Citizens and Subjects

If you go back in the archives of this blog, which I hope that someday my grandchildren will do, you will find posts in which I equate being disarmed as being made a subject, not a citizen.  A subject is not quite a slave, but his rights and privileges are defined by his government, and can be restricted at any time.  For most of history, and indeed, for much of the world, this has been the condition in which most people existed.  A citizen, by contrast, is one who understands his rights come from God, and precede any Constitution which his fellow citizens may draw up to govern themselves.  It is one of the great beauties of the Constitution of the United States that it does, in fact, acknowledge our rights rather than grant them.

Jeremy Egerer is getting at this same point in a article at American Thinker yesterday entitled Why We Love our Guns. Egerer writes:

It's only fair to have a certain kind of sympathy for black Americans in the Democratic Party. They've rarely tasted the best benefits of liberty, while suffering many of the indignities of tyranny – the indignities known as a lack of hope and an experience of violence. White Americans, on the other hand, have no excuse for disarming themselves. White Americans are some of the safest people in the entire world – and they would be safer if it wasn't for the weakest of white Americans. They fight to give their guns away without ever having experienced any reason to give away their guns.

White men claim it's about suicide but keep their tailpipes and garden hoses. They claim it's about accidents but then let us all ride cars. They claim it's about mass shootings, but never rally against the overwhelming masses of shooters (because the overwhelming masses of shooters aren't currently white). A Black Lives Matter activist is almost respectable in comparison, because he's at least got enough balls to go to war for his cause. The reason white men want to give up their guns is because they're convinced nobody has to go to war. They're almost convinced that nobody ever has to die in order for others to live. They believe that our guns will bring us death. Their weakness will be responsible for bringing death to us – and sooner, and in a much more degrading way, than they imagine.

Whites have traded the feelings of free men for the sentiments of slaves. I say this because liberty isn't a feeling, but it always has to begin with one. It begins with the conviction that you're responsible for yourself and the safety of your family. It originates in the idea that the only men we ought to fear should be our best men. A manly spirit of danger, ignoring all the statistics and overriding every media endeavor to tell us otherwise, accepts the fact that violence is either our threat or our future. A man who refuses danger is refusing not danger, actually, but liberty. A man who refuses liberty isn't actually refusing liberty, but courting slavery. A man who refuses adequate weaponry isn't refusing a fight. He is only refusing his ability to fight adequately.

If it isn't clear in this passage, Egerer is talking about what he terms the "weakest white Americans," a term under which heading I would include most of the gun grabbers in both political parties.

Mrs. Polykahr and I had a brief discussion yesterday on the nature of our rights while driving to work yesterday. I called our rights "God given," but when she objected, I pointed out that these same rights could be claimed as natural rights. She pointed out that we only have what rights we can defend, which is true as well.

The Constitution acknowledges the right to free speech, as an example. Yes, the government could censure me, could actually lock me up, but right up to the moment of my execution, I could be yelling at the top of my lungs to any who could hear me. Jesus spoke the Truth, and was eventually crucified by the Romans, but the Truth got out, and in a few centuries changed the world.  Recognizing these things, the framers of the Constitution wisely put in free speech as right.  In a similar manner, the state can attempt to force me into its brand of religion, but they can not get into my thoughts unless I allow them to. So the framers again wisely recognized freedom of religion as a right.

 The framers recognized that a man, as well as a nation of men, has a right to defend himself. He is always the first responder to aggression, and like it or not, there will always be men (and women) who wish to prey on the weaker, who wish to take what they have not earned, and are unconstrained by God's law.  This applies to both individual men and to sovereigns to bring nations to war..So, the framers included a right to keep and bear arms.  Both the Islamic Terrorist attack in Paris, and the Islamic Terrorist attack in San Berardino show that those who want to make war on the innocent will acquire whatever weapons they need to carry out those attacks, regardless of laws against such things.  Men, citizens, not subjects, have the right to defend against these attacks, and to keep and bear arms necessary for their defense.

But the fact that criminals can always get weapons is a utilitarian argument.  More importantly, the right to keep and bear arms is an important principle that has deterred tyranny for the last 200 years, and frankly, it may be so again.  Like yelling fire in a crowded theater, men can own, in the sense of posses firearms no matter their legal status.  Banning guns will not put the genie back in the bottle.  In countries such as China, where firearms are heavily banned from all but government forces, people cobble together working firearms to fulfill their needs.  In the United States, any competent machine shop could produce fairly sophisticated copies of a number of designs of weapons.  The AK 47 was designed and produced in Russia precisely because it has few moving parts, those parts do not need such close tolerances, and you do not need a lot of precision equipment to produce one.  Oh, and it is effective.

So, as the Left makes its major push to finally put into effect laws that will bring about the confiscation of your firearms, it may be time to figure out if you are going to resist, and how you plan to do it.  For the left, we, the law abiding gun owners have become the enemy.