How the gun-control movement got smart

In his 2003 dissent in Silveira v. Lockyer, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Chief Judge Alex Kozinski wrote,

All too many of the other great tragedies of history—
Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust,
to name but a few—were perpetrated by armed troops
against unarmed populations. Many could well have been
avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their
intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets
apiece, as the Militia Act required here. …

If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw
Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with
only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles
could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.

My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons
of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines
the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw
the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second
Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those
exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have
failed—where the government refuses to stand for reelection
and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the
courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees.

However improbable these contingencies may seem today,
facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make
only once.

Fortunately, the Framers were wise enough to entrench the
right of the people to keep and bear arms within our
constitutional structure.

The purpose and importance of that right was
still fresh in their minds, and they spelled it out clearly so it
would not be forgotten. Despite the panel’s mighty struggle
to erase these words, they remain, and the people themselves
can read what they say plainly enough:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the
security of a free State, the right of the people to
keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

davidk on February 9, 2013 at 7:30 PM

Bullet to the Head

In effect, the fabulous armamentarium that Jimmy Bobo maintains is the fundamental means of resistance for ordinary citizens against a government and its misdeeds. Some smart politicians and related cronies had the idea to hire low-level criminals as unwitting agents and then to dispose of them conveniently; one of these criminals, Bobo, is smart enough to catch on, strong enough to hold out, and tough enough to fight back. “Some will rob you with a six-gun, some with a fountain pen,” Woody Guthrie sang (in “Pretty Boy Floyd”), and “Bullet to the Head” is the story of bearing and keeping arms for purposes unrelated to a well-regulated militia and altogether connected to the ultimate, if veiled and limited, prospect of fighting back against the government.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/02/bullet-to-the-head-and-stallones-stardom.html

davidk on February 9, 2013 at 7:39 PM

As I have said for years, the controlling word in the phrase “gun control” is control, not gun. I’ve followed with interest many of the threads on various forums arguing about “terminology”…if, for instance, we all agreed to call black rifles “modern sporting rifles” or we were careful to never refer to firearms as “weapons.” I used to agree pretty wholeheartedly with those arguments, but over the years I’ve come around to a different view. Our enemies aren’t antigun, they’re anti-people-with-guns. It’s not the guns they hate…it’s us.

http://michaelbane.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-rabbit-hole.html

davidk on February 9, 2013 at 7:48 PM