We need your help to join an amicus brief to the Supreme Court arguing that the right to keep and bear arms is not only a right to self-defense against criminals, but also against tyrannical government. If you want the Supreme Court to hear this argument please make a tax-deductible contribution for this purpose to the Downsize DC Foundation.
Why this is important
Statism is the belief that politicians and bureaucrats should have broad powers to use force against citizens. In its most virulent forms Statism killed more people in the 20th Century alone than all of the individual non-governmental murderers in the history of the world, COMBINED! Professor R.J. Rummel estimates the total murderous death-toll of Statism at about 170 million people!
Not even the Black Death of the Middle Ages, or the Flu epidemic of 1918, can approach these numbers, even if you combine the totals from those two epidemics and reduce the estimate for the total number of murders committed by governments.
But the terrible statistics for Statist murder still only tell part of the story. We must add to them the statistics for the mass theft, imprisonment, and torture committed by governments against innocent people. These measurements of State criminality are even more vast, so much so that they are literally incalculable.
The State, and the belief-system that fosters its criminality—Statism—are the great scourges of human existence, against which no other source of death and destruction can remotely compare.
Of course, in reaction to all of these blood-curdling facts the fool argues that such things could never happen in this country. The same foolish belief was held by people in Russia, Germany, China, Cambodia, and a hundred other places, before such things DID happen in those countries. But such naivety is also exposed by one other crucial fact…
Murderous and violent crimes by the State have already been committed by our government, on a massive scale. A partial list would include . . .
Our government's eviction of the law-abiding Cherokees from the South Eastern U.S., the confiscation of their property, and the "Trail of Tears" Death March to Oklahoma that followed
Repeated massacres of Indian women and children by U.S. Army death squads throughout the 19th Century
Two hundred years of State-enforced, multi-generational captivity for Africans, and the continual rape and torture that accompanied this enslavement
One hundred years of State-enforced segregation of Africans over broad stretches of the United States, including the unofficial collaboration by police in lynchings and beatings against unarmed African-Americans
The mass murder of Filipinos in a campaign of colonial subjugation following the Spanish-American war (which was supposedly fought against colonialism!)
The internment of innocent Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II
The United States is indeed special, but not as special as blind, adolescent patriotism wants to believe. And what remains of our specialness is under relentless and increasing pressure. We have argued elsewhere that:
President George W. Bush laid the basic infrastructure for a future police state, and that . President Obama has retained, and in some cases expanded, all the Bush-era policies—the PATRIOT Act, warrantless spying, REAL ID, imprisonment without due process, extraordinary rendition, etc. Some future crisis, or series of calamities, could deploy this infrastructure in a freedom-crushing, and perhaps even murderous way
What has made America special are the controls that our Founders erected against the kind of Statist thuggery so-loved by President Bush, President Obama, and nearly all politicians. It is true that these controls have always been incomplete, and have failed repeatedly, as in the examples cited above. But it is also true that…
They have worked better than any other system yet devised by mortal man. To remain special, and to become more special, we must preserve and even enhance every protection we have against State criminality. Some of these protections could be thought of as a series of boxes . . .
The ballot box
The jury box
The mail box (which DownsizeDC.org is using in its modern electronic forms because the ballot and jury boxes have become so corrupted)
And finally, as a last resort, the cartridge (ammo) box
Cartridge boxes are what:
Jews, Gypsies, Poles and Russians needed against the Nazi Statists
Russians, Chinese, Cambodians, and countless others needed against the Communist Statists
Filipinos and many other peoples needed against American and other colonial Statists
Cartridge boxes may also be what Americans need someday, against their own government, if current trends explode into the kind of mass Statist gangsterism that so many other societies have suffered.
Our Founders gave us the Second Amendment for exactly this purpose. They were not thinking of self-defense against individual criminals when they wrote the Second Amendment the way they wrote it, though they did not exclude that purpose. Instead, they were thinking about Statist thugs....
Here are some pertinent quotes:
"And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms....."___ Samuel Adams, United States Congress, 1779
"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms... The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." _____ Thomas Jefferson . Proposal of the Virginia Constitution, June 1776
"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few public officials." _____ George Mason United States Congress 1779 during Ratification of Bill of Rights
"...if raised, whether they could subdue a Nation of Freemen, who know how to prize liberty, and who have arms in their hands?" _____ Delegate Sedgwick . during the Massachusetts Convention, 1779 rhetorically asking if an oppressive standing army could prevail over a citizens' Militia
"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. When you give up that force, you are eventually ruined."____ Patrick Henry . 1779
"Firearms are second only to the Constitution in importance; they are the people's liberty teeth."_____ George Washington
"...but if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people, while there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in discipline and use of arms, who stand ready to defend their rights..."_____ Alexander Hamilton, Federalist Paper No. 29
"Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms in our own possession and under our direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?"_____ Patrick Henry
"the ultimate authority ... resides in the people alone,"__ James Madison, co-author of the Bill of Rights Federalist Paper No. 46
"The Constitution of most of our states, and of the United States, assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed. ___ Thomas Jefferson
"...arms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property...horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them."__ Thomas Paine . From his essay, Thoughts on Defensive War, 1775
A free people ought to be armed. When firearms go, all goes - we need them every hour."___ George Washington
The American people were to be armed as a final defense against Statist aggression, both foreign AND DOMESTIC. There is a mountain of evidence to support this view, and we want to see the Supreme Court exposed to this evidence. Do you?
The Downsize DC Foundation is joining with Gun Owners of America and several other organizations in the MacDonald case, which challenges the handgun ban in Chicago—also being called by some, "Heller II." With your help we will be the ONLY GROUP submitting an amicus curiae brief making the argument that the Second Amendment is much more than permission to have a handgun in your home.
If you want to see this evidence presented to the Supreme Court, please make a TAX-DEDUCTIBLE contribution for this purpose. You can do so here.
