in his dissent to the recent Silveria v. Locker decision, The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.Guns in the hands of citizens means carnage and mayhem. Guns in the exclusive control of criminals and government risks far worse. It is a better choice by far to have dangerous victims rather than powerless ones. | | |
