August 15, 2001
A Blueprint for Ending Gun Control
[© Copyright 2001 by JPFO. Permission to reproduce in its entire content
without any editing is granted providing all contact information for JPFO is
included.]
By L. Neil Smith and Aaron Zelman
WARNING!
If you're the kind of self-defense advocate who actually believes in doing
something, it's likely that you'll find this article interesting and useful.
If, however, you'd rather complain than act, if you believe "we can live with"
whatever unconstitutional measure has just been or is about to be passed, or
that perhaps we'd better write the next legislation ourselves, before it's
written for us -- in short, if you feel more comfortable on your knees than on
your feet, the authors strenuously suggest that you skip this article, as they
don't wish to be responsible for raising your blood pressure and possibly
killing you.
STEP ONE: REMEMBER HISTORY
By some estimates "gun control" -- better referred to as victim disarmament
-- began in 1968, when retail gun sales were first registered under federal
law, and mail order sales sharply regulated. Others say it was in the 30s, when
the government, in violation of the Second Amendment, began telling Americans
what kind of guns they could and couldn't have. Others point to New York's 1911
Sullivan Act, which outlawed possession of guns in that city, meaning that
self-defense was effectively outlawed, too.
But the phenomenon is older than that. Some say victim disarmament began in the
19th century, when Wyatt Earp and his brothers tried to force a rival gang to
disarm themselves. Under similar circumstances, the Fourteenth Amendment had to
be passed, following the War between the States, because some jurisdictions
tried to prevent black people from exercising the individual right to own and
carry weapons.
That right -- and attempts by those in power to suppress it -- are central to
American history. Our nation was born as a result of an 18th century victim
disarmament scheme, when minions of King George III, meaning to steal rifles
and ammunition from their American cousins, were violently rebuffed at
Lexington and Concord.
Recent clashes with those in power concerned weapons, as well. Ruby Ridge was
about a shotgun barrel allegedly a quarter of an inch too short. The Waco
Massacre occurred when members of a church were accused of having too many, or
the wrong kind of, guns. It turned out, after they were all dead or in prison,
that they owned fewer guns, per capita, than the average Texas family.
Naturally, in this struggle, those on the pro-gun side have spoken out. Groups
have formed to see the Second Amendment properly enforced. An early one was
made up of former Union officers trying to make sure the nation produced enough
marksmen to defend it. They were also instrumental in passing the Fourteenth
Amendment.
Others have come and gone, responding to increasing challenges to a right that
was never supposed to have been questioned. These groups have fought proposed
new laws in congress, the statehouse, and city hall. They've staged one holding
action after another, sometimes winning, sometimes losing, always demanding
that their members give more money to counter the next threat. Yet in no case
has any significant restriction on the right to own and carry weapons ever been
repealed, overturned, nullified, or otherwise disposed of.
The last three decades of legal and historical scholarship are solidly on the
side of an unviolable individual right to own and carry weapons. Moreover,
weapons in the hands of individuals drastically reduce crime -- and
increasingly, ordinary people know it. And yet, although millions -- possibly
billions -- of dollars have been donated throughout a culture-war lasting
almost a century, and countless man-hours expended lobbying, electioneering,
and haranguing from soapboxes, newspapers, TV, and radio, there's no record of
any of these supposedly pro-gun groups even trying
to roll those 25,000 laws back.
Read the Second Amendment for yourself. Learn what the Founders wrote about it,
or just apply common sense: what would a group of rebels (who'd just defeated
the most powerful and ruthless empire in the world) have wanted the Second
Amendment to mean? Did they want to make sure the new government had guns
(which victim disarmers have ludicrously suggested) or did they want to make
sure the government would never have an unstoppable power to oppress its people
the way the King tried to do?
Understanding the Founders' intentions, we can safely say that not one of
America's gun laws is constitutional. In their view, and that of Supreme Court
justices and other judges from the 18th century to the 21st, each of them is
null and void.
Legal and historical scholarship, and the practical benefits of an armed
citizenry, demonstrate that victim disarmament isn't just a bad idea, it's the
worst possible idea for a free society. The concept is defeated and
discredited. Its proponents have nothing left but lies and brute force. Still,
governments gone bad (as ours did at least half a century ago) desperately need
weapons registration -- and the confiscation that invariably follows -- if they
are to go about their business of "reducing us under absolute despotism".
STEP TWO: ADJUST YOUR ATTITUDE
Our challenge to other pro-gun groups is this: abandon a strategy doomed to
defeat; acknowledge that not one of the 25,000 gun laws in America is legal
under the Second Amendment; embrace the goal that should have been adopted in
the first place: work toward ending victim disarmament completely and forever.
Anyone who doubts the ultimate aim of "background checks", of gun, and
gun-owner registration in any form, should ask unfortunate gun owners in
California, Illinois, and, recently, New Jersey, where police have begun going
door-to-door (as the Nazis did in Germany) with registration lists, demanding
that guns be turned over to them. In New Jersey, if you fail to comply, your
home and your business will be seized, without any "due process of law". The
FBI illegally retains the results of "Brady" background checks -- which they
were expressly forbidden to do under the law as written -- and America's
corrupt police state courts have backed them up. The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco
and Firearms has been computerizing the records (Form 4473s) of gun dealers
who've gone out of business for years. Why should they do that, unless they
plan to turn the whole country into New Jersey and start going door-to-door?
It isn't enough just to militarize the police until -- in weapons, tactics, and
objectives -- they can't be told from the black-clad stormtroopers mindlessly
serving state terrorism in today's Europe. Their innocent victims of the
productive class must be stripped of all defenses in advance, helpless to
resist no matter how evil or illegal the aims of the state, forced to grovel
face-down in the dirt, cursed, bludgeoned, spat upon, and kicked at the whim of
the police and their masters. And if they raise a hand, they're shot, dozens of
times, by ski-masked cowards wielding guns forbidden to ordinary people, in
violation of the highest law of the land, the Bill of Rights.
STEP THREE: LEARN THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRETS
This is what America has come to. The question is what will we do about it? And
before we answer, there's even worse news. An historic correlation exists
between victim disarmament on the one hand, and racism and social prejudice on
the other. Most of America's 25,000 gun laws were originally passed to disarm
-- and disenfranchise -- some economic, social, or ethnic class that those in
power were afraid of.
New York's 1911 Sullivan Act was written to take the means of self-defense from
the hands of Italians and Jews. (Earlier laws tended to disarm the Irish.) The
Federal Firearms Acts of 1934 and 1937 relied on fear of Italian gangsters
(although many famous criminals of the time had names like Barker, Dillinger,
Lansky, Schultz, Floyd, Parker, and Barrow). When the 1968 Gun Control Act
became law, America's inner cities were in flames, and while white politicians
publicly stroked leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., they did their best to
disarm his people.
Recent laws against semiautomatic weapons that strike ignorant politicians as
"ugly", and laws against magazines deemed, with equal ignorance, "too large",
started in California, where the perceived problem was Asian and Hispanic
street gangs. The infamous Brady law never stood a chance until male
politicians, many of them Republicans -- and left-wing females willing to
betray the feminist cause, along with the rights and safety of their own sex --
suddenly noticed that women owned a majority of the handguns in America, and in
certain jurisdictions -- Orlando, Florida and Toledo, Ohio, among them -- had
put a virtual stop to the crime of rape.
Rooted in race prejudice and class hatred though it may be, victim disarmament
has an uglier face. Documents exist proving that Senator Thomas Dodd of
Connecticut had the Gun Control Act of 1968 copied from the gun laws of Nazi
Germany -- ominous in light of the fact that, historically, genocide is always
preceded by sweeping gun laws and weapons confiscation.
STEP FOUR: AVOID PITFALLS
A regrettable fact of human nature is that, sooner or later, any group created
for a specific purpose begins acting like an independent organism, pursuing its
own interests at the expense of the purpose for which it was created. A tragic
example is the United States itself, established to enshrine individual
liberty, and gradually perverted, over 200 years, into protecting "national
security" and "overriding interests of the state" at the expense of everything
else.
Nowhere is this more evident than with groups that claim to defend the Second
Amendment (those that weren't created simply to provide their officers with
comfortable salaries). Obsessed with wheeling and dealing, using other people's
rights as bargaining chips, feeling important at Beltway cocktail parties, and
making trade-offs that somehow always turn out to be damaging to the individual
right to own and carry weapons, they have forgotten what they were all about.
Tangled in philosophical contradictions, unwilling even to attempt getting rid
of existing laws, the leaders of such groups have become more interested in
suppressing competition and consolidating power, than in educating members who
would throw them out if they knew the truth. Clubbed into submission by
viciously slanted coverage by media slavishly devoted to socialism, they
eventually give in to compromise and defeatism, having also forgotten Sun Tzu's
first principle, that all that's needed to defeat an enemy is to convince him
-- before the battle begins -- that he's already lost.
Why haven't these groups warned their members that they have no legal right to
police protection? Or reminded them why we fought a Revolution? Or shown them
how blind faith in government is a fatal mistake; that this government, no
longer any different from the king the Founders rejected in the 18th century,
is capable of doing extremely nasty things -- things like the Sand Creek and
Wounded Knee massacres, the violent mistreatment of the World War I Bonus
Marchers, the wrongful imprisonment of Japanese-Americans, the genocidal
Operation Keelhaul, Kent State, the MOVE bombing, Ruby Ridge, and what happened
at Waco. Why do they let events like Oklahoma City and Columbine High become
leverage for more victim disarmament? Why don't they encourage their members to
do something really dangerous -- like think for themselves? Why, instead, do we
always get more treacherous backroom wheeling and dealing -- such as their
secret approval and eventual acceptance of unconstitutional travesties like the
Gun Control Act of 1968 or the current oppressive National "Instant" Check
System?
STEP FIVE: ELIMINATE SELF-DEFEAT
It's important to know your enemy, and even more important to know yourself,
your limitations and strengths. Bound only by the laws of physics, people can
do almost anything they want. They can fly like a bird, break the sound
barrier, even go to the Moon. But people didn't get to the Moon by holding
their arms over their heads and fending it off. Certain objectives simply can't
be achieved defensively. Second Amendment advocates have always made this
error, and it will finish them off unless they change.
A few years ago, one of the authors was a regular guest on a radio talk show.
Callers, even the host himself, were fond of complaining about the horrible
things government had done to them in the past, the horrible things government
was doing to them now, and the horrible things government was about to do to
them in the future. If the guest offered them good news, or pointed them toward
something they could do to change their condition, they bitterly resented it.
Complaining is not the same as acting. It's not even an acceptable substitute --
although it's easier and less risky than actually trying to do something. If
you paralyze yourself with depressing forecasts of doom, then of course
you'll lose. And you'll deserve to. If you're serious about putting an end to
victim disarmament, understand that it's only one symptom of a cancer called
socialism that afflicts our civilization -- and you can't fight cancer by
complaining about it or limiting your treatment to its symptoms.
Shuck your victim identity today.
STEP SIX: KNOW THE REAL ENEMY
Understand, too, that there's no such thing as a "liberal". It's a word
socialists use to evade being properly identified. And no wonder: socialism is
nothing more than a cheap attempt, philosophically and politically, to justify
rape, robbery, and murder on a scale Attila the Hun never dreamed of.
In a way, that's good. To those who don't think much about it, taking guns away
from everyone but the army and police may sound like a fine idea. The Germans
who elected Hitler thought it was. But it's harder for the other side, the
socialist side, to make rape, robbery and murder attractive to the average
individual.
Since the Soviet collapse, the new world center for socialism is the United
Nations, no less an enemy of everything worthwhile in the western world than
Hitler and Stalin were. The UN admits openly that it wants to obliterate the
American Constitution -- especially the Bill of Rights, with emphasis on the
Second Amendment. What it wants to substitute for it is a dictatorial world
government.
Sovereign nations are like watertight compartments in a ship. When one becomes
"flooded" by dictatorship, victim disarmament, and the mass killings that
inevitably follow, others remain free, provided their geographical and
psychological "bulkheads" remain sound. They act as a refuge for those who
escape the "flooded" compartments. Socialists know this, of course. That's why
they strive to establish a world government nobody can escape from.
Why do we tolerate the presence of this declared enemy of liberty on American
soil? Without a doubt, that will become one of the most important political
questions of the 21st century.
Defenders of the Bill or Rights have always been too polite. It's one reason
we're in this mess. Victim disarmament causes thousands of injuries and deaths
a year, many times the number of injuries and deaths claimed for the weapons
themselves. Victim disarmers know this, and therefore must be evil, stupid,
insane, or unbelievably mentally lazy to go on demanding it.
Privately-owned guns are used to take 30,000 lives a year (some in perfectly
justified acts of self-defense, three quarters of them suicides). Guns are used
to save more than 2,500,000 people from injury or death every year. Socialist
victim disarmers would sacrifice the 2,500,000 in a futile effort to save the
30,000. That's crazy -- and there are mental health experts who agree. Victim
disarmers are people, largely, who project their own mental and emotional
shortcomings onto others. They would never trust themselves with a gun, but
they can't admit that, so they convert their mistrust of themselves into
mistrust of others.
Rosie O'Donnel, one of the country's foremost advocates of victim disarmament
-- who has demanded that anyone who owns a gun should be locked up, yet travels
with heavily-armed bodyguards -- recently admitted that she's fought severe
depression for decades, and is medicated for it. Yet she believes that
everybody else ought to be forced to accept her dictatorial and demented
judgement.
What about those who parrot Rosie's sentiments? Do they also have mental
problems? Should people who have mental problems be making public policy that
negatively impacts your ability to save your life or the lives of your loved
ones?
Whatever they are, victim disarmers are not concerned neighborhood moms with
whom you've amiably agreed to disagree. They're 50-year-old white males,
mostly, more than a third of whom own guns themselves. They're enemies of
freedom who don't mind if you're beaten up, jailed, and murdered "under color
of law" for exercising your rights. Their government representatives are
criminals who took a solemn oath to uphold the Constitution, including the
Second Amendment, but violate it every day, every hour they scheme to assault
the Bill of Rights. They're the badguys, lying, thieving parasites who'd rather
see a woman raped in an alley and strangled with her own hose than see her with
a gun in her hand. They can't be argued with or made to see the truth. They
can't be reasoned out of beliefs they were never reasoned into
. They can only be defeated.
This is not the polite democratic debate socialists would have us believe it
is. We're the goodguys, legitimate heirs of the Founding Fathers. If we win,
for the most part nothing will change. You'll keep your guns. All government
records of them will be destroyed. It'll be easier to buy more if you want, in
the kind of anonymity the Founders regarded as essential (freedom isn't secure
if government knows who has all the guns) for the Second Amendment to work.
If the socialists win, thousands of innocents will be assaulted, imprisoned,
and killed -- along with thousands of their would-be oppressors -- as
government attempts to enforce unconstitutional laws. Thousands more will die
because they no longer have the means to defend themselves against ordinary
criminals.
STEP SEVEN: DEVELOP GRIM DETERMINATION
To end the kind of victim disarmament that annoys you most, you must end all
victim disarmament. To end all victim disarmament, you must end all violations
of the Bill of Rights, even those you may quietly approve of. To end all
violations of the Bill of Rights, you must end all forms of socialism.
Socialists got us where they want us by offering us "candy" -- social security,
national health insurance, federal highways, national parks, public shooting
ranges. As painful as it may be, it's time for America to go on a diet.
Get your family and friends -- and yourself -- out of denial regarding their
fear of government. Although at some level they know better -- everybody saw
what happened at Waco -- they want government to be their friend, and despite
the evidence, they've tried to convince themselves it is. The Founding Fathers
knew better than that; they'd be horrified today.
Next time you start to write your congressman, remember: constant petitioning
of politicians gives them more power. Don't beg -- throw away those Monica
Lewinski knee pads -- don't be polite. If you must write, tell them that if
they won't enforce the Bill of Rights, you'll do your best to see that their
next job will be standing on a corner with a tin cup, selling pencils. (The
tactic that works best with bureaucrats is to stand on their toes, grab them by
the lapels, and scream up their nostrils.) Remind these government goblins of
the limits on their power. Tell them your new "Zero Tolerance" is for police
states and victim disarmament, and that they'd better get with the program, or
go back to chasing ambulances, selling used cars, and flipping burgers.
If you can't do that, if you can't overcome the urge to grovel, you're a part
of the problem.
One of the authors is Jewish. He says it's time for Americans of all faiths and
ethnicities to stand up to Jewish, black, and other minority politicians who've
made a career blowing their noses on the Bill of Rights. Most Americans have
been sensitive to and considerate of them because of unspeakable crimes
committed against their people in the past. Now it's time to tell them that if
they can't appreciate what America's done for them, after long, dark centuries
of oppression and slaughter, if they really hate freedom so much, they should
pack their bags and leave.
STEP EIGHT: MEMORIZE THESE FIVE POINTS
1. A holding action, no matter how prolonged, is doomed to defeat. You must
decide to take the offensive and eliminate victim disarmament altogether and
forever.
2. You can't defend one right by sacrificing another. Other people are going to
do things with their lives you don't approve of, just as they're unlikely to
approve of everything you do. Making criminals of them gives socialists a
precedent for making a criminal of you.
3. You can't stay free -- or regain your freedom -- by exalting your
oppressors, no matter how flashy their cars and uniforms may be.
4. You can't defend without attacking. Let the world know who the real enemies
of liberty are, and that there's no such thing as a liberal.
5. And you must decide upon another kind of "Zero Tolerance" -- for compromise.
Do you disagree? Then let's see your
blueprint.
STEP NINE: MAKE A NEW BEGINNING
It's impossible to change a nation's politics before you change its culture. Do
that, and the politics will follow. America will enforce the Bill of Rights
when it has a Bill of rights culture.
The best way to start is to celebrate December 15th in your family and
community as Bill of Rights Day, making it fully equivalent with Independence
Day. Take charge of the celebration yourself. Keep it out of the hands of
politicians and the media. Next time some socialist complains that "only
America allows people to own guns", tell him that's because only America has a
Bill of Rights to keep us from being slaves. The Bill of Rights is what makes
America different from other countries, it's the one thing that keeps America
from becoming the world's largest banana republic.
STEP TEN: ENVISION THE FUTURE YOU WANT
Socialists have made us waste our lives, spend decades defending rights that
were supposedly guaranteed. Consciously or unconsciously, everyone carries a
picture of the future in his head. Until now, it's been the picture socialists
want us to carry, of a gradual, inevitable loss of our rights. If you feel
strangely disturbed or embarrassed at the notion of ending victim disarmament,
that's what they did to you and it's time to get it fixed.
Begin by carrying a new picture of the future in your head, one of a nation
that celebrates and enforces the Bill of Rights, where you can afford to enjoy
your life instead of using it up fighting tyranny.
Striking through your opponent is a vital part of the martial arts. Thinking
through to the future, seeing beyond the victory of freedom, is vital to that
struggle, as well.
The novel HOPE,
by Aaron Zelman and L. Neil Smith, paints a picture of a future where
the Bill of Rights is energetically and stringently enforced. To get
a copy postage paid for $14.95 -- or for additional resources and information
regarding points covered in this article -- please contact: Jews for
the Preservation of Firearms Ownership at http://www.jpfo.org, call
toll-free (800) 869-1884, or write to
JPFO, P.O. Box 270143, Hartford WI 53027.
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