George Rebane

On the morning of 19 April 1775, the communities surrounding Boston were awakened by riders alerting the colonial Americans that a battalion of British were marching out of Boston toward Lexington and Concord.  They were coming to confiscate a cache of arms and ammunition that the colonials had collected for the anticipated mounting resistance to years of tyranny by the Crown in distant England.  Later in the day the British regulars would be met by an ad hoc militia who would drive them back toward Boston while taking heavy losses before the colonials, out of ammunition, had to withdraw.

Word of the successful armed resistance spread throughout the colonies like wildfire.  The demonstration of what armed citizens could accomplish against arguably the best army in the world was simply inspirational and communicated the very hopeful art of the possible.  The battle marked the beginning of our Revolutionary War, and was soon followed by equally inspirational pitched battles such as that on Bunker (Breed’s) Hill a few weeks later.  The revolution was on.

In the early part of the war, all citizens forming into militias were required to provide their own weapons, ammunition, and generally their entire kit for operations in the field.  They were required to respond to the call to arms “at a minute’s notice”, hence they became known as Minute Men.

We remember that in 1775 the American colonies belonged to Great Britain, and the British government had jurisdiction over all of their North American colonies.  Moreover, as things became more tense between the colonies and the Crown, the British army was deployed as the local constabulary around colonial cities like Boston and New York.  The royal magistrates ruled and collected taxes with the ever-present British troops garrisoned nearby to enforce and subdue resistance by the colonials.

Members of the ad hoc militias remained active throughout the Revolution, harassing the British and joining with the newly formed Continental Army under General Washington to make important contributions to the American regulars in several battles.  Their ongoing value to the fight was their ability to quickly assemble from their homes in the local area when the call went out.  And they could do that because every man stepped out of his house ready to fight; no one had to first go to an armory to get outfitted before marching to the battle.  They all headed directly for the battle and assembled there for deployment to carry out a mission or augment the regulars as needed.

The readiness of such broadly dispersed and available armed citizens was already recognized before the Revolution by colonial leaders who were later to become our Founders.  They communicated the need and benefits of a free and well-armed citizenry through letters, articles, pamphlets, and they even codified such provisions into the laws of individual colonies.  All this occurred before the uprising against British tyranny, and directly benefitted the revolution when it came.

After the British were defeated and our Founders assembled to draft the foundational documents of our new nation, the retention of an armed citizenry remained high on their list of inclusions, and was ultimately set in stone as the Second Amendment to what was to become our Constitution.  The Founders were an educated lot and realized first and foremost that all governments had the potential to become tyrannies.  As they had since time immemorial, tyrants could and would arise anywhere, they were not restricted to foreign lands that lay across vast oceans.  And history showed that no tyrant had ever come to power in a country with an armed and informed citizenry.   The would-be tyrant’s drill was always the same, first disarm the people.  (King Charles, to his ultimate demise in1649, did that to his subjects during the early part of his war with the parliamentarians which brought Cromwell to power.)

The Founders took for granted that the level of armaments retained by the citizenry should be at a sufficient level that would enable neighbors to spontaneously assemble and resist local government forces – the local constabulary if you will – so as to either turn the autocratic tide or hold it back long enough for word to spread to other communities that an armed resistance has been mounted.  This was the important part of such a spontaneous resistance, it would either inspire other individuals and communities to join, or it would be a lone act of defiance for which a dear price would be paid.  But the point here is that the grievances would become known by other citizens who could then decide and, if necessary, be able to mount their own resistance without further appeal.  In such a manner the armed resistance would ‘go viral’, as it did during our Revolution, and rise to a popular level that no tyrant could successfully oppose, and the republic would be restored.

According to their own post-Revolutionary letters and articles, that was the intent of the Founders for including the Second Amendment so that the nation would have to think long and hard before abolishing the right of individual citizens to remain armed at a level to successfully resist the local constabulary long enough to inspire others if their cause were just and grievances shared.  And such sufficient level of arms should always remain somewhere near par with that which the local government has at its disposal, so that the nascent resistance could not be peremptorily silenced and snuffed out in its cradle.  Remembering the Minute Men, we identify that ‘sufficient level’ as the citizens’ ability to rapidly bring ‘par force’ to bear against any local agents of tyranny.

Our Founders provided for free Americans the ability to always cast their vote with ballots, boots, or bullets as they individually or in cohort saw fit.  Over the course of our history, the par force rationale of the Second Amendment has made it the quintessential part of our Constitution, guaranteeing that, with its inclusion, our freedoms and other rights delineated therein endure.  As most historians, political scientists, and jurists have known for generations, tyranny understands and deals only in force.  And as one of the greatest killers of his own citizens, Chairman Mao Zedong, wisely taught his minions, “All power grows out the barrel of a gun.”  This makes clear that in matters of governance, the pen is mighty only to the extent that it can inspire the gun.  And without that ability to inspire, the pen is a lame instrument indeed.

Since then, the mere existence of par force in the population has deterred both native would-be tyrants and foreign tyrants in even entertaining the notion of conquering the American nation.  But in recent decades America has suffered a major ideological schism.  On one side are we the people who can be called ‘originalists’ and ‘strict constructionists’ of the Constitution which, in its intended interpretation, we hold as the sustaining instrument of a limited government under which live a free and enterprising citizenry.

On the other side are Americans, unassimilating immigrants, and illegal aliens (aka the Left) who seek to fundamentally transform America, and they see that made possible only through a massive and overarching government that presides over a well-regulated citizenry.  They comprise the collectivists who see government as the natural manager, central planner, and the comprehensive controller of the national collective for the greatest benefit of all those who can be induced to cooperate.  For them, all good comes from and through government, and tyranny is unthinkable, especially since it can’t happen in America.

Consequently, these people see the first group (aka the Right) as an unreliable segment of the population that cannot be trusted to go quietly on the road to their designated brave new world.  But given today’s considerable residue of strong affinities for individual responsibility, enterprise, and liberty, such social misfits must first be marginalized, if not disenfranchised, before they can be managed into compliance.  The necessary and sufficient tasks to achieve this are to first educate them away from American exceptionalism, and then slowly disarm them so that only government and criminals (one and the same?) will be left with the power that grows out the barrel of a gun.  To date, the first part has been accomplished, and the second part is well underway to constructively (i.e. de facto) make the ownership, transfer, and use of firearms onerous, and then proceed to legislate away the last vestiges of the right to bear arms, in the final act repealing the Second Amendment.

In the meanwhile, America’s gradual disarmament is fostered by discussions and debates about what is really required by the civilian population to hunt ducks and deer, and which firearms should play what role in the Right’s primitive urge for a gun to secure themselves in their homes and on their streets.  In this narrative the notion, let alone the purpose, of par force is determidley absent.  And if someone dares raise it, they are shouted down with arguments that resisting government with arms is an ignorant, antiquated, and treasonous notion, because we all know that the government has lots of big guns, tanks, fighter bombers, and trained combat teams – overwhelming force in its pre-militarized bureaus and agencies ready to spring into action to quickly annihilate any foolish civilians who would dare put up such resistance.  Government is all powerful and has already won that fight – armed resistance is futile.

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I’d like to conclude this little essay by citing some support for par force from more notable thinkers, point out the relative impact of school shootings on gun deaths and saving lives in general, and present the obvious logic of our Founders in their embed of par force as the raison d’etre of the Second Amendment.

So where is the ‘gun violence’ debate today?  The latest focus of the Left revolves around the Parkland high school massacre where an insane 19-year-old killed 17 and wounded more with a semi-automatic AR-15 (22.3 caliber) that has been politically and erroneously labeled as an ‘assault rifle’.  The near-term intent is to remove such ‘assault rifles’ from civilian hands since they are deemed by the Left to be useful for nothing other than killing children in schools.  With this narrative the gun confiscation coalition has been sailing for years under the smokescreen of saving lives which are lost through the annual mass slaughter of what they call gun violence. And they maintain that all this killing will be stopped by the removal of such dangerous-looking rifles from the hands of law-abiding citizens.

To accomplish this, the Left’s approach is to cite dodgy and manipulated statistics on firearms related deaths and accidents in the hopes that national dumbth has taken a sufficient toll so as to make their claims believable.  However, the facts, as assembled and recounted by researchers such as R.J. Rummel (Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder since 1900) and John R. Lott (More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Gun Control Laws, 3^rd edition), tell a different story.  Governments by far have been the greatest killers of their own people in times and situations that have nothing to do with war.  The 20^th century toll approaches 200 million worldwide with Mao Zedong being humanity’s greatest butcher of his own people.  During the Cultural Revolution alone, the politically correct figures have put the mass deaths in the 2-10 million range.  However, more recent and comprehensive research puts that number into the 40-80 million range, and conversations with Chinese who have tallied that figure after Mao’s death increase the number of dead above 100 million. (more here)

When US firearm deaths – about 30,000 annually – are dissected and compared with other more or equally numerous ways in which Americans die tragically every year, the role of ‘assault rifles’ in such deaths shrinks to near insignificance.

Most readers are aware that the overwhelming fraction of gun deaths every year are self-inflicted, and not the result of perpetrated ‘gun violence’.  And the number of gun murders annually is comprised of purposeful criminal acts, carried out with handguns primarily in minority neighborhoods by minorities against minorities that involve competing gangs and drug trafficking.  The Centers for Disease Control reports, “Non-Hispanic black male teenagers are disproportionately affected by homicide. Homicide is the leading cause of death for non-Hispanic black male teenagers. The risk of dying from homicide among non-Hispanic black male teenagers (39.2 per 100,000 population) is more than twice that of Hispanic males (17.1 per 100,000 population) and about 15 times that of non-Hispanic white males (2.6 per 100,000 population).”  And this annual slaughter of thousands is not of material interest to the Left’s elite leaders, be they black, Hispanic, or white.  Their focus remains only on the restriction and removal of guns from the remaining law-abiding Americans.

The matter of fact in the Parkland and other mass shootings is the abject failure of our law enforcement institutions and security personnel to 1) enforce existing gun laws and regulations, 2) executing their own procedures to follow up the timely information they receive on probable shooters, and most shockingly, 3) not having the courage and/or initiative to engage and stop the shooter while the massacre is taking place and lives could be saved.  In the latter case there have been exceptions, but generally LE personnel arrive late and then mill around, taking cover, and wait for additional backup and direction from commanders more distant from and less knowledgeable about the situation on the ground – Parkland was just the latest incident demonstrating such unprofessional conduct.

However, once a school shooting tragedy has happened, the Left’s elites swing into action to organize and orchestrate a victims’ and/or children’s crusade of demonstrations, marches, walk-outs, media appearances, … to focus blame on the millions of law-abiding gun owners, the NRA, gun manufacturers, and anywhere else except the longstanding cultural causes (e.g. government’s destruction of the family unit) and law enforcement failures that in reality bear on the problem.  Their clear aim is not hindering these massacres which serve so well their cause to disarm the American citizenry.  They need these atrocities to occur regularly because they have no reasonable basis other than the resulting emotional detritus from such killings to support their demands to constructively or in actuality repeal the Second Amendment.

Within this strategy the Left has identified the National Rifle Association as the visible proxy and culprit to blame for all ‘gun violence’.  And that for the simple reason that the NRA is the nation’s leading and longstanding gun rights institution, and defender of the Second Amendment the repeal of which the Left has finally admitted as its ultimate goal.  The evidence for their claim to ‘save lives’ ranges between thin and non-existent.  Because, were that their real goal, there are so many other ways the Left could work to save lives lost to destitution, drugs, and the culture of crime.  By their constant efforts to roll back the legal access and use of guns, their true purpose to prepare a compliant citizenry that has no recourse against an overarching government is revealed.

Much has been written about the intent of the Second Amendment.  But in our beginning, we heard from those who risked everything to give us a free America.  Let us again read their words.

“Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed, as they are in almost every country in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops.” – Noah Webster, An Examination of the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution, October 10, 1787

“Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined…. The great object is that every man be armed. Everyone who is able might have a gun.” – Patrick Henry, Speech to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 5, 1778

“Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!” – Benjamin Franklin

“What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance. Let them take arms.” – Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, December 20, 1787

To this we add the unambiguous intent of the nation’s Supreme Court as they revealed the intent of the Second Amendment.  In the historical Dred Scott decision (1857) 7 of 9 justices declined to give freed slaves the following rights, stating, “It would give to persons of the negro race, who were recognized as citizens in any one State of the Union, the right to enter every other State whenever they pleased, singly or in companies, without pass or passport, and without obstruction, to sojourn there as long as they pleased, to go where they pleased at every hour of the day or night without molestation, unless they committed some violation of law for which a white man would be punished; and it would give them the full liberty of speech in public and in private upon all subjects upon which its own citizens might speak; to hold public meetings upon political affairs, and to keep and carry arms wherever they went.” (emphasis mine) The Two of Nine who voted to grant Mr. Scott his rights as a citizen didn’t counter anything on that list of citizens’ rights. So that was nine out of nine who agreed… the people had (and according to Heller 2008, still have) the right to keep and carry arms wherever they went. It just didn’t enter into the national mind that citizens may not have that right until FDR became President.

And most recently we hear from a current jurist, commentator, and student of American life, Judge Andrew Napolitano in a Washington Times article citing par force – “The historical reality of the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms is not that it protects the right to shoot deer, it protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon us. If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had had the firepower and ammunition that the Nazis had, some of Poland might have stayed free and more persons would have survived the Holocaust.”

The logic of par force, as intended by the Founders and their follow-on apologists, has always been straightforward.  Given that ballots and boots no longer served, their intent was for citizens to have the ability to ‘vote with their bullets’ as a last recourse to stop tyranny.  Their arms had to be sufficient to delay/stop the local agents of tyranny so that the desperate yet just purpose of their resistance could spread.  Permitting citizens to ‘bear arms’ that were inaccessible and/or insufficient to hold back the local agents of tyranny would not serve, therefore such an interpretation of the Second Amendment right would remove the ‘bullets vote’.  However, it was unreasonable for a civil society to possess and maintain private armaments that matched the might of the government’s professional military.  Therefore, the natural compromise was to grant citizens, through the codified Second Amendment, the right to possess force that was on some par level with the local constabulary.  Force that if exercised individually, such as by a criminal or deranged person, could be quickly overcome by the constabulary constituted to provide normal community security services, but a force that if exercised in concert by like-minded neighbors would persist, and perhaps even prevail long enough to communicate the grievance over the countryside.  The right to maintain such a level of civilian arms has been the Second Amendment’s par force interpretation since our founding.

For the discriminating reader it is clear that the possession of par force has also served to provide Americans the ability to defend themselves, their families, and their homes.  Par force obviously subsumes the ability to use firearms for hunting and recreation.  And if it ever came to an invasion by a rogue foreign power or by their in-country fifth column, the established and enduring institution of par force would allow citizens to answer the call “at a minute’s notice” to once again field American militias as we did during our revolution.

Today’s defenders of Americans’ gun rights err greatly when they restrict their arguments to the maintenance of recreational uses and personal security.  These arguments have not prevented the rollback of gun rights that have already taken place, and they will be equally lame in the ongoing debate.  Recreational and security uses of guns will continue to be minimalized with counter arguments of ever more prevalent police forces, and that there is no need for a modern society to cruelly slaughter animals in the wild (‘who were there first’), and that competitive shooting is nothing but a ritualistic, unnecessary, and even detrimental remembrance of a more primitive, violent, and warlike age in the evolution of civilization, that does nothing but maintain and kindle the coarser spirits of human nature.

In sum, we conclude that the only unassailable defense of the Second Amendment is the preservation of our republic (“… if you can keep it.” B. Franklin) as bequeathed to us by our Founders and the American patriots who followed them.  They knew that autocracy cum tyranny has been the most stable and common form of governance throughout the ages, and that America would become history’s Great Experiment to demonstrate and test whether common man can govern himself through democratically elected representatives functioning within a democratic republic.  And they taught that the most basic and necessary foundation of self-governance was the informed individual citizen, always alert and with ready recourse to join with neighbors to become its defenders of last resort.  The Left has never been able to convince anyone but the historically innocent that its prescriptive governance by cadres of elite central planners and invincible controllers would do anything but put us on the fast track to tyranny.

Watching our freedoms wither all around us today, we continue to confirm Thomas Jefferson’s ‘A nation ignorant and free, that never was and never shall be.’