At issue in our society for centuries now is the right of individuals to have weapons, and to have them freely without governmental restrictions. What we need to understand today, though, is that the defense of this right is a leftist and humanist policy, and not the rightist and elitist one that it appears to be in the US media. If we have trouble seeing this, it’s only because our traditionalist intellectuals don’t acknowledge that we have four basic political attitudes rather than just the two of the old ‘political spectrum’. In my psychologic theory, by definition, leftists are individualists and they are either tolerant moderates or intolerant extremists; I call the moderates ‘progressives’ and the extremists ‘radicals’. Accordingly, rightists are collectivists, and they too are either moderates, who I call ‘liberals’, or extremists, who I call ‘conservatives’. . . .
[I omit here most of the discussion in my original 2005 essay
on this subject, where I summarized the re-definitions of our key political
terms that I put in my book Human
Nature. I end
that discussion with this:]
Leftists believe that only the individual is real and that
every collective we form is an artificial construct. So, like the great leftists Thomas Paine, George
Mason, and Thomas Jefferson, they believe that we have natural individual
rights that are inalienable and that
therefore have logical and moral precedence over any legalized ‘civil’ rights that
our artificially constructed states fabricate.
In our traditional political systems, none of which are leftist, this fact
is ignored, and we are all left asking, “Who will be the ultimate
defenders of our natural individual rights if a tyrannical state oversteps all
reason and denies those natural rights by force?” It will not be any state or its judiciary or
other agents. No, their ultimate
defender can only be the people themselves, seen as constituting not an
electoral majority, but rather a hypothetical militia, which to be an effective
deterrent must be potentially powerful.
We the People have no defense against tyranny unless we
are a body of privately armed individuals who will join together as a military
force whenever this is necessary to defend our natural liberties in our homes,
farms, and streets. But to fulfill this
hallowed social duty to oppose tyranny, we must have adequate weapons. And we will certainly be enslaved by our elitist
rulers if we let them disarm us, or even track the weapons we own.
Mention a ‘militia’ and our rightists point to our Second
Amendment, as if our constitution were an unimprovable sacred text. Conventionally, a militia means any body of citizen soldiers, or
nonprofessionals. It could be an
organized military force under the direction of a government, but it can also
be an unorganized force that has no officers or regulated exercises, with
soldiers who are unknown to each other until the time comes to be comrades in
justice and the noble defenders of individual rights.
This latter view of a militia was stated clearly in the
great Virginia Declaration of Rights,
written by the progressive George Mason and ratified on June 12, 1776 by a legislative
convention in Richmond that was attended by the liberal James Madison, the foxy
opportunist who in 1791 used it as his guide to write the weakened, so-called “Bill
of Rights” of our Constitution. Madison participated
actively in this convention, which ratified Mason’s Declaration about three weeks before
Jefferson wrote the Declaration of
Independence. Mason had written this:
"[Article] 13. That
a well-regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms,
is the proper, natural, and safe defence of a free state; that standing armies, in time of
peace, should be avoided, as dangerous to liberty; and that, in all cases, the
military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil
power."
This, and not the 1791 “Bill of Rights” that Madison reluctantly
added to the Constitution, is what America’s revolutionists understood by
the term ‘the right to bear arms’. Madison
knew that the centralized state that he and his co-conspirators desired would end soon unless some concessions to the people regarding their individual
rights were added to their constitution, which guaranteed no such rights. That elitist constitution was not written or
ratified with the public’s consent; it was wholly decided by the conspiracy of
the minority Federalists (mainly Washington, Hamilton, and Madison). But the people, like the great leftists who
spoke eloquently for them before and during the Revolutionary War, wanted more
than Madison offered in his limited and often-vague “Bill of Rights.” They also wanted greater political authority
for their localities, their wards or townships, such as they had before that
constitution imposed federal and state rule of all local governments, and also a prohibition against a standing
army in time of peace. But the rightist
Federalists were determined all along to block those demands. So Madison emasculated the Virginia Declaration
and, as regards its 13th article, he wrote this line instead, as his 2nd Amendment:
“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.”
Note that he intentionally used the phrase "a well-regulated militia" in order to suggest to all that he was following Mason in this, but then he discarded the prohibition
against standing armies and distorted Mason’s clear definition of what a militia is. That is, he failed to say that it was “the
body of the people, trained to arms” as Mason did, and said instead, “A
well-regulated Militia, being necessary
to the security of a free State…”
But that second clause is just a bland truism and digression from the
real issue, which is whether a militia should be considered (a) a standing army
controlled by the central state, or (b) the “body of the people, trained to
arms.” The autarchic Federalists wanted
a standing army under their centralized control in order to defend their wealth
and status against the people, and to humble the citizenry to that end, as the
British monarchy had done before them.
And that is just what most of the people who wanted a true
democracy feared.
Rightists ever since the Federalists have continued to
vitiate our individual rights and to further expand federal authority at the
expense of the people and their communities.
For some years now elitist Democrats have united behind elitist
Republicans like the conservatives Nixon,
Bush II, and Ashcroft in their attempt to give us a fascist Department of Justice,
an intolerant judiciary, a standing mercenary army to impose its will upon us
and the world, and (to make its subjugation of the people easier) an unarmed
citizenry. Note that the liberal Hitler, like many dictators
before and after him, disarmed the people in Germany as soon as he assumed
power, for this is the first step in the old rightist textbook on how to transform
an electoral democracy into a dictatorship.
I won’t join Madison in calling this “the right of the
people to keep and bear arms.” Rather, I
call it ‘the right of the individual to have reasonable means of
self-defense’. As a progressive, I also
reject the rightists’ assumption that this right to adequate self-defense is a
civil right that can be granted or denied by any government. Instead, on universal moral grounds, I say
that self-defense is a natural right of all real individuals, and that it
therefore takes precedence over any of a state’s artificial rules, customs, or laws. The only open issue is what we mean by
‘reasonable’, since in practice even a universal human right must be subject to
reason under the circumstances. But it surely
cannot mean anything less than what a state’s police or military forces could use,
legally or not, to control its own people.
If it did, then both a people’s militia and our individuals’
self-defense will be prohibited, whereupon democracy and justice are lost.
Liberals lie to us when they pretend that the right to
have arms is merely about our right to hunt animals, engage in target practice,
or defend our homes against illegal
thefts or invasion. We also need to
defend against legal thefts or
invasions. A constitution must provide for
this universal right because it is the surest way to deter elitists and selfists, who always
want to transform a leftist democracy into a rightist tyranny. It is a check against tyranny because it is
far more difficult for any military force, foreign or domestic, to subdue an
armed people than an unarmed people, especially across a land as vast as ours.
No state in history has ever been just; therefore, that
which is legal can be as much a threat to our life, liberty, and property as that
which a state declares to be illegal by its own rules. Moreover, criminal corporations and
underworld operations are tolerated by elitist rulers and politicians when it
profits them to do so. Add to this that
every day our world is becoming more ignorant, barbaric, and dangerous, and no
one can honestly or sanely deny that we each need adequate means of self-defense.
The blame for our dire world situation today belongs
mostly with the rulers of our multinational corporations, religions, and other collectives, whose selfishness
and greed make them the chief opponents of democracy and justice, and hence the
opponents of national and individual self-defense. Their media encourage ‘nonviolence’, but only
from the people or nations they have targeted for theft, reserving to
themselves the right to do great violence to anyone anytime. If we are all disarmed, they can expand
their unjust empires and excessive riches at will.
Excess profits are theft, and theft requires the denial of
reason and the use of lies or force. So
an increasingly militaristic and warring world simply means that global
thievery is increasing. Disarming all
others is thus high on the agenda of these behemoth corporations, and our
prostituted politicians only want what they want; hence ‘gun control’ and
international ‘preemptive strikes’. By
using force to impose world ‘peace’, they can reduce the costs of securing
their immoral activities internationally and at home. They already do this through our public
treasury. Our budgets for police,
intelligence, and ‘defense’ forces are largely just corporate welfare, a
largesse that is not even confined to our domestic corporations.
There are two clear proofs of this charge. First, the United Nations, a creature of its
rightist member states and their multinational corporations, is working to
achieve global ‘gun control’, in a way that will preempt the wishes and
sovereignty of all the people and communities of the world. Second, the elitist Anglo-American axis is
now waging a so-called ‘war on terrorism’ against minor or even fictional
enemies, whose limited power and scattered acts of destruction are being used
by this elitist axis to rationalize a vast worldwide war, possibly another
Hundred Years War, the sole purpose of which is to benefit the world’s greedy
and unregulated multinational corporations.
The participation of the United Nations in this elitist
conspiracy against the world’s people should not surprise us, for nothing is
closer to tyranny and more removed from democracy and justice than
international organizations and the fictions that create and bind them, which
monarchic jurists since the sixteenth century have presumed to call
‘international law’. Did the people
anywhere ever pass or approve those ‘laws’?
No. This is a bastardization of
the centuries-old but prevailing concept of law as a hypothetical “social
contract.” It is just a rightist shortcut
by which elitists can achieve global tyranny without ever having to argue, with
people of all types and views, the fundamental issues of legal legitimacy. And my
psychologic theory shows that legal legitimacy comes directly from our judgment process, or more specifically our common
moral reasoning, which precedes, implies, and hence determines all the social laws, rules, customs,
and practices that we devise.
No international union, agency, or court yet formed has a charter
from the people who are being ruled by it. Their
absolutist authority over us has no plebiscite, no consent of the governed, no "contract" of any kind with us, or
no other honest foundation. These
international agencies represent lawlessness, for they imitate their modern-era
paradigm, the United States, which itself imitated the bestial British
Empire. They are all created alike, by
private conspiracies at elitist ‘constitutional conventions’, the first purpose
of which is always to subdue and enslave the unrepresented population. If we ever do have a sound and just world
legal system, you may be sure that it will be conceived by leftists and humanists, and not by rightists
and elitists.
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