Gun Rights as a Defense against Tyranny

by Austin Raynor

As Justice Antonin Scalia asserted on behalf of the majority in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the D.C. ban on handguns was declared unconstitutional, the right to bear arms, enshrined in the Second Amendment, preserves specifically the common-law right to self defense. What is often overlooked, however, by both those who oppose and support gun rights, is that the aggressors which an armed citizen is suited to resist may include one’s own government. An armed citizenry is the last resort against oppression; the right to bear arms is the freedom from which all other freedoms flow.

Naïve trust of the government dominates much public sentiment in modern-day America, but a healthy distrust, even suspicion, of the government animated the writing of our Constitution, inspiring our Founding Fathers to preserve in that document the protection of the citizenry’s right to bear arms.

As George Washington wrote, “A free people ought not only to be armed and disciplined, but they should have sufficient arms and ammunition to maintain a status of independence from any who might attempt to abuse them, which would include their own government.” George Mason said, “I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people...To disarm the people is the best and most effectual way to enslave them.”

History has borne out this observation. Genocide is almost always preceded by disarmament of the intended victims. Adolf Hitler, following the institution of strict gun control legislation in Germany in 1935, proclaimed: “This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!”

After legislating gun control in 1929, the Soviet government murdered 20 million of its own people. Turkey implemented gun control in 1911 and shortly thereafter murdered 1.5 million Armenians. Gun ownership was also outlawed prior to widespread executions in China, Cambodia, Guatemala, Rwanda, and Uganda. Over the past 100 years over 56 million people have been killed by their own governments.

Genocide is unlikely to occur in the United States, though it is important to note that Germans in the 1920s possessed similar sentiments concerning their own country. Short of genocide, however, but frightening nonetheless, is the boundless usurpation of liberty that occurs under a government that knows no bounds. Thomas Jefferson aptly observed: “When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”

Hubert Humphrey struck a similar note when he said, “Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms…the right of the citizens to bear arms is just one guarantee against arbitrary government and one more safeguard against a tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible.”

Some gun control advocates operate under the guidance of a utopian gun-free vision. But gun control merely creates a society in which the government and the criminals, exclusively, are armed. Prohibition ensures that only the criminals, by definition, possess guns. A desired good does not disappear; it simply goes underground. Furthermore, gun prohibition does nothing to remove guns from the hands of the government, and removes from the people’s grasp the last resort against tyranny. Gun rights are the final safeguard against a government, such as our own, that shows repeated contempt for both the Constitution and the rights of its citizens.

Few people take seriously the lessons of history concerning the necessity of an armed population in defense of freedom. But they do so at their own peril. As Scottish philosopher Andrew Fletcher wrote, “Arms are the only true badges of liberty,” providing “the distinction of a free man from a slave.” No unarmed people has long remained free; this is a principle that our ever-encroaching government does not fail to grasp. Gun control legislators know well the attitude expressed by Adolf Hitler when he said, “The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms.”

It is every citizen’s duty to arm himself. We must in this case side with Thomas Paine, American firebrand who published the incendiary pamphlet Common Sense shortly before the explosion of the American Revolution, who wrote that “It is the duty of the patriot to protect his country from its government.” Firearms and ammunition sales have skyrocketed since Obama’s election. Perhaps this speaks, at last, to the revival of that spirit of our Founding Fathers, who knew so well the dangers of tyranny and the oppressions of an unafraid government.