By Robert R Hamlyn
"We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..."
Thomas Jefferson
From The Declaration of Independence.
"We the people of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
James Madison
From The Constitution of the United States
"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
Abraham Lincoln
From the Gettysburg Address
We are the sum total of our inheritance. We are our own history made manifest. We represent everything our ancestors learned, developed, created, and destroyed. We are their progeny and as such represent all they will ever have had. We are the ever-expanding culmination of the wandering tribes, the nomadic bands, the hunters and gatherers, and the wayfaring peoples of all the continents and all the oceans of the globe.
Our progenitors have won wars, freed enslaved peoples, and stamped out tyranny all over the world. And here we are at this point in our history worshipping youth while simultaneously degrading the education system that would shape it, ostensibly adoring its unique individuality while concurrently denying its right of individual responsibility, replacing the notion of earned self sufficiency with the expectation of Federal entitlement. We are debasing individual worth with a communization of character, a socialism of the soul.
For far too long we have been standing on the brink of a voluntary surrender of everything we should hold dear as Americans. The values our parents tried to teach us were true; that’s why they tried to teach us: "There’s no such thing as something for nothing. If you want something you have to work for it. If it sounds too good to be true, it is." Yet notions such as self-reliance, self-determinism, and self-respect now sound impossibly quaint as if part of some wonderful pioneer spirit that existed prior to traffic lights, flushing toilets, and other necessities of contemporary civilization.
A mayor of a great Eastern city in the United States once said that for every benefit there is an obligation. He was of course talking about his city’s municipal dole and the expected program of participation the recipients would incur. For most of the people in this country he could just as well have been talking about the Bill of Rights. The public mood seems to be: give me 2.5% on my money market and you can have my social security number, give me universal health care and you can have fifty percent of my income, give me free community transit and you can tell me when and where and how I’ll conduct my affairs.
We have taken the heritage passed on to us by our parents, the children of the Depression, the World War II Generation, and we have collectively pissed it away. The whole country has become a mob, a flock of sheep, a name-brand conscious tribe of consumers with its character diminished. We have become the Tribe of the Timid. Even more alarming, we expect the source of all good things to be a benevolent government.
The documents that form the foundation of our society, the conceptual building blocks of our nation: The Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, the Bill of Rights, proclaim for us as citizens of this country a number of rights with which we were born; and each right demands a corresponding responsibility of good citizenship as well as the responsibility of eternal vigilance. Yet we have abandoned that responsibility in allowing ourselves to be lulled by the pleas of the statist politicians, their undisclosed soft-money donors, their unseen sycophants, and their ilk that would ban not only the private ownership of certain kinds of property (for example, guns) but the logic behind it as well, in return for which we would presumably be the beneficiaries of their wonderful philanthropy.
Since the passage of the National Firearms Act of 1934 American gun-owners have been besieged with an unending litany of appeals for "reasonable compromise", "common sense precautions", and "socially responsible restrictions". The republic, which the Constitution was presumed to have wrought, has endured an incessant encroachment of the constitutionally guaranteed right of American citizens to keep and bear arms. "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..." until now, as we stand at the brink of the "final solution". After seventy-four years of restrictions, and controls, and bans, and limitations that have yet to work what is the answer?
As Neal Knox asserted, the unfailing solution for a failed law is a tighter law continuing the cycle toward the inevitable: the total and irrevocable banning of civilian possession of all guns. Over the past few years we have seen the very same pattern in process in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and in the people’s republics of California and New Jersey. And what manner of catastrophic failure has bequeathed upon us this wondrous bounty of thousands of gun laws that somehow aren’t quite enough? Very simply put: the fallacy that people are not responsible for their own acts.
Nearly all of the gun control measures offered by those who would proffer them embrace the same philosophy. They are founded on the belief that America’s law abiding gun owners are the source of the problem. Wringing their hands and rending their garments, their media mouthpieces proselytize that with our profane appetite for guns we are ostensibly creating a society saturated in a sea of guns, thereby turning innocents to evil, and helping the underprivileged (read juvenile delinquents) become vested in their respective criminal enterprise.
When a six-year-old boy took a gun to school and shot a six-year-old girl, who was to blame? According to the prosecutor for that county that poor little boy was a victim. The child could not be held to blame because the child was six years old and incapable of forming intent. The father was not to blame because the father was in jail. The mother was not to blame because the mother was chemically dependent upon crack cocaine and had left the child with a relative while she went to work. So if no one was to blame are we to conclude that this was a victimless crime? Are we to conclude that the little girl was an unintended consequence in a series of actions for which no one was held to account? No, according to the county prosecutor the little six-year-old boy was a victim of the gun culture. The prosecutor failed to mention the fact that the gun belonged to the mother’s boyfriend and that the little boy found the gun in his mother’s bedroom.
In "A Nation Of Cowards," Jeff Snyder states: "This charging of moral blame for violent crime on the law abiding, and the tacit exoneration of violent criminals for their misdeeds, naturally enrages honest gun owners."
(Accurate Press, Lonedell, MO., 2001. "A Nation of Cowards" first appeared in The Public Interest, Number 113, Fall 1993.)
Indeed. Consider the 45 year old Washington man who, when visiting friends and relatives on the East Coast, was confronted with the demand to explain what possible good the presence of firearms served in a society in which someone could just go pick up a gun on the street corner and murder in cold blood a girlfriend made pregnant by someone else (a third party), and didn’t he (the man from Washington) agree that something had to be done about the gun problem? Why couldn’t he just be reasonable and agree to the solution that was best for everybody?
Unbeknownst to the man from Washington, that very scenario had played itself out the previous week in a major East Coast city. The man from Washington had no connection whatsoever to the murderer, the murder victim, the street corner vendor selling stolen guns out of the trunk of his stolen car, or the alleged father. Yet he was expected to defend in principle a murderer. The man from Washington was absolutely confounded by the notion that although he had owned firearms for the previous thirty years and had not ever killed anyone, let alone ever committed any crime, he was expected to agree to willingly hand over his property so that miscreants and lunatics, over which he had no control, could do no harm.
His retort to his erstwhile petitioners was: "You can’t legislate against lunacy. Why should I be punished for somebody else’s crime?" But his reply fell on deaf ears. He could not reconcile the level of their vitriolic hysteria with what he knew the gun culture to be and he could not help but wonder as to exactly where in the continent this rift of perception occurred.
It is not simply East vs. West, or North vs. South, but it is very literally Us vs. Them. We have let our society become striated. We have allowed ourselves to become a nation of the governors and the governed.
Liberal elite, conservative elite, ruling elite, the demarcation becomes frayed until one latches onto the defining term: elite. It is the mindset of our self-appointed privileged few who would do our thinking for us, make our choices for us, and keep us safe from ourselves and who understand that, like our elected representatives, laws are for other people. The self-interested elitist cadres who would exclude our voice from the highest councils of government would never be subject to their own handiwork. Rather, they would assemble myriad obstacles before us for the sole purpose of fatiguing us into compliance with their measures.
In Jeffrey Snyder’s "A Nation Of Cowards", he makes a brief summary of Plato’s Republic, comparing the proffered perfect society to our own... "The liberal elite know that they are our philosopher-kings. They know that the masses can not be trusted; that they are incapable of just and fair self-government; that left to their own devices, their society will be racist, sexist, homophobic, and inequitable -- and the liberal elite know how to fix things and they know what is right for us. The very notion of the private ownership of firearms is a refutation to their Utopian zeal
(A Nation of Cowards, The Public Interest, No. 113, Fall, 1993)."
The elite know these things because it is their professedly heartfelt contention that if we would just be reasonable and compromise our sadly mistaken notions of what gun ownership is really about and concede to their wishes for a disarmed society we would finally have harmonious communities safe for families and ensure the stability of our democracy. Our nation would finally be safe for our young and old alike. In fact we would at last enjoy living in the safest nation on earth. (May I humbly point out that the safest nation on earth is currently Communist China?) Indeed we would inherit Plato’s Republic, St. Augustine’s Utopia, the Global Village, the One-world Government foretold in a much-neglected book from long ago. And as the intelligentsia scoff, and the literati chuckle, and the Illuminati sneer, and the paparazzi take their pictures, the people in this country who are old enough and fortunate enough to have been raised in nuclear families nod in mute understanding.
It seems that what we sometimes tend to forget is that the Bill of Rights is not a list of ancillary privileges granted to the populace by a beneficial Utopian governing body, but that it is the enunciation of unalienable rights with which we were all born. Indeed, in the Declaration of Independence, those convened to sign it agreed:
"...That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,
That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."
There is much talk now of repealing the Second Amendment. So what? If the Second Amendment were repealed, that in itself could not nullify a pre-existing condition. Like it or not, believe it or not, it is a right granted by God, and as such cannot be taken away. Just as you are responsible for yourself, you are also responsible to yourself. Inasmuch as your life is a gift from God it is not yours to squander. Indeed you have an obligation to yourself, your family, and your community as well as to your Creator to cherish and defend it and to guard against the greater evil of those who would deprive you of your God-granted freedoms.
"But wait!" You say. "What if someone doesn’t believe in God?" You ask. OK, what if you are intellectually incapable of believing in God: a Higher Being, a Force greater than yourself, because there is no proof, no empirical evidence for the existence of God? For you, these notions of God-granted gifts and God-granted freedoms would not apply, would they?
No problem. Whether you believe in God or not, you are still responsible for yourself. If you believe that all you have is you in this life, that nothing in the
Universe of known and unknown things can be greater than yourself, that there is nothing else after, no light at the end of the tunnel, no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, if you believe these things, why on earth would you abdicate your responsibility to safeguard your welfare and that of your family, to someone else: a "benign" government, a benefic state?
There are countries in the world in which their governments do not recognize the right of an individual to self-defense. Think about that for a minute. Now think about this: what is the first intrinsic and immutable drive of every living organism on earth?
Answer: self-preservation. Yet these governments of enlightened self interest would proscribe by legislation that which it is hard wired into our very DNA to do: protect ourselves. It is not by accident that the governments that do not recognize a right to self-defense also do not recognize a right to the private ownership of firearms. And it will happen here.
If we, the collective voting constituency, of every politician in the United States let those people in Washington D.C., push this nonsense of repealing the Second Amendment through, it will happen here.
Private ownership of firearms and the resolve to use them are the method and manner by which we as Americans keep our selves free. But the question that we have to ask ourselves is: in our heart of hearts, the place where we will admit to only ourselves that which we would admit to no other, do we have the resolve to use them?
We are closer now than at any previous time in our history of having the Constitution redefined by those who would re-engineer American Society according to the empyrean ideals they hold dear. We have the Bill of Rights and, yes, men and women have died to preserve it. If we are the culmination of the people that founded this country and let their fine and shining achievement slip away, how will our children regard us?
A citizen of any society must be willing to take upon himself the personal responsibility for the quality of the society of which he is a part. Just as one must vote to ensure proper representation in the legislative assemblies from school board and city council to the Congress and the Executive, and just as one must from time to time participate in jury duty, one must not shirk the personal responsibility of actively defending oneself and protecting one’s family from the fear of harm by cutting short the threat of violent crime at its root: the criminal. (Snyder, Ibid.)
Similarly, a government that would deprive its citizens of any of the basic rights upon which this nation was founded would be nothing less than criminal in nature. It is time to cut short the threat to our own liberty. Once we as a nation give into the agitprop proposed by the political elitists that only the state is capable of legitimate action, that only the state is the source of our earthly salvation, that only
the state can provide society's moral moorings, and that only the state can be trusted with firearms, we will have transformed ourselves from a nation of citizens to a nation of subjects and will, at that time, be subject to whatever treatment the ruling elite that forms the state deems proper to administer.
This is not a call to arms. It is a plea for each of us to examine our own conscience. We’ve all heard the tired rhetoric: "You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands". Really? Tell your friends whatever you like but be honest with yourself. Will you really take your rifle and start picking off the confiscators as they come lumbering down your street with their trucks full of your neighbors guns? And who do you suppose those confiscators will be? Will it be some alien constabulary with vaguely European sounding speech? Or will they be the police officers with whom you grew up and who have served your community well? Do you suppose it will be some foreign division in oddly colored uniforms and blue helmets? Or will it be the local National Guard unit staffed with your own friends, neighbors and relatives? Are you really prepared to use deadly force against people you know to protect a noble idea? What are you going to do?
We need to take a brief respite from our universally shared virtual reality of Walter Mitty and admit some basic facts of life to ourselves. Some (most) guns will be easily removed. Some of us may put up a show of symbolic protest or actual physical resistance for the benefit of the cameras that most assuredly will be there. Many, if not most of us, will simply turn in our means of personal protection when told to do so. Perhaps a few of us across the country may actually take to arms and try to defend what we understand our freedom to be about.
But this is where you need to be honest with yourself. Will you count yourself among the rest of the good citizens who are too scared to oppose anything the government tells them to do and toss your guns in the back of the truck? Or, when faced with the certainty of losing your house, your job, your standing in the community, your means of support and self reliance, and even your family, will you stand in the way of a government that would proclaim itself as master redefining the role of it’s citizens as subjects? When the time comes you will know what to do--either you will, or you won’t do it. Bear in mind the words of
H. L. Mencken: "To die for an idea; it is unquestionably noble. But how much nobler would it be if men died for ideas that were true." How much of a sacrifice are you honest-to-God willing to make?
"...All experience hath shown that mankind are disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
Thomas Jefferson
From the Declaration of Independence
Fortunately while we still have time, there is a weapon available to us for preserving life and liberty that can be wielded effectively by almost anyone of legal age--the ballot box. Don’t throw away your opportunity to vote: the most morally challenged man in the history of the Oval Office was put there with 46% of the popular vote. We have before us the prospect of shaping the tone, text, form and content of life in this country for the rest of the century. In spite of the oft told proclamation that the two party system of American politics is as hollow as two empty whiskey bottles, and neither one of much substance, we have as clear a choice as can be made between two disparate views of government: that between the constitutionally prescribed tradition of representative government, and handing the reigns of government over to those who would continue to usurp our rights in a campaign of incremental expropriation. If we choose the latter, before you know it, the Bill of Rights will have been expunged by Executive Order. It is time for us to vote our convictions.
Until we resolve to once again define ourselves as a nation of equals defined by laws predicated on common sense and not on the unsolicited judgment of the upper echelon we shall remain the Tribe of the Timid.
*****
The essay above is from a forthcoming novel. Although it is taken from a work of fiction I believe it is relevant to the discussion in this venue. I thank David Codrea for his including the Tribe of the Timid in The War On Guns.
R Hamlyn
*****
AFTERWORD from David Codrea
I agreed to feature this on WarOnGuns with a caveat--here is what I sent to Mr. Hamlyn:
Very well written. Compelling in the first three-quarters.
Here's the thing--I disagree with some of your conclusions.
No one recomends a last stand against the national guard or police officers surrounding your house. That would be tactically stupid and self-defeating But make no mistake that some who feign compliance will take the fight to the oppressors on terms and at times of their choosing. Not many, true, but you don't need that many. I'd hazard 1% of the big talkers could have quite an impact. If the cartridge box is not the ultimate check and balance guarantor, we might as well just fold up the tents now.
I just don't see the ballot box being a reliable fallback--not in this election--not with this conditioned public. What majority rule giveth, majority rule taketh away.
That said, and no, I ain't goin' soft, I believe this essay is a good reference point for discussion, a nexus between irascible absolutists like myself and those who consider their approach more "pragmatic." Besides, I don't mean for this caveat to imply that I don't strongly agree with much of what he's written here--he is right about much, he makes his case well, and his arguments need to be heard and understood.
Feel free to engage in reasoned discourse, below. I'm sure Bob will be checking in from time to time, so also feel free to engage him directly.
