>January 11, 2000
>
>Terry E Peele
>2303 Underpar Circle
>Las Vegas, NV 89142
>(702) 641-2408
>tp@vegas.infi.net
>
>Letters to the Editor
>Las Vegas Review-Journal
>P.O. Box 70
>Las Vegas, NV 89125-0070
>
>Vin:
> Thanks very much for responding to my e-mail. You are the first person
>
>to deal with this issue with me head on. I agree, necessary to the
>security of a free state, is a direct quote. Its the four words
>preceding those where we disagree. I feel we both accept the word
>being.
> Now, you contend that your phrase an armed citizenry is synonymous
>with a well regulated Militia. If thats the case, why paraphrase?
>Why not use the exact quote since it contains only one additional word?
> My American Heritage Dictionary defines militia the same as your
>Websters New World. That noted, just how do you explain the words,
>well regulated?
> In your original hypothetical you have the mob armed with
>sledgehammers and torches. That mob is intent on using tyrannical means
>
>in order to impose its will on the newspaper. Just suppose that mob is
>armed with guns instead. Would that qualify as an armed citizenry?
>It most certainly wouldnt qualify as a well regulated Militia.
> Youve referred to the confiscation of registered guns by Turkey,
>Russia and Germany. Have we not learned anything from Waco? The Branch
>
>Davidians were armed with non-registered gun when they fought the most
>powerful government in the world. They failed because they could not
>muster enough public support to succeed. If ever enough public support
>was available to assemble an armed citizenry to successfully overthrow
>
>the government of The United States of America, would not that number be
>
>sufficient enough to resolve the dispute at the ballot box?
> Its the narrow minded individuals, intent on imposing their will, be
>it on a newspaper or be it on a community, being able to assemble an
>armed citizenry that I fear. Imagine someone in Nevada, intent on
>creating a moral society thats void of gaming and legal prostitution ,
>assembling an arm citizenry. The havoc they created could alter all
>our lives. Logic tells me they most likely would start by attacking
>small places in Pahrump. Imagine fighting in the streets as our
>government protected our freedom to chose for ourselves, against an
>armed citizenry that was certain they knew what was best for us.
> An individual does not become a tyrant until they seize power. Fidel
>Castro was viewed as a liberator, not a tyrant, while he lead an armed
>citizenry against Batista in the fifties. Whom would you select to
>lead an armed citizenry in this country?
> Control of guns is no more synonymous with the outlawing of guns than
>an armed citizenry is synonymous with A well regulated Militia.
>Vin, the manner you and the NRA chose to defend the Second Amendment -
>making the qualifier mean no more than The moon being made of green
>cheese, - only encourages the narrow minded to create an armed
>citizenry. While the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,
>shall not be infringed, is the heart of the amendment, it does not
>stand alone.
>
>Thank You
>Terry E Peele
Hi, Terry --
The Branch Davidian were not armed with any illegal weapons. The local sheriff had inspected their weapons not long before, and found them all to be legal. None of the Branch Davidians were ever charged with -- or convicted of -- any such weapons violations. The prosecution promised to hold up samples of their illegal weapons at the trial of the Branch Davidian survivors in San Antonio, but never did so. There were none.
Since when is it the responsibility of those who are attacked by armed government helicopters and machine guns and finally tanks to "muster enough public support to succeed"? This is like saying the Jews obviously had no right to survive in the Warsaw ghetto in 1943, because they "could not muster enough public support to succeed." I find this doctrine hideous. Waco proves that Americans need to own machine guns and anti-tank missiles, and keep them in their homes. Otherwise, government agents anxious for some "good TV footage" to show at their congressional funding hearings will come to our homes and kill us and our children. This is not some paranoid fantasy. We all watched it happen on TV, in Texas, in 1993.
The occupants of the Mount Carmel Church in Waco owned fewer firearms per capita than is the current average for all citizens of Texas. Perhaps next time the government thugs will pick on someone OTHER than a bunch of old ladies and children in a Seventh Day Adventist Church -- someone who DOES have the training and the willingness to fight back. Fortunately, following Waco, Americans civilians have been rearming like crazy, often collectively buying as many as a MILLION new firearms per month. The thugs you love are soon going to have some surprises, if they keep this up.
The eighth chapter of my book, "Send in the Waco Killers," is titled "Demonizing the Militias." It tells the stories of many well-meaning Americans who attempted to form "well-regulated militias" in the years following Ruby Ridge and Waco. I interviewed several who scheduled drills (with unloaded weapons) at town greens in Oregon and California -- clearing their activities with local parks and recreation departments beforehand -- with the specific purpose of getting Americans used to seeing respectable citizens in public, again, with military-style rifles, as had been common in the 18th and 19th centuries.
How did folks like Janet Reno respond when these law-abiding citizens decided to call the bluff of all you "It's only for a militia" whiners? Almost to a man they had their fledgling, above-ground militias infiltrated by government agents provocateurs who proposed that they commit crimes like bank robbery and thefts from U.S. armories. When the undercover federal operatives were unable to convince these decent veterans and lawyers to commit such crimes, the government infiltrators settled for "setting them up" on conspiracy charges, in some cases planting bomb makings (Macon, Georgia) or stolen property (New Hampshire) on the targets of their "investigations." Many are now in prison, despite the fact they never shot anyone, or blew anything up.
I submit neither you nor the tyrannical government to which you would like to grant a MONOPOLY on armed force has any interest in encouraging the development of "well-regulated militias." Such arguments are mere casuistry; your real goal is to disarm everyone but the professional criminals and the government police, leaving the populace to live in docile terror.
You ask: "If ever enough public support was available to assemble 'an armed citizenry' to successfully overthrow the government of The United States of America, would not that number be sufficient enough to resolve the dispute at the ballot box?"
The purpose of the armed citizenry, as properly pointed out in the amendment you keep insisting we cite correctly, is to preserve "the security of a free state." To interpret that as meaning "the overthrow the government of The United States of America" is disingenuous. There is no need to overthrow a government which is kept within its constitutional bounds by the knowledge that it faces an armed populace ever jealous of its liberties -- nor is there any way to keep any government within such bounds WITHOUT an armed citizenry. The founding fathers knew this. You would merely like to wish away this truth -- demonstrated time and again, down through the centuries.
You say you are concerned about someone in America "being able to assemble an armed citizenry." Fortunately, there is no need for anyone to "create" or "assemble" in America an armed citizenry. George Washington found the citizenry armed when it flocked to his banner in 1776. It has remained armed ever since. Yet your paranoid fantasies of militiamen "attacking Pahrump" and "fighting in the streets" have never come to pass, except when the government in Washington City staged a military invasion of the southern states from 1861 to1865. If an armed citizenry is so dangerous, how come we didn't see blood running in the streets back in 1899, or or 1919, or 1933 -- before there were ANY federal restrictions on the private ownership of machine guns?
(The only exception I can think of was the invention of the tommy-gun drive-by during alcohol Prohibition in the 1920s -- a problem solved overnight by Franklin Roosevelt when he legalized alcohol in 1933. When was the last time you heard of a modern Anheuser-Busch distributor taking a machine gun to his competitor from Miller Lite? Yet I don't suppose we'd want to end our equivalent epidemic of inner-city violence by ending our own modern Prohibitions, today?)
If the 20th century teaches us nothing else, it is that government mass murders occur in slave states where the citizenry is disarmed (the Armenians in Turkey; the Ukrainians under Stalin, the Jews and Gypsies under Hitler; the intellectuals under Mao and Pol Pot -- oh, what a happy catalog you gun-banners have compiled) -- not in free nations where the citizenry is armed, as in America.
If you wish to live in a country where the citizenry is disarmed, then you do not want to live in the America envisioned by our founding fathers. You can either move to Cuba or Red China, or you can endeavor to repeal the Second Amendment -- instead of trying to twist its real and obvious meaning, which is that any 14-year-old girl must be allowed to buy a shoulder launched heat-seeking missile over the counter at Home Depot, for cash, without showing any "government-issued ID."
Of course, since the states ratified the Constitution only on the promise that a Bill of Rights (specifically including the right to keep and bear arms) would be enacted, at that point the entire contract represented by the current Constitution would be null and void, and an armed revolution would indeed loom fairly likely. And how would you propose to win such a fight, once you've given up your own arms?
To argue that, under the Second Amendment, "If you want to bear arms, you can always join the Army or the National Guard," requires us to believe that -- while George Washington was still President -- the founders enacted a Bill of Rights which would have allowed the colonial governor of Virginia to disarm and jail gentleman farmer George Washington and his friend George Mason for founding the Fairfax County Militia -- which neither had the blessing of nor was answerable to any government authority -- sneering "If they want to bear arms, they can always go join the British Army."
"An armed citizenry" is a synonym for "a well-regulated militia," just as "gun control and registration" has led to gun confiscation not just in the older historical examples cited above, but in England and Australia just in the past decade. Your argument requires that you ignore every single historical example demonstrating where your proposed course of action -- victim disarmament -- actually leads.
But fortunately, this argument neither can or will be decided by any contest of dictionary definitions.
I am an American citizen. I am a member of the unorganized militia. As is my duty (and in compliance with all federal and local laws), I am armed. If you want to come to my house and try to disarm me, come and try. Or will you, like all those cowards before you, instead hire some uniformed thug to try and do your dirty work for you?
And when he comes for me, in violation of the very make-believe principles you cite, he'll be ... armed ... won't he?
I thought so.
Vin Suprynowicz
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken