The Right to Self Defense

[Colonel Dan, SASS #24025]

Blackthorne 4440 brought this to my attention. It's good reading and should be shared wiith all.

 

I'm sure many in Team SASS have already seen this as Blackthorne tells me it's been all over the internet...except under the rock where I must be living because I didn't see it until Blackthorne emailed it to me. Thanks Blackthorne

 

The Right to Self-Defense

by Andrew P. Napolitano

 

In all the noise caused by the Obama administration’s direct
assault on the right of every person to keep and bear arms, the essence of the
issue has been drowned out. The president and his big-government colleagues
want you to believe that only the government can keep you free and safe, so to
them, the essence of this debate is about obedience to law.

To those who have killed innocents among us, obedience to
law is the last of their thoughts. And to those who believe that the
Constitution means what it says, the essence of this debate is not about the
law; it is about personal liberty in a free society. It is the exercise of this
particular personal liberty – the freedom to defend yourself when the police
cannot or will not and the freedom to use weapons to repel tyrants if they take
over the government – that the big-government crowd fears the most.

Let’s be candid: All government fears liberty. By its
nature, government is the negation of liberty. God has given us freedom, and
the government has taken it away. George Washington recognized this when he
argued that government is not reason or eloquence but force. If the government
had its way, it would have a monopoly on force.

Government compels, restrains and takes. Thomas Jefferson
understood that when he wrote that our liberties are inalienable and endowed by
our Creator, and the only reason we have formed governments is to engage them
to protect our liberties. We enacted the Constitution as the supreme law of the
land to restrain the government. Yet somewhere along the way, government got
the idea that it can more easily protect the freedom of us all from the abuses
of a few by curtailing the freedom of us all. I know that sounds ridiculous,
but that’s where we are today.

The anti-Second Amendment crowd cannot point to a single
incident in which curtailing the freedom of law-abiding Americans has stopped
criminals or crazies from killing. It is obvious that criminals don’t care what
the law says because they think they can get away with their violations of it.
And those unfortunates who are deranged don’t recognize any restraint on their
own behavior, as they cannot mentally distinguish right from wrong and cannot
be expected to do so in the future, no matter what the law says.

When the Second Amendment was written and added to the
Constitution, the use of guns in America was common. At the same
time, King George III – whom we had just defeated and who was contemplating
another war against us, which he would start in 1812 – no doubt ardently wished
that he had stripped his colonists of their right to self-defense so as to
subdue their use of violence to secede from Great Britain. That act of secession,
the American Revolution, was largely successful because close to half of the
colonists were armed and did not fear the use of weaponry.

If the king and the Parliament had enacted and enforced laws
that told them who among the colonists owned guns or that limited the power of
the colonists’ guns or the amount of ammunition they could possess, our
Founding Fathers would have been hanged for treason. One of the secrets of the
Revolution – one not taught in public schools today – is that the colonists
actually had superior firepower to the king. The British soldiers had
standard-issue muskets, which propelled a steel ball or several of them about
50 yards from the shooter. But the colonists had the long gun – sometimes
called the Kentucky or the Tennessee – which propelled a single steel
ball about 200 yards, nearly four times as far as the British could shoot. Is
it any wonder that by Yorktown in 1781, the
king and the Parliament had lost enough men and treasure to surrender?

The lesson here is that free people cannot remain free by
permitting the government – even a popularly elected one that they can unelect
– to take their freedoms away. The anti-freedom crowd in the government
desperately wants to convey the impression that it is doing something to
protect us. So it unconstitutionally and foolishly seeks, via burdensome and
intrusive registration laws, laws restricting the strength of weapons and the
quantity and quality of ammunition and, the latest trick, laws that impose
financial liability on law-abiding manufacturers and sellers for the criminal
behavior of some users, to make it so burdensome to own a gun that the ordinary
folks who want one will give up their efforts to obtain one.

We cannot let ourselves fall down this slippery slope. The
right to self-defense is a natural individual right that pre-exists the
government. It cannot morally or constitutionally be taken away absent
individual consent or due process. Kings and tyrants have taken this right
away. We cannot let a popular majority take it away, for the tyranny of the
majority can be as destructive to freedom as the tyranny of a madman.

Reprinted with the author's permission.

 

March 7, 2013

 

 

[Longhorn Jack]

It speaks volumes. Thank you for sharing this with is Colonel.

[Subdeacon Joe]

If I may add on to that. My comments will be in blue.

 

William Rawle, A View of the Constitution of the United States 125--26 1829 (2d ed.)

In the second article, it is declared, that a well regulated
militia is necessary to the security of a free state; a proposition
from which few will dissent. Although in actual war, the
services of regular troops are confessedly more valuable;
yet, while peace prevails, and in the commencement of a
war before a regular force can be raised, the militia form
the palladium of the country. They are ready to repel invasion,
to suppress insurrection, and preserve the good order
and peace of government. That they should be well
regulated, is judiciously added. A disorderly militia is disgraceful
to itself, and dangerous not to the enemy, but to
its own country. The duty of the state government is, to
adopt such regulations as will tend to make good soldiers
with the least interruptions of the ordinary and useful occupations
of civil life. In this all the Union has a strong
and visible interest.

 

I would say that a state failing in its duty to provide such "regulation," which in context seems to have the meaning of training, does nothing to diminish the right enumerated in this amendment.

[Volume 5, Page 214]

The corollary, from the first position, is, that the right of
the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The prohibition is general. No clause in the Constitution
could by any rule of construction be conceived to give to
congress a power to disarm the people. Such a flagitious
attempt could only be made under some general pretence
by a state legislature. But if in any blind pursuit of inordinate
power, either should attempt it, this amendment
may be appealed to as a restraint on both.

 

Mr. Rawle seemed to feel that the 2nd applied to both the state and federal governments. I like his comment "if in any blind pursuit of inordinate power..." by which it looks like he means taking power from the people and concentrating it in the hands of the government.

In most of the countries of Europe, this right does not
seem to be denied, although it is allowed more or less
sparingly, according to circumstances. In England, a country
which boasts so much of its freedom, the right was secured
to protestant subjects only, on the revolution of
1688; and it is cautiously described to be that of bearing
arms for their defence, "suitable to their conditions, and
as allowed by law." An arbitrary code for the preservation
of game in that country has long disgraced them. A very
small proportion of the people being permitted to kill it,
though for their own subsistence; a gun or other instrument,
used for that purpose by an unqualified person,
may be seized and forfeited. Blackstone, in whom we regret
that we cannot always trace the expanded principles
of rational liberty, observes however, on this subject, that
the prevention of popular insurrections and resistance to
government by disarming the people, is oftener meant
than avowed, by the makers of forest and game laws.

This right ought not, however, in any government, to be
abused to the disturbance of the public peace.

An assemblage of persons with arms, for an unlawful
purpose, is an indictable offence, and even the carrying of
arms abroad by a single individual, attended with circumstances
giving just reason to fear that he purposes to make
an unlawful use of them, would be sufficient cause to require
him to give surety of the peace. If he refused he
would be liable to imprisonment.

 

And he closes with saying that the law breaker should be the one punished, not the generality.