“Gun Control”

“Gun control” is something of a legalistic neologism, the term with its present connotations having first appeared in a statute of the General Government only in 1968.[1] Pre-constitutional American laws aimed at a near-universality of armament among able-bodied free adult male inhabitants, either through their own efforts or with the assistance of public institutions. In those days, had the term been current, “gun control” would have meant, not keeping firearms and ammunition away from as many private citizens as legislators might contrive to disarm, but instead seeing to it that as many citizens as possible possessed their own arms at all times, and were as well trained in the use of those arms as circumstances permitted. To employ the modern Judiciary’s mumbo jumbo, that and only that was considered to be “reasonable regulation” with respect to firearms. That the Colonies and independent States never attempted to exercise a purported power to disarm the general populace—and that no one of consequence ever seriously advocated that they should have done so—provides compelling evidence that no such power was ever believed to exist.[2] The purpose of “gun control” today, conversely, is not to train people in the safe and effective use of firearms, or to regulate the use of firearms so as to minimize negligent, reckless, or criminal behavior while still maximizing the freedom of individuals to possess and use firearms for all legitimate purposes. Rather, “gun control” aims at denying as many people as possible possession of as many types of firearms as possible in as many places as possible with respect to as many uses as possible—as soon as possible. Its goal is the systematic disarmament of common Americans, typically coupled with the equally systematic elaboration of a para-military police-state apparatus to keep defenseless people in line through a cynically calculated policy of official Schrecklichkeit (“frightfulness”) mediated, ironically, through various “law-enforcement agencies”. “Gun control”, police lawlessness and brutality, and a general contempt on the part of the professional political class for the people’s basic human and civil rights inevitably and invariably march together in goose-step. The motivations of “gun controllers” may be debatable. A very few of them may be simple-minded, rather than aggressively malevolent. But no one is so dim-witted as to be unable to read and understand the historical record of modern times. For that chronicle is as pellucid as it is bloody: Once the common people in any country are disarmed, they are helpless against oppression. Aspiring usurpers and tyrants always disarm the people as a key step towards oppressing them. And, confronted by a psychopathic political class claiming unlimited “governmental” powers, disarmed people generally become victims of slavery and mass murder.[3] Unfortunately, all too many Americans with otherwise sound patriotic instincts who should vocally support revitalization of “the Militia of the several States”—on the undeniably constitutional, as well as practical, ground that “well regulated Militia” are “necessary to the security of a free State” in their own personal interests where they themselves reside—have been so thoroughly cowed and demoralized by “gun controllers’” black propaganda that they shrink from uttering the word “Militia” in public as part of a political proposal, lest they be vilified in the mass media as dangerous crackpots. The jack-booted trampling of political thugs who demonize the word “Militia” cannot drown out the truth, however, because “[a] well regulated Militia” is not some newly contrived conception with no firm foundation in American law and history. Quite the contrary.[4]