I’m a realist, I know neither of these proposed remedies will be implemented. In fact, like a dog returning to its vomit, the Regime will continue to contribute to the factors inherent in mass killings, for the Empire by definition serves and protects only its own interests, not those of the people. And this sad fact raises another issue concerning the role of firearms in the Empire of death. We must think beyond the indirect threat of the Empire’s spawning of murderous psychopaths. We must also consider the potential of direct action against us by the armed force of the Empire itself.
R. J. Rummel’s book, Death by Government, shows that in the 20th Century far more millions were killed by their own governments than by all the wars combined. The conservative estimate is roughly 170 million. Southern commentator Charley Reese got it exactly right: “As the German people discovered, once a government has unlimited power, it will eventually use that power against everyone.”
But some will ask, why would it want to? Why indeed? Doubtless the French victims of the Great Terror asked the same question on the way to the guillotine, as did the kulaks starved and murdered by Stalin, the millions of Mao’s Chinese victims, the Jews marked for death by Hitler on their way to the camps, the millions slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge in the killing fields of Cambodia. The blood of countless innocents cries out from the ground. Why! Why! There is no easy answer, yet this has been the hallmark of every modern state that claims absolute power. The lesson has been written in suffering and death time and time again within recent memory. There is no excuse for us not to have learned it.
But America is different, you protest. We have our democratic traditions, our Constitution. Come now, does any thinking person not sunk deep in denial really believe the Empire still observes the Constitution? Our freedom, or what’s left of it, exists only at the whim of the authorities. The Constitution and rule of law are reduced to a fiction, just as the Roman emperors preserved the outward forms of the Republic while creating an absolute despotism. Caligula, the most depraved emperor of them all, had his favorite horse Incitatus elected to the Senate. Does that election mean Rome was still a Republic? The question answers itself. (At least the Roman Senate, unlike our own, had the whole horse!)
Despite the expenditure of billions and ever more draconian law enforcement that treats us all as virtual criminals, the Regime can’t protect us from random mass murder, as at Columbine and Virginia Tech. It can’t prevent drug-and-gang violence or common street crime. Indeed, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report released in May 2007 shows violent crimes rising for a second straight year, marking “the first sustained increase in homicide, robberies, and other serious offenses since the early 1990’s.” The jump in violent crime is especially severe in cities like Washington, DC (with a 9 % increase) where gun ownership is prohibited.
The Regime has shown dramatically it can’t protect us from foreign terror attacks. It won’t protect us from the Third World invasion that saps our economy, undermines our culture, and adds untold misery in violence and social disorder. Its enormous, intrusive bureaucracy can’t protect us from Mad Cow disease or avian flu or contaminated Chinese wheat gluten or e. coli in Mexican lettuce or unsafe pharmaceuticals. It can’t protect us from identify thieves who steal our sensitive personal data in the computers of proliferating government agencies. The Empire can’t protect us from the looming meltdown of the dollar and the economy – indeed, the Empire is the principal cause of the impending collapse.
Yet in exchange for the illusory protection from all the ills modern life can envision, the Empire demands our wealth – and our liberty. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, those who give up liberty for safety deserve neither, and in the end they will have neither. For we give up our liberty to the state. As the Romans learned to ask to their sorrow, Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? “Who will guard us from the guardians?” This exchange of freedom for security is a Faustian bargain, for when we sell our freedom, we sell our souls. At least Faust entered into his deal with Mephistopheles of his free will. But we aren’t given that privilege. The Empire uses manipulation, deceit, and intimidation to force us into the false bargain. In other word, the Empire’s survival depends on lies and on force. This vast criminal enterprise can only be countered by truth and by a countervailing force of our own.
Today we suffer under people in various places of power, both formal and informal, whose only difference between the Jacobins of the French Terror, or Hitler, Stalin, and Mao is one of degree, not of kind. The inexorable goal of the Empire they have created is to obliterate the Christian moral order and the social stability that flowed from it. Their program generates ever more misery, violence, and societal breakdown, which they then demand greater powers to address. The purveyors of this worldview don’t get it because they can’t get it. Their blindness is not just intellectual; it is moral. And even if some of them aren’t guilty of malicious intent (as so many are), do we really want to entrust our very lives to people whose grasp of reality is so flawed? It’s pointless to argue with them. More facts, more evidence of their criminal folly won’t convince them they’re wrong. Only one thing will dissuade them from pushing us over a fatal threshold, and that one thing is force.
The cannon of the French Kings bore the Latin inscription, Ultima Ratio Regium, “the final argument of kings.” Armed force, whether it’s the aggression of despots or the resistance of patriots, is the final argument. Our imperial elites ask themselves, “How can we further enslave and despoil them?” Consequently, we must ask ourselves, “How can we defend ourselves and our freedom?” Between these two poles there is no common ground, no arguing with the Regime and its outriders, fellow travelers, and useful idiots. There is no good will among them that will enable us to come and reason together. The final argument comes down to force.
And no, I am not advocating we take up arms against the government. I am saying the government will turn its arms on us. It is the inevitable logic of empire. It has already done so at Waco and Ruby Ridge. It is doing so ever more blatantly in individual cases around the country as we sink deeper and deeper into a surveillance-and-police state in which the cops no longer serve and protect, but harass and oppress. With increasing dismay and clarity we see that their role is not to defend us against criminals, but to defend the Regime against us.
In a future economic collapse or other national crisis (again, brought about by the negligence, folly, and corruption of the Regime) an armed citizenry may be the only remaining deterrent to the centralized state’s Endlosung, its Final Solution. Gun rights activist Jeff Snyder says, "To own firearms is to affirm that freedom and liberty are not gifts from the state. It is to reserve final judgment about whether the state is encroaching on freedom and liberty, to stand ready to defend that freedom with more than words, and to stand outside totalitarian reach and speech."
Today the Regime’s anti-gun strategy is to whittle away at our gun rights and capabilities at the margin, stopping short of an outright assault on the 2nd Amendment -- for the time being. Delays in obtaining a gun, banning certain features like high-capacity magazines, administratively driving up the cost of guns and ammunition are the current means of choice. Yet despite the continuous salami slicing, Americans retain a considerable self-defense and deterrent capability. The armed citizen remains the final impediment to the Regime’s total control. Yet it’s unlikely that the Empire, which has usurped our freedom in every other conceivable way, will allow this deterrent to its absolute power to go unchallenged much longer. Another mass killing or terrorist attack, followed by widespread public revulsion, could provide the opportunity the Empire is waiting for. Dare I say hoping for?
If you have any thought of obtaining weapons for personal defense or hunting or just recreational shooting, you’d better do it soon. The threats to gun freedom, while perhaps not immediate, are numerous. Sooner or later one or several of these measures will connect. There’s the big-city mayor’s campaign to restrict gun sales. There’s H.R. 1022, the worst Congressional legislation introduced since 1968 (by the afore-mentioned Rep. McCarthy) that would renew and expand the so-called assault-weapons ban, this time for good, without a “sunset” provision. Then there are various global gun control initiatives of the UN that could undermine the 2nd Amendment via U.S. ratification of an international treaty.
High quality rifles and handguns will only become scarcer and more expensive as these threats materialize. It’s already difficult and costly to obtain good ammunition. Stock up now. Ammo keeps a long time if stored in a cool, dry place. Don’t forget extra magazines. And above all, get training. Owning a weapon is not enough. Only with training and practice can the armed citizen really constitute a meaningful deterrent capability.
The Empire has reduced us from citizens to subjects. As its corruption and tyranny wax worse and worse, it treats us as enemies, and finally as prey. But in a world where everyone is reduced to either predator or prey, we Southerners wish to be neither. And those who wish to be neither had better have the means of self-defense.
Sadly, we can expect more events like Blacksburg, perhaps with more dead than the last. The Yankee culture of death guarantees it. Sooner or later the Regime will use the monsters it has spawned to justify sweeping gun registration, to be followed by an attempt at confiscation, as happened in Britain and Australia. Every gun-owner must think about this scenario in advance and decide what you will do before it transpires; not wait till the BATF thugs show up on your doorstep.
It’s a self-delusion of the first order to think that the GOP will save our gun rights. Republicans have been better than most Democrats on the issue -- so far. But with a few notable exceptions, Republicans are cowardly and unprincipled and will collapse like a house of cards if the political winds change and they sense it’s in their interest of holding on to power (which is really their only principle). The Empire subsists on the one-party political system in which Democrats and Republicans masquerade as genuine political alternatives, but are really just two sides of the same (counterfeit) coin.
We live in a time of crisis, both the crises besetting us now and the worse ones to come. To be sure, it is wrong to think that guns by themselves will save us. They are a necessary but by no means sufficient condition for security and freedom. Yet, in a time of increasing instability and violence it makes more sense to be armed than unarmed. Our attitude should echo that of our colonial forefathers who defeated the greatest military power on the globe, largely through superior marksmanship, combined with faith: “Trust in the Lord, but keep your powder dry.”
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Thomas Moore is the author of The Hunt for Confederate Gold and Chairman of the Southern National Congress Committee
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