Why do Liberals and Progressives want you Disarmed?
Following the shooting of Treyvon Martin earlier this year, liberals and progressives renewed their calls for more restrictions on firearms and repeal of Florida’s stand your ground law. Some called for the out right ban of handguns. Once again their justification is so-called public safety because they claim the police are entrusted with duty of protecting you. As I wrote in “The Police are Under No Legal Obligation to Protect You”, this assertion is patently false because courts throughout these United States have consistently held that police have no legal duty to provide police protection to any individual citizen.
That being the case, then there must be some other reason why liberals and progressives want the American people disarmed. In my mind, the answer is a no brainier; they know the only way they can force their statist policies down the throats of the American people is through the power of government and their biggest fear is the people will eventually draw a line in the sand and resist.
Statists worship at the alter of government and believe individual liberty is subordinate to the power and dictates of the state. An armed populace scares the hell out of these people. That is why they constantly misrepresent and demonize the right to keep and bear arms.
The Founders believed the people are sovereign and have the right and duty to resist an oppressive government; even the one they were establishing through the Constitution.
Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist Essay No.28, asserted that the people have the right to take up arms when their elected representatives betray them:
“If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defence which is paramount to all positive forms of government… The citizens must rush tumultuously to arms, without concert, without system, without resource, except in their courage and despair.”
In 1803, St. George Tucker, a judge on the Supreme Court of Virginia and later a United States District Court judge, published a five-volume edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries on English common law. In his analysis of these Commentaries, Tucker wrote:
“The right of self-defense is the first law of nature; in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Whenever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any color or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.”
Joseph Story, an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court from 1811 to 1845, construed the right to keep and bear arms as a check on oppressive government:
“One of the ordinary modes, by which tyrants accomplish their purposes without resistance, is, by disarming the people, and making it an offense to keep arms… The friends of a free government cannot be too watchful, to overcome the dangerous tendency of the public mind to sacrifice, for the sake of mere private convenience, this powerful check upon the designs of ambitious men.
The importance of this article (Second Amendment) will scarcely be doubted by any persons, who have duly reflected upon the subject. …The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms had justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpations and arbitrary power of rulers; and it will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.”
Members of Congress, irrespective of party, are constantly drafting laws to make the federal government supreme and above the people. These so-called public servants view the people as submissive servants to government and classify those who speak out against their statist policies and usurpations as potential domestic terrorists. Patrick Henry foresaw this in 1788:
Become a member and support the TAC!
“We are told…that our own representatives-Congress-will not exercise their powers oppressively; that we shall not enslave ourselves… Who has enslaved France, Spain, Germany, Turkey, and the other countries that groan under tyranny? They have been enslaved by the hands of their own people. If it be so in America, it will be only as it has been every where else.”
If the police are under no legal obligation to protect you and an armed citizenry is essential for the preservation of liberty against an oppressive government’s laws and dictates, then the question that begs to be answered is: what do liberals and progressives have in store for the American people that would necessitate disarming us under the banner of public safety?
Maybe it’s time to start asking them.
- Checkmate on your “Military Type” Firearms Ban - April 2, 2013
- Is the Federal Government Supreme? - March 8, 2013
- The Second Amendment: Constitutional Right or a Governmental Wrong? - January 29, 2013