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    Default Tyranny and Gun Control

    http://www.campaignforliberty.com/article.php?view=501

    Tyranny and Gun Control

    By Jacob Hornberger

    Published 01/06/10

    Over the years, I’ve had conversations with Europeans about gun control. Not surprisingly, they have been very critical of America’s “gun culture” — that is, the widespread ownership of guns among the American people. They have extolled the situation in Europe, where gun-control laws preclude people from freely owning guns, arguing that such laws make for a more peaceful society.

    My response to such Europeans has included the following: The big advantage we have over you is what happens if a tyrannical regime ever takes power. Except for Switzerland, where most families are well-armed with assault rifles and handguns, Europeans have but one choice when faced with the rise of a tyrannical regime: submit and obey or be killed. Americans, at least, have one final choice — resist with guns.

    Let’s assume, for example, that a regime assumes power in a European country that will not permit elections, abolishes civil liberties, takes command and control over the economy, and begins rounding up and incarcerating, torturing, raping, and killing dissidents and critics without a trial. Given that the troops who are enforcing the regime’s orders will be the only ones in society who have guns, the citizenry will inevitably shut their mouths or, even worse, become ardent and enthusiastic supporters of the regime.

    A good example, of course, was Nazi Germany, where German Jews lacked the means to resist their round-ups and incarceration with force and where ordinary Germans, also lacking the means to resist what was going on, kept silent or became government supporters.

    We’re seeing a good example of a modern-day tyrannical regime in Iran. There, the elections are crooked and the government is using its troops and police to arrest dissidents, protestors, and critics. After taking such “enemies of society” into custody, some of the troops are then raping and torturing some of the prisoners. The troops and police are sometimes shooting protestors in cold blood on the streets or executing them in custody. No legitimate trials are being accorded the suspects and any such trials would be of a kangaroo nature anyway.

    The Iranian people have an interesting choice — submit and obey, or resist and be raped, tortured, or killed. Because there is no widespread ownership of guns, they are precluded from shooting back at the troops and police when they’re fired upon or when the troops or police come to cart them away for indefinite incarceration, torture, rape, or execution.

    Of course, there are many American gun-control types who say, “Well, that sort of thing could happen in Iran or Europe or elsewhere, but it could never happen here in the United States.”

    That position, needless to say, is the height of naïveté. Anything is possible. Human nature is human nature. There’s nothing special about American human beings as compared to other human beings. There will always be those in every society, including the United States, who thirst for power over the lives of other human beings and who are all-too-ready to convince themselves that the assumption of omnipotent, tyrannical power is necessary to save the nation. And there will always be those who are ready and willing to loyally obey orders, especially when their superiors tell them that what they're doing is saving the nation.

    Likely? Of course not. America’s long tradition of democracy and due process makes the likelihood of a tyrannical regime assuming power, say in a coup, extremely unlikely.

    But not impossible.

    And that’s where the right to keep and bear arms comes into play. It’s the insurance policy that Americans have in the unlikely event that would-be American tyrants were ever to assume power in our country, prohibiting elections, rounding up dissidents and critics, torturing and raping them, and executing them without due process of law.

    In fact, the right to keep and bears arms actually serves as more than an insurance policy, it also serves as a deterrent. For when would-be tyrants know that the citizenry is well-armed, they think twice about imposing tyranny.

    In the case of Silveira v. Lockyer, Ninth Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski summed up the importance of the right to keep and bear arms:

    The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. 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.

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    Default Re: Tyranny and Gun Control

    Of course, there are many American gun-control types who say, “Well, that sort of thing could happen in Iran or Europe or elsewhere, but it could never happen here in the United States.”
    It could but it would be a helluva lot harder for the same reason the Japanese didn't want to invade the US mainland.

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    Default Re: Tyranny and Gun Control

    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.
    Since when is "during every other empire in recorded history," exceptionally rare? It is not if, but when.
    Any mission, any conditions, any foe at any range.
    Twice the mayhem, triple the force.
    Ten times the action, total hardcore.

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    Default Re: Tyranny and Gun Control

    An interesting note is that Alex Kozinski is the Chief Judge of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals -- you know, the Circuit court that gets overturned more often than not at the Supreme Court level. Then again, he's a guy from Communist Romania whose parents were Holocaust survivors, so he's got a particularly strong opinion on the people keeping the government in check.

    The quote from his dissent in the OP was reprinted in an article for Capitalism Magazine, which is worth mentioning in this thread: [Source]
    The Individual's Right to Bear Arms
    by Alex Kozinski (May 22, 2003)

    Last December, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld California's ban on assault weapons. Writing for the Court, Judge Stephen Reinhardt held that the Second Amendment only protected the state's "collective" right to own firearms, and that the Constitution recognized no individual right to bear arms.

    Earlier this month, the full Ninth Circuit denied a motion to set aside the panel's opinion and rehear the case. Four judges dissented from this decision and one of the judge's opinions, that of Circuit Judge Alex Kozinski, is reprinted below--Nicholas Provenzo


    Judges know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that "speech, or . . . the press" also means the Internet, and that "persons, houses, papers, and effects" also means public telephone booths. When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases--or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text. But, as the panel amply demonstrates, when we're none too keen on a particular constitutional guarantee, we can be equally ingenious in burying language that is incontrovertibly there.

    It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as spring-boards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit annoying us. As guardians of the Constitution, we must be consistent in interpreting its provisions. If we adopt a jurisprudence sympathetic to individual rights, we must give broad compass to all constitutional provisions that protect individuals from tyranny. If we take a more statist approach, we must give all such provisions narrow scope. Expanding some to gargantuan proportions while discarding others like a crumpled gum wrapper is not faithfully applying the Constitution; it's using our power as federal judges to constitutionalize our personal preferences.

    The able judges of the panel majority are usually very sympathetic to individual rights, but they have succumbed to the temptation to pick and choose. Had they brought the same generous approach to the Second Amendment that they routinely bring to the First, Fourth and selected portions of the Fifth, they would have had no trouble finding an individual right to bear arms. Indeed, to conclude otherwise, they had to ignore binding precedent. United States v. Miller (1939) did not hold that the defendants lacked standing to raise a Second Amendment defense, even though the government argued the collective rights theory in its brief. The Supreme Court reached the Second Amendment claim and rejected it on the merits after finding no evidence that Miller's weapon--a sawed-off shotgun--was reasonably susceptible to militia use. We are bound not only by the outcome of Miller but also by its rationale. If Miller's claim was dead on arrival because it was raised by a person rather than a state, why would the Court have bothered discussing whether a sawed-off shotgun was suitable for militia use? The panel majority not only ignores Miller's test; it renders most of the opinion wholly superfluous. As an inferior court, we may not tell the Supreme Court it was out to lunch when it last visited a constitutional provision.

    The majority falls prey to the delusion--popular in some circles--that ordinary people are too careless and stupid to own guns, and we would be far better off leaving all weapons in the hands of professionals on the government payroll. But the simple truth--born of experience--is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people. Our own sorry history bears this out: Disarmament was the tool of choice for subjugating both slaves and free blacks in the South. In Florida, patrols searched blacks' homes for weapons, confiscated those found and punished their owners without judicial process. In the North, by contrast, blacks exercised their right to bear arms to defend against racial mob violence. As Chief Justice Taney well appreciated, the institution of slavery required a class of people who lacked the means to resist. See Dred Scott v. Sandford, (1857) (finding black citizenship unthinkable because it would give blacks the right to "keep and carry arms wherever they went"). A revolt by Nat Turner and a few dozen other armed blacks could be put down without much difficulty; one by four million armed blacks would have meant big trouble.

    All too many of the other great tragedies of history--Stalin's atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few--were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.

    My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. 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.

    Fortunately, the Framers were wise enough to entrench the right of the people to keep and bear arms within our constitutional structure. The purpose and importance of that right was still fresh in their minds, and they spelled it out clearly so it would not be forgotten. Despite the panel's mighty struggle to erase these words, they remain, and the people themselves can read what they say plainly enough:

    A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

    The sheer ponderousness of the panel's opinion--the mountain of verbiage it must deploy to explain away these fourteen short words of constitutional text--refutes its thesis far more convincingly than anything I might say. The panel's labored effort to smother the Second Amendment by sheer body weight has all the grace of a sumo wrestler trying to kill a rattlesnake by sitting on it--and is just as likely to succeed.
    Nevermore ...peering from the People's Republic of California

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    Default Re: Tyranny and Gun Control

    The Ninth Circus Court is the very "kangaroo court" that the original writer is talking about.

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    Default Re: Tyranny and Gun Control

    The powers that be are slowly twisting the rules and laws to become the very thing our fore fathers earnestly tried to repel.
    People are very lazy by nature! They want someone to take care of them, they want someone to guard them, to rule them. The people that came to America were pioneers, rebellious to governments / kings. They despised being ruled and owned. That is what made us so powerful and resilient, but with anything in nature, time, and our nature has watered down the populations resistance. We still have the pioneer spirit amongst us, but at the creation of this country the percentages of pioneers was extremely larger.
    -Remember the Constitution-

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    Default Re: Tyranny and Gun Control

    Quote Originally Posted by nlcrsn View Post
    The powers that be are slowly twisting the rules and laws to become the very thing our fore fathers earnestly tried to repel.
    People are very lazy by nature! They want someone to take care of them, they want someone to guard them, to rule them. The people that came to America were pioneers, rebellious to governments / kings. They despised being ruled and owned. That is what made us so powerful and resilient, but with anything in nature, time, and our nature has watered down the populations resistance. We still have the pioneer spirit amongst us, but at the creation of this country the percentages of pioneers was extremely larger.
    Would you like my humble opinion as to why people have become lazy and dependent on Gov't for everything?

    Well even if you don't want to hear it I'll tell you anyway

    One word. Fear. Simple fear. They don't know how to live for themselves. They don't know how to rely on their own hard work and they don't know how to make a decision on their own.

    I'm not saying they don't want to be free from government intervention with everything. I'm not saying they don't want to be free to make their own decisions and decide how best to live their life, raise their families and spend their money. Because they do.

    They are just terrified. What we really fear is the unknown. Most people don't know how to be free or make their own decisions. Think of them like a kid living away from mom and dad for the first time. They are all for it. They want it. They go on and on about how great it'll be. But they're afraid.

    They may make it seem like it's no big deal but they've never paid their own bills, been responsible for their own grocery shopping, all the chores. Any of it.

    Americans know the benefits of being free. They want it. They're just too damn scared to actually fight for it. Simple fear.

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