Incremental Civilian Disarmament: Strip-Tease of the Liberties

A gun in the wrong hands: Chuck Schumer, seen here compensating for some hidden shortcoming (but not for all of his obvious ones).

“When the NRA and I agree on legislation,” oozed the incarnate glob of viscous evil known as Senator Chuck Schumer, “you know that it's going to get through, become law, and do some good.”

Schumer was referring to the measure passed in the House yesterday (June 13) -- by an unrecorded voice vote! -- that will expand the scope and funding of a national database used in background checks of prospective gun buyers.

The Quisling outfit called the National Rifle Association, ever eager to see that patently unconstitutional gun laws are faithfully enforced, supported the measure. Gun Owners of America -- which, like the estimable Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, is a national gun rights group worthy of that description* -- did not. As GOA's Erich Pratt told the New York Times, this system is designed to force “law-abiding people ... to prove their innocence to a bureaucrat before they exercise their constitutional rights” to purchase and own a firearm.

The putative purpose of the measure is to prevent deranged people and other “mental defectives” like the Virginia Tech mass murderer Seung-Hui Cho from buying firearms. But this law, like every other gun law, will give criminals of that sort an additional competitive advantage over the law-abiding.

This, Schumer would insist, falls under the heading of doing “good.”

One must keep in mind that from Schumer's perspective, which differs from that of the Khmer Rouge only in relatively trivial matters of detail, doing “good” involves denuding individuals of their privacy and the means to resist the government.

To understand more fully Schumer's passion to reduce Americans to servitude, it's useful to picture him not as a Senator, freshly groomed and swaddled in an expensive, well-tailored suit, but rather as a grimy, unshaven patron of a malodorous strip club, his beady eyes fixed with unblinking, predatory lust on the hapless Chinese immigrant girl forced to perform for his amusement (her career as an “exotic dancer” being written into the contract with the Snakehead that brought her to the U.S.).

As the dancer, trembling from the effort to suppress her disgust, discards each layer of clothing, Schumer (the version in our example) becomes more agitated, his illicit appetites growing more insistent. He will not relent until that unfortunate girl is deprived of any modesty or decency, fully exposed to his inspection and subject to his whims.

In this respect, Schumer is not significantly different from most representatives of our political class, irrespective of the political brand name under which they conduct their assault on our liberties. In dealing with Americans who insist on defending their rights, Schumer emits a dense musk of unfiltered malice; his arrogance is palpable, as is his desire to reduce Americans to helotry. During the 1995 congressional hearings into the Waco Holocaust, Schumer gave the impression that he was disappointed that the federal mass murder at Mt. Carmel was a one-off event, rather than the opening shots of a campaign to annihilate gun owners nation-wide.

Schumer's demeanor and tactics in that hearing left me with the strong impression that he was somehow the product of a genetic experiment combining the salient traits of Soviet gulag master Lazar Kaganovich with those of the equally repellent Roland Freisler, the histrionic Communist-turned National Socialist who presided over Nazi Germany's “People's Court”:

At the risk of sounding reactionary, I must say that any legislation that would receive Schumer's approval should be rejected for that reason alone. But this is just one of numerous reasons why the bill passed by the House yesterday must be defeated.

Schumer's ideological ancestor Lazar Kaganovich, the "Wolf of the Kremlin" (left) and Nazi Judge Roland Freisler (below, right), whose demeanor and comportment uncannily matched those of New York's senior Senator.

The purpose of the Second Amendment, as I've pointed out before, is not merely to protect a clearly articulated individual right to armed self-defense, although this is certainly one of its important function. Its central purpose, I believe, is to make it clear that in the republic the Founders created (how I wish it were still in operation), the government did not have a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

The people who wrote that Amendment, we should never forget, were pretty much the same group that took part in history's noblest act of sedition by signing a document setting out some of the conditions under which it was proper and necessary to “alter or abolish” the government that ruled them. The right to keep and bear arms must be viewed in that context: When the time comes for an oppressive government to be confronted and, if necessary, abolished, the people must be armed.

(A quick digression: Why is sedition – a word directly related to “separation” or “secession” -- considered a crime? It seems to me that when a government attempts to criminalize sedition, becoming a seditionist is the moral duty of every citizen.)

On the other hand, the reason why the Regime is intent on collecting as much information as it can on law-abiding gun owners is to make gun confiscation possible. This is theoretical only as it applies to the Regime's actions domestically: As I've documented elsewhere, the Regime has eagerly conducted gun confiscation programs as part of “peacekeeping” missions in Haiti, Somalia, and elsewhere. We shouldn't forget the effort to disarm victims of Hurricane Katrina.

And those who don't think that our rulers are capable of systematically destroying their disarmed victims really should acquaint themselves with the Federal Government's treatment of American Indians during the 19^th Century. Once again, we're not discussing this issue in an abstract, theoretical realm.

Schumer and his loathsome ilk seek to strip us of all of our rights. They would love to denude us in a single paroxysm of violence, of course, but from their perspective a forced strip-tease works just as well. The outcome would be the same in either case.

*The original version of this essay inexplicably, and perhaps unforgivably, omitted mention of JPFO. I sincerely regret that oversight, and thank Henry Bowman for correcting it.

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The Second Amendment: The Constitution, In Miniature

"We are here now to protect you, and no one has a need for a weapon any more.” --

A Khmer Rouge soldier sent to disarm Cambodian peasants, as recounted by a survivor of the Cambodian genocide; The New Yorker, January 24, 1994

It is because Daniel Lazare makes no effort to disguise his contempt for the US Constitution that he enjoys the luxury of candor about its provisions.

In his 1995 book The Frozen Republic, Lazare assailed the Constitution for “paralyzing democracy” -- which was one of the key objectives of the Framers, who did not share Lazare's enthusiasm for “majoritarian absolutism” (as one critic aptly described the author's philosophy).

To his credit, Lazare doesn't claim to have found some previously concealed progressive subtext in the Constitution, or offer flatulent platitudes about the “true” meaning of the “living” document. He admits that the Framers created a system in which the powers of the State were to be limited by a written text and not easily expanded through demagogic appeals to the mob.

In similar fashion, Lazare's October 1999 Harper's magazine essay “Your Constitution is Killing You: A Reconsideration of the Right to Bear Arms,” Lazare – a stout supporter of civilian disarmament – offers the following rueful admission:

“The truth about the Second Amendment is something that liberals cannot bear to admit: The right wing is right. The amendment does confer an individual right to bear arms, and its very presence makes effective gun control in this country all but impossible.”

Even here, Lazare misses the most important point, namely that neither the Second Amendment nor any other part of the Constitution could be said to “confer” rights of any kind; rather, they protect unalienable rights by specifying what government can do, and a few of the myriad things it is prohibited from doing.

(A brief digression: Even in the absence of the Second Amendment, the Constitution would protect the individual right to bear arms, since it does not confer on the federal government the authority to disarm the citizenry. The Amendment is an important supplemental protection, however, in that it denies the central government the luxury of using its delegated powers – for instance, that of regulating interstate commerce – to infringe on that right.)

Despite his subtle denial of innate individual rights, Lazare's admission against interest is useful, as are his pointed words of rebuke to fellow “liberals” (here meaning left-leaning collectivists, not lovers of individual liberty) who interpolate their political prejudices into the Constitution's text.

“We have long been in the habit of seeing in the Constitution whatever it is we want to see.,” Lazare admits. “Because liberals want a society that is neat and orderly, they tell themselves that this is what the Constitution `wants' as well.” That desire translated into, among other things, a “purely collectivist reading” of the Second Amendment, in which the purported right mentioned in the text is that of states to create and regulate “select” militias; this is in contrast to the “individualist” view, in which the right to bear arms – like those of speech, freedom of worship, and all other rights and immunities protected in the Bill of Rights – is exercised by the individual.

The “collectivist” view, Lazare writes, “is becoming harder and harder to defend” as more honest scholarship – that is, honest scholarship, more widely reported – demonstrates what should be obvious: The American Founders, who had wrested independence from Britain in a war that began with gun-toting citizens repelling an effort to disarm them, were determined to protect the individual right to armed self-defense. And nothing could be more alien to their intentions than the “collectivist” view of firearms ownership.

“`Standing armies,' the great bugaboo of the day, represented concentrated power at its most brutal; the late-medieval institution of the popular militia represented freedom at its most noble and idealistic,” writes Lazare. “Beginning with the highly influential Niccolo Machiavelli, a long line of political commentators stressed the special importance of the popular militias in the defense of liberty. Since the only ones who could defend popular liberty were the people themselves, a freedom-loving people had to maintain themselves in a high state of republican readiness. They had to be strong and independent, keep themselves well armed, and be well versed in the arts of war. The moment they allowed themselves to surrender to the wiles of luxury, the cause of liberty was lost.”

Does anybody really think it's a good idea to let Bucketheads like these have all the guns?

Lazare is warily circling a point that he apparently doesn't want to make clearly, so I'll do it for him:

The Second Amendment does explicitly protect an individual right to bear arms, but its real significance is that it denies the government a monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

The typical political science textbook published in the last five decades will either assert or assume that government claims a monopoly on force. This is Lenin's vision -- “power without limit, resting directly on force” -- not that of Jefferson, et. al. -- namely, that of governments as contingent entities “deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and subject to abolition when they exceed their modest mandate.

They can't operate a parking brake on their federally funded Gestapomobiles, but they're uniquely qualified to carry and use firearms.

Lazare, like every other commentator, politician, or scholar who wants to transmute the individual right to armed self-defense into a limited, State-granted privilege, is on Lenin's side of this argument. He's simply more honest than most, even though his concessions are heavily seasoned with condescension toward the supposedly archaic views of the Framers.

“Since `we the people' are powerless to change the Second Amendment, we must somehow learn to live within its confines,” he writes as if sighing in weary frustration. “But since this means standing by helplessly while ordinary people are gunned down by a succession of heavily armed maniacs, it is becoming more and more difficult to do so.... There is simply no solution to the gun problem within the confines of the U.S. Constitution.... Other countries are free to change their constitutions when it becomes necessary. In fact, with the exception of Luxembourg, Norway, and Great Britain, there is not one advanced industrial nation that has not thoroughly revamped its constitution since 1900. If they can do it, why can't we? Why must Americans remain slaves to the past?”

Lazare's writing is shot through with the sort of smug historicism one would expect of a modestly bright undergraduate: How could a group of unenlightened white males – most of them Christians of a repellently literalist sort – who gadded about in powdered wigs and tricornered hats possibly have anything worthwhile to say about our modern society and its problems?

The obvious answer is that the Framers knew a great deal about human nature as magnified by political power, and that because of their sound insights the US Constitution, unlike a milk carton, doesn't contain an expiration date.

Nothing that has occurred since 1787 has invalidated the wisdom of the Framers in decentralizing political power and denying the State a monopoly on force. Exactly the opposite is the case: When viewed in retrospect across centuries littered with war and political mass murder carried out by states that claimed a monopoly on coercion, the honest observer whose mind is not hostage to collectivist delusions is astonished at the Founders' foresight.

“Heavily armed maniacs” of the sort Lazare alludes to can kill dozens of unarmed innocents. Heavily armed maniacs in the employ of the State, and clothed in its supposed authority – the oh-so-helpful Khmer Rouge soldier quoted above, for example -- have killed tens of millions of disarmed victims. Important though the first consideration is when we're discussing the right protected by the Second Amendment, it is the latter that best illustrates why that Amendment could be considered the Constitution in microcosm.

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