In my view, the real argument for private firearm ownership is a different one. The less able individuals are to protect themselves from crime, the more dependent they are on protection by government law enforcement. The more dependent they are on protection by government law enforcement, the more willing they will be to accept abuses by government law enforcement. The more willing we are to be pushed around by the police, the harder it will be to prevent a tyrannical government from arising. Indeed, in some contexts, most obviously the War on Drugs, one can argue that one has already arisen. And been tolerated.

Did you notice how everyone just calls the crimes “gun charges”? Or “weapons charges”? They just glide right past the “unregistered” and “illegal” handgun part with nary a word on the absurdity of jackbooted thugs and professional criminals with heavily armed bodyguards declaring other people’s guns to be illegal because they didn’t register them.

I like the Statist’s typical response to the audacious notion that people (well, most people, anyway) should be allowed to carry a gun wherever property owners permit them: “We have laws forbidding everyone from carrying a gun anywhere they like to protect the general populace from mass-murdering madmen! Unless you have a piece of paper signed by certain government bureaucrats, your gun is dangerous and could be used to threaten, terrorize, hurt, or kill defenseless people!” Oh, you mean, like terrorizing and threatening peaceful, non-aggressing homeowners and business owners, on their own property, to make them submit and obey to everything the State demands of them? You mean like kidnapping and enslaving a (relatively) peaceful man for two years because he did something to himself on someone else’s property that the professional criminal class disapproved of?

These are typical policies of a police state: restrict gun ownership and take away the guns and the freedoms of people who dare defy the glorious and beneficent State. Obviously no one else was harmed by Plaxico Burress’s actions, and obviously Burress and millions of others are harmed by the restrictions of freedoms implemented by governments, so the State of New York is the only party that appears to be in the wrong in this case (an aggressor) and looks mighty hypocritical to boot.

“If you’re on that no-fly list, your access to the right to bear arms is canceled because you’re not part of the American family; you don’t deserve that right. There is no right for you if you’re on that terrorist list.”

See for yourself:

Hat tip: Warren Meyer

Please get this through your head once and for all: regarding the individual right to own and carry weapons, there is no “allowed”. Government has nothing to say about it. This basic human right predates the Second Amendment (which only offers to protect it). It predates the Constitution. It predates the United States. It predates the British and the Roman empires. It predates civilization itself.
—L. Neil Smith

Her friends’ responses: “hear hear!” “No guns and arms? That settles it, no more gym.” (admittedly, kind of funny) “But then what the hell am I going to do in Texas? Ah well at least I can still drink and drive.” “True dat!”

No kidding! We should probably also make murder illegal—that would really dissuade demented psychopaths from murdering anybody!

This country sucks because its citizens suck, and it’s only going to get suckier in my lifetime. I am more afraid of fascist police-state advocates like these than I am of gun-wielding maniacs. Mainly because the government will always have guns.

Do these people ever notice that the frequency of maniacal public shootings like the one in Binghamton, NY, has only increased in recent decades along with the increase in police-state measures like gun-control laws? Correlation does not prove causality, but it sure as hell doesn’t prove that the measures prevent mass murders! Get it through your head: We already have somewhat strict gun-control laws, no additional number or severity of gun-control laws will keep guns out of the United States, murderous psychopaths are never swayed by the existing laws against murder or against owning the guns, they will simply turn to bombings or something else if they can’t get ahold of a gun easily, the government will ALWAYS have guns and that is a bad thing (which was the entire point of the Second Amendment), a society would be better off trying to keep people from wanting to shoot 30 people instead of preventing anyone from owning a gun, and the increasing influence that the State has had in our lives during the last century is most definitely a significant source of the strife, hatred, poverty, desperation, isolation, and psychosis that drives people to public mass murder.

I am apparently the only one around here who sees the arrest, trial, and imprisonment of gun owners as the fascist, police-state crimes that they are. Can you believe the nonchalant and unquestioning attitude with which most people talk about “gun crimes,” without even stopping to think, much less discuss, the right of the State to restrict gun ownership and use as much as it wants? No government or any other body of people has any right to restrict the purchase, ownership, possession, or use of a firearm, beyond what our natural right of self-defense allows.

It is (or, should be) the purview of the night club owners and only the night club owners what types of firearms are allowed on their premises. They let him in with his gun, knowing full well that he was carrying it, so that was their decision. The property owners, and the people who went onto the property expecting their person and property to be safe, are certainly in a position to object to someone’s brandishing or firing of a gun, because even threatening, much less shooting, other people except in self-defense is completely indefensible. If Plaxico Burress had ever endangered anyone other than himself with the gun, that would be another matter entirely. Perhaps the club’s lawyers could press charges against him for scaring or threatening its guests and giving it a bad reputation or something. But he didn’t even pull his gun out of his pants (or wherever it was). He did nothing wrong to anyone else.

The ESPN.com article says, “Burress had a concealed-weapon permit issued to him in Florida, but records show it expired in May and New York does not recognize out-of-state permits anyway, New York media have reported.” It apparently doesn’t recognize any redeeming qualities in the Second Amendment or the innate rights it refers to, either.

Burress faces 3.5 to 15 years in prison for the laws he broke. Can you believe that? What an appalling, depressing, enraging authoritarian police state we live in! I am left almost speechless by the unquestioning, matter-of-fact attitude with which the rest of this country—this world!—accepts fascist laws that treat non-aggressing people as potential criminals to be caged and constrained and mothered and regulated until they can’t do anything without the State’s explicit permission.

I don’t have much to say about the Horn incident, just these quick thoughts: I kind of think the dispatcher was right to discourage Horn from confronting them and certainly from shooting them, because deadly force should (ideally) be used only as self-defense when your well-being is directly threatened. I understand that a free society needs private citizens to protect their property and protect each other, but fatally shooting two people in the back who were robbing your neighbor, when your neighbor wasn’t home, seems excessive to me. But, on the other hand, I’ve never been in a burglary situation, and I don’t know how I’d react knowing that burglars were right next door and could come to my house next. I’d rather shoot too early, before they came close to my house and started directly threatening me, than shoot too late after they had already broken in, or shot at me, or attacked me with their crowbar or something. Or, before they had gone to another neighbor’s house, where everyone was asleep and owned no firearms to defend themselves.

Secondly, the two criminals were Colombian immigrants who were on parole…from previous drug charges. What a surprise: the Drug War ruins two immigrants’ lives by causing them to be arrested for drug possession/trafficking, a completely victimless crime that only harms anyone because it is made illegal by the monopolistic State, and it makes them desperate enough to resort to a life of real crime. But, I don’t know their whole story, they might be legitimately shady characters who have committed real crimes like burglary before. It sounds just typical of the life-ruining character of the War on Drugs, though.

Third, read this exchange between Joe Horn and the 911 dispatcher, after he had shot the burglars:

Dispatcher: “Put that gun down! There’s officers out there without uniforms on. Do not shoot anybody else, do you understand me? I’ve got police out there…”

Horn: “I understand, I understand. I am out in the front yard waving my hand right now.”

Dispatcher: “You don’t have a gun with you, do you?

Horn: “No, no, no.”

Dispatcher: “You see a uniformed officer? Now lay down on the ground and don’t do nothing else. Lay down on the ground, Mister Horn. Do what the officers tell you to do right now.”

They have special uniforms, so they are exempt from the actions and considerations that you might apply to ordinary citizens. I’m not stretching this to make an issue out of nothing, here. I know that the reason the cops were there is because they were called there and, proper or not, it’s their job to protect us against and investigate crimes. These particular circumstances are not what I’m focusing on; it’s the attitude that police officers are held to a different set of standards and (oftentimes) laws because they are official agents of the State and their uniforms prove it. The dispatcher is saying, You may have been right or wrong to shoot those burglars, but you aren’t of the same legal status as these uniformed officers, so you can’t walk around with a gun like they can; you can’t address them standing up and armed like they will be. (The dispatcher could also have realized that at the scene of a crime where two people had already been shot, the cops were likely to be prepared to shoot, too, so Horn better do all he can to avoid provoking their trigger-happiness.)

What do you think that 911 dispatcher (and millions of others) would have thought about this scenario: Two police officers had a house surrounded because there were burglars in it, and when the burglars came running towards the cops, the cops shot them dead, and then a few more police officers come to the scene. Do you think anyone would expect the two original cops to put their guns down, come out from behind their cars or from the vicinity of the bodies with their hands up, and then lie down with their hands behind their head, waiting for the new cops to tell them what to do? Obviously not. They are not considered ordinary citizens and are not held to the same standards that we are in many situations—in any situations involving crimes and shootings. (If you think police officers are unlikely to exhibit so little restraint and shoot people unjustifiably, please read this blag more often, as you have a lot to learn.)

Consider one other scenario: What if, instead of Joe Horn, the next-door neighbor had been an off-duty police officer, and he had shot the burglars just as Horn did? Do you think he, or the police who came to the scene, would have thought the off-duty cop needed to leave his gun in the house, come out with his hands up, and lie down waiting for instructions? Don’t be foolish. He would have said, No, it’s okay, I’m a cop! Or, if he lived in the same city he worked in, his own police force would probably be the one coming to his house, so they’d know him… Either way, he wouldn’t be treated the same as an ordinary citizen. You might say that’s fine and that’s the way it should be because the cops should be held to different standards, but I’d say, one, there is no moral or philosophical basis for such a double-standard, and, two, as long as you admit this is true, that’s a good start.

The point of this longer-than-expected early-morning post was to relate the story that Chris, a 47-year-old caller to WRIF FM, told on the air this morning. He was out in his back yard grilling when he heard something weird in the woods behind his and his neighbor’s houses. It sounded like lumber being moved or loaded or something. He got his bright-orange hunting gear on and took his handgun out into the woods, and saw three young men loading up a bunch of lumber and wheels and other equipment from his neighbor’s shed into their van!

When one of them noticed him (I guess he wore his bright-orange to protect himself against hunters or trigger-happy criminals or something…I don’t know, but they saw him when he got 40 or 50 feet away), the guy started walking towards Chris. Chris asked them what the hell they were doing, and they said they knew Mr. McMahon, his neighbor, and they had permission to be there and take his stuff. When the guy walking towards Chris got pretty close, like 5-10 feet away, Chris pulled his handgun out and told him to back off and continued asking them why they were there. The guy stopped walking towards him and started listening then. Chris kept the gun pointed at all of them, and told them they could all come back to the shed later that night or the next day when its owner was home, because there should be no problem if they have his explicit permission, should there? They didn’t agree to that, so Chris made them unload all of the stuff from the van back into the shed, and they drove off.

About an hour later, cops showed up in Chris’s driveway, confiscated his gun, handcuffed him, put him in the back of their police car, and locked him up in a jail cell for 24 hours.

What had happened was one of the guys he encountered in the woods had called the police to report what Chris had done to them—threatened them with a gun even though they had a right, had permission, to be there and take Mr. McMahon’s stuff. The police immediately and by default assumed that the man with the firearm was in the wrong, and so arrested him without an investigation and took his gun even though it was his property. (If ordinary citizens did this, it would be called kidnapping and theft.) Next, the police went back to the shed in the woods to meet up with these people and supervise their taking of this lumber and other equipment from Mr. McMahon’s shed.

Perhaps you can tell by the fact that I’m relating this story on my blag and by the way I’m telling it that, of course, these were criminals and the cops were completely wrong. I guess it was after Chris got home from jail, he talked to his neighbor McMahon, who called the police and said he had no idea who any of those guys were and in no way, shape, or form did they have permission to even be there, much less take his stuff!

The police released Chris after 24 hours—maybe because that’s how long they keep someone while an “investigation” is ongoing or maybe because they found out he was completely in the right—and it took Chris several months and $1500 to get his gun back, which belonged to him, was stolen by people who had no place to take it, and which wasn’t used in the commission of a crime.

Oh, and it turns out two of the three criminals were on parole.

A few closing thoughts: The police assume by default that the person with the gun was in the wrong, but the police will always have guns and they never assume one of their own is in the wrong. They stole Chris’s gun and held him in a cell for 24 hours, but not only will they not be charged with theft or kidnapping, Chris had to pay them fifteen hundred freaking dollars to get his own perfectly legal and justified property back. Third, if he did charge them with wrongful arrest or theft, they would never be convicted and would probably not be brought to trial. If he brought them to small-claims court for his $1500 in fines and fees, he would never win (the courts are part of the same monopolistic justice [sic] system as the police department!). The cops were negligent in failing to ascertain who these criminals were and whether they had any legitimate reason to be there taking stuff out of someone’s shed. (By the way, what balls those criminals have, calling the cops and then taking equipment out of this shed right in front of them!) And, lastly, do you think Chris or his neighbor would choose to subscribe to these police-protection and adjudication systems in the future, if they had the choice? Do you think many people would, after they heard about this?

I particularly enjoyed the passage he quoted from Lysander Spooner, which explains that any arguments concerning guns and self-defense against criminals or hunting are completely irrelevant in an discussion about Constitutional law—in a discussion about what the Second Amendment really means.

[T]he object of all bills of rights is to assert the rights of individuals and the people, as against the government, and not as against private persons. It would be a matter of ridiculous supererogation … [I]t would be unnecessary and silly indeed to assert, in a constitution of government, the natural right of individuals to protect their property against thieves and robbers…The legal effect of these constitutional recognitions of the right of individuals to defend their property, liberties, and lives, against the government, is to legalize resistance to all injustice and oppression, of every name and nature whatsoever, on the part of the government.

“It would be unnecessary and silly [for a constitution] to assert…the natural right of individuals to protect their property against thieves and robbers.” It would be unnecessary and silly for a constitution to do that because it isn’t the remotest concern of a constitution to talk about crimes and criminals and the particulars of criminal law. The purpose of a constitution is to elucidate the relationship (contract, if you want to think of it that way, which I don’t and neither did Spooner) between a government and its subjects. Is murder outlawed by the U.S. Constitution? Is embezzlement? Is rape? Is armed robbery? No. Those things don’t belong in a constitution any more than poetry or sheet music.

Furthermore, consider the content and the purpose of the other 9 amendments of the Bill of Rights. They all specifically and unequivocally restrict the permissible actions of the central government toward its citizens. Their purpose is to restrict the government even further and more specifically than the rest of the Constitution does. But, gun-hating liberal Republocrats would have us believe that one out of the ten, which James Madison and the other Framers ranked as the second most important, gives a power to governments (state militias) and limits the power of individuals (by claiming it is a collective and state-approved “right”).

Therefore, since it is not possible that the U.S. Constitution has this one clause concerning our right to defend ourselves against criminals, and it is wilfully ignorant or maliciously dishonest to assert that only the Second Amendment out of the ten amendments in the Bill of Rights gives a power to government and limits the power of individuals, we can conclude what everyone before about 1960 already knew, viz., that the entire purpose of the Second Amendment is to protect the right of individual citizens to defend themselves against their governments. Not to hunt with, not to store on shelves, not to defend against armed robbers. To shoot, injure, and kill despotic politicians and their armed agents. The only justification anyone ever needs for unrestricted gun ownership among the American populace is that the government will always have guns.

The Gun Control Act of 1968 was largely copied from a gun-control act passed by the Nazi government in 1938. This account from the Free Republic is really quite fascinating. It goes into much detail about Sen. Thomas Dodd (D-CT), father of current Sen. Christopher Dodd, who had a copy of the 1938 German law and inserted, or helped insert, large parts of it into gun-control and gun-registration bills.