It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong (23 page)

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The Founders formed a consensus as to the meaning of the amendment. The Second Amendment is not a collective right, but rather an
individual
right. There is no record of the Founders viewing a “well regulated Militia” as only state militias, such as the National Guard or police departments, but rather the sum of individuals in a state who choose to create a militia. Furthermore, “the right of the people” in the Constitution is always in reference to individuals, not to some state entity.

The Founders may have agreed on the necessity and meaning of the Second Amendment, but subsequent governments fought to curtail this right. However, because the right to keep and bear arms is a modern-day extension of the right to self-defense, it is natural, or fundamental, and these governments had no legal authority to take away an absolute right without due process. Yet, despite the unconstitutionality of their actions and the clarity of the Founders' vision, progressives in American governments have continuously attempted to create controversy over the true meaning of the Second Amendment and used this controversy to disarm the nation's individuals to seize more power for government.

Give Me Your Guns, and I'll Protect You

Government's quest to strip us of our ability to defend life, liberty, and property is not unique to this nation. The Nazis used this method to disarm the Jews in Eastern Europe. Once the Nazis overtook a town, Hitler ordered them to seize all guns and other weapons from the Jews and forbade the Jews from acquiring new arms. Not surprisingly, Hitler exempted members of the Sturmabteilung, Hitler's paramilitary organization (the “brown shirts”), and Nazi Party members from the existing gun laws. The tragedy during the night of November 9th through the early hours of the 10th, 1938, or Kristallnacht, demonstrates the success of this method. The Nazis unleashed a series of pogroms against the German Jews in response to a November 7th 1938 assassination of a German diplomat in Paris, Ernst vom Rath, by Herschel Grynszpan, a Jewish teenager. In a matter of hours, the Nazis killed at least 91 Jews, injured countless others,
³
destroyed 7,500 Jewish businesses,
⁴
and burned 267 synagogues.
⁵
The Nazis arrested about 30,000 Jews and transported them to concentration camps.
⁶
The Nazis' previous denial of the Jews' natural right to keep and bear arms left them without a chance to defend themselves, their homes, businesses, or synagogues.

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In contrast, those able to hold onto their arms and their basic right to self-defense were much more successful in resisting the Nazi genocide. Take, for example, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising of April 1943. Without notice, Wehrmacht troops arrived in the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland, with orders to liquidate the remaining Jewish population and transport survivors to concentration camps. Yet, to their surprise, they met resistance from a loosely organized group of Zionists, the Jewish Combat Organization (ZOB). The ZOB never totaled more than 220 individuals,
⁷
who were ill equipped to fight the Nazis. With only small arms and grenades, they were able to kill about three hundred members of the German military and hold them off for almost a month. More impressively, not one ZOB member was brought to the concentration camps; they either died in combat, escaped, or committed suicide. While there was no way for the Jews to know the Holocaust was occurring or about to occur, if they were able to maintain arms and fight for their lives like those of the ZOB did, then perhaps the six million Jews would never have suffered their tragic horrific fate.

Unfortunately, despite the widespread knowledge of the Holocaust, it is surely not the only case of dictators using the power of disarmament to their advantage. In fact, the Chinese, the inventors of gunpowder, are forbidden from owning any firearms or ammunition. In 1996, the Chinese government imposed a blanket ban and outlawed the private manufacturing, sale, transportation, possession, importation, or exportation of bullets, guns, and replicated guns. The irony is that as the Chinese government continues to disarm its citizens, it makes a fortune off the arms trade.
⁸
In fact, as of 2009, China was the seventh largest exporter of arms in the world.
⁹

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Why would a government making large profits exporting arms, prevent its people from owning these arms? The answer is simple: To retain power. As Mao Zedong famously remarked, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” A disarmed citizenry allows China's growing military to maintain the status quo; a status quo involving complete governmental dominance of all non-government persons. In fact, the timing of the blanket prohibition is evidence of this. The Chinese government initiated the prohibition after political unrest and social tensions rose with pro-democracy demonstrations in 1989.

Unfortunately, despite what we are taught, our own nation's history in the realm of gun laws is more similar to Eastern Europe's and China's history than we would like to believe. Currently, the federal government reaps the tax and trade benefits of our nation being the number one producer and exporter of arms; yet, restricts the right to keep and bear arms.
¹⁰
The trend in disarming American individuals is not new. During the period after the Civil War, southern governments enacted Black Codes, which prohibited freed slaves and all blacks from owning and bearing firearms. By disarming the former slaves, the Codes made it virtually impossible for them to defend themselves from the violent actions of the KKK. KKK-inspired assaults on self-defense soon spread to the North, and similar statutes were enforced in states, such as New York, which disarmed blacks, Irish, Italians, Jews, and other immigrant groups.

Partly in response to and partly in anticipation of the southern governments depriving blacks of their basic liberties, Congress enacted the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment generally applies the protections of the Bill of Rights to the states. Stated differently, the Fourteenth Amendment imposes the same restraints on the states that the first eight amendments impose on the federal government. There are some exceptions to this; though, for the most part, it is the case.

Statutes such as those enacted after the Civil War and in subsequent periods are exactly the atrocities the Second Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment were meant to prevent. And while it does not take a wise man to recognize the advantages of an unarmed citizenry, if we are unable to learn from history's lessons, we are fools destined to repeat them.

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Federal Denial of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

The Founders envisioned a nation where the government held limited powers and the people were able to live their daily lives with little interference from any government. Within this vision was the power of individuals to defend their property from criminals, other foreign entities, and tyrannical domestic governments. Yet, our current and past governments continually seek legislative tools to circumvent the Second Amendment. The initial efforts of state governments were shamefully blatant in their attempts to disarm the black citizenry, but over time, the state governments and the federal government sought to impair the right of all non-government persons to keep and bear arms.

The first of the federal acts interfering with the right to self-defense was the National Firearms Act of 1934. In the guise of raising revenues, the government began to require registrations and taxation on the transfer of weapons. Today, the registration of a gun is the status quo, and we are taxed on everything from food to the shampoo we buy at the store. However, the National Firearms Act placed a two-hundred-dollar tax on the registration of shotguns. This tax is even more exorbitant when you consider that a brand-new shotgun only cost $6.95 in a 1938 Sears catalogue. The government claimed it was trying to raise revenues and not prohibit guns; yet, what other conclusion can one come to when a tax is thirty times more than the price of the product?

Continuing the assault on natural rights by the feds, the Supreme Court got in on the action. On June 22nd 1938, Treasury agents looking to make a bootlegging bust stopped Frank Layton and Jack Miller as they drove through Arkansas. To their despair, Layton and Miller's car contained no illicit bootlegging equipment; however, the men were in possession of an unregistered sawed-off shotgun. The reason for the arrest was the length of the gun's barrel. Had it been two inches
longer
, and thus comparable in size to those used by the military at the time, Miller and Layton would not have been arrested. The comparability to military weapons was the premise—a historically inaccurate, profoundly unconstitutional, and Natural Law–violating premise—of the 1934 Act. Progressives in Congress took the phrase “a well regulated Militia” in the text of the Second Amendment and falsely claimed that the Framers intended to protect the ownership of military-style weapons only, those fit for use by a well-regulated militia. The newly enacted National Firearms Act prohibited the unregistered gun, and the men were subsequently arrested.

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Under the Act, the men faced fines and up to five years in jail. Layton and Miller appealed their conviction all the way to the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, by the time their case reached the Court, the men were unavailable, and their counsel could no longer afford to represent them without compensation. Yet, their case moved forward, and the Court heard oral arguments on behalf of the government only. The government argued that the statute was for revenue purposes and held no relation to the Second Amendment or the right to keep and bear arms. This one-sided oral argument resulted in the Court incorrectly ruling in favor of the government and the constitutionality of the National Firearms Act. The justices accepted the government's false claims that firearms with a barrel shorter than sixteen inches were not used by the military. Consequently, the government successfully argued these arms were not protected by the Second Amendment because it only protects arms used by the militia, and the militia can only be armed by guns used by the military. The failure of the Court to investigate the truth and reject this narrow and obviously incorrect interpretation of the Second Amendment created a wide-open door for the enactment of gun regulations over the next seventy years.

By 1968, the government took the opportunity to intrude even more on the natural right to keep and bear arms by enacting the Gun Control Act of 1968 and Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act. These Acts required all gun owners to be over the age of eighteen and prohibited the sales of arms between residents of different states. Moreover, a gun-licensing program was implemented, and a manipulative “sporting test” was developed. Yet, after allegations of abuse and a complete about-face by the government, the Firearms Owners Protection Act of 1986 was enacted. The Act resulted from a 1982 bipartisan Senate subcommittee. The subcommittee was tasked with investigating the Second Amendment and found,

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The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the second amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an
individual
right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner.
¹¹

While the subcommittee concluded the above, the Act did not reinstate the natural right to self-defense. Instead, the Act banned the manufacture, transfer, and civilian use of machine guns not manufactured as of the date of the Act. But, of course, there was one exception: Those for the police.

By 1993, the government was up to its old tricks, and President Clinton signed into law the Brady Handgun Prevention Act (Brady Act) on November 30th 1993. The Brady Act was named in honor of James Brady. During the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan, a stray bullet hit Brady, Reagan's press secretary, and left him permanently disabled. Consequently, he and his wife have devoted their lives to assaulting the right to self-defense. The main purpose of the Act was to provide “for a waiting period before the purchase of a handgun, and for the establishment of a national instant criminal background check system to be contacted by firearms dealers before the transfer of any firearm.”
¹²
In doing so, the Act imposed a five-day interim measure before a licensed importer, manufacturer, or dealer may sell, deliver, or transfer a handgun to an unlicensed individual. While the interim measure applied only in states without an acceptable alternate system of conducting background checks on handgun purchasers, it expired on November 30th 1998, and the waiting period ceased to apply when the computerized instant check system came online.

Finally, the government enacted the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, or more appropriately the “Federal Assault Weapons Ban.” The main thrust of the Act was to prohibit the sale of specified semiautomatic firearms, which were defined as “assault weapons,” to civilians. Additionally, the Act designated nineteen weapons as assault weapons and then provided a definition of assault weapons based on certain senseless combinations of a variety of non-lethal features.

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Now, at first you may be sympathetic to a ban on “assault weapons,” but in reality, these weapons are no more potent than your or your neighbor's legal hunting rifle. In fact, the bullets are fired one at a time, at the same speed, and produce the same damage as a hunting rifle. So then, what is the difference? The rifle's plastic casing. That's right, the government is not protecting you from machine guns producing a spray fire; no, it is restricting your right to own a dangerous-
looking
hunting rifle.