Kurt Nimmo

Infowars

June 29, 2008

"The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers." –Justice Story

It really bugs the gun-grabbers that the Supremes did not completely scratch out the Second Amendment last week, although they made a small first step in that direction. For instance, so steamed are they over at the Chicago Tribune they are calling for the Second Amendment to be repealed. As usual, they predicate their argument on three words — “well regulated Militia” — and claim beyond this you and I have no right to own firearms. “The amendment was intended to protect the authority of the states to organize militias. The inartful wording has left the amendment open to public debate for more than 200 years,” the Tribune claims.

There is absolutely no evidence this is what the founders intended and the editors of the Chicago Tribune would be hard-pressed to find a single word in the writings of the founders indicating they believed only militias had the right to bear arms. In fact, the gun-grabbers completely misunderstand the very meaning of the word as the framers used it — for the founders, a militia was not like the National Guard, but rather a body of armed citizens. The militia clause and the right to arms are intended to be complementary. As Thomas Jefferson knew, “modern regular armies” consist of “desperate characters,” thus demonstrating “the necessity of obliging every citizen to be a soldier; this was the case with the Greeks and Romans and must be that of every free State. Where there is no oppression there can be no pauper hirelings.”

Justice Story, appointed to the Supreme Court as an Associate Justice by James Madison in 1811, wrote in 1833:

The militia is the natural defense of a free country against sudden foreign invasions, domestic insurrections, and domestic usurpations of power by rulers. It is against sound policy for a free people to keep up large military establishments and standing armies in time of peace, both from the enormous expenses, with which they are attended, and the facile means, which they afford to ambitious and unprincipled rulers, to subvert the government, or trample upon the rights of the people. The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.

In New Orleans after Katrina, the state went house to house grabbing guns, not because they were concerned about Old West shoot-outs in the street but because they did not want citizens challenging the “arbitrary power of rulers.” As Alexander Hamilton noted, in times of chaos and the breakdown of civility — as in the case of Katrina — the “citizens must rush tumultuously to arms, without concert, without system, without resource,” that is without the intervention of the state, because the “people, without exaggeration, may be said to be entirely the masters of their own fate.”

As the founders knew, and the Chicago Tribune is unable or unwilling to admit, the “militia,” that is to say an armed citizenry, is the ultimate check against a state or the national government. In fact, as Jefferson stated, it is the “right and duty” of citizens “to be at all times armed” as a deterrent to tyranny. However, since Jefferson’s time, the very concept of such a duty has all but disappeared and has been replaced by a mass psychosis in dreadful fear of the very existence of weapons. Millions of Americans expect the government to protect them, a mindset diametrically opposed to the thinking of Jefferson and the founders who knew all too well that government will become murderously tyrannical if not checked.

It should come as no surprise the corporate media is engaged in a propaganda campaign to convince you that the Second Amendment should be repealed. After all, we no longer have small, independent newspapers published by people who understand the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but rather huge corporate combines owned by the very same globalist interests that have hijacked the government. It will be impossible for them to impose their transnational corporate plan — in other words, fascist plan, as Mussolini understood that corporatism and fascism are inseparable — on the whole of humanity so long as an appreciable minority remain armed. That’s what the corporate media jihad against the Constitution is all about — convincing you that “gun crime” is out of control, people who own guns are redneck nut cases, guns are for hunting only, the Second Amendment is a myth (or at best an editorial mistake), and it is in our best interest to relinquish responsibility for our own protection, our duty, and embrace government.

Finally, keep in mind the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was a big advocate of gun control. In 1929, the Soviet Union established gun control and from 1929 to 1953 about 20 million dissidents, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated. By 1987 that figure had risen to 61,911,000. “There is no doubt in my mind that millions of lives could have been saved if the people were not ‘brainwashed’ about gun ownership and had been well armed,” writes Theodore Haas, a survivor of Dachau. “Hitler’s thugs and goons were not very brave when confronted by a gun.”

Our thugs are not very brave, either. But they don’t need to be when confronted with a brainwashed and increasingly disarmed public.

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