The Real Meaning of the 2nd Amendment...Joseph Story knew...

Uneducated and ignorant People today with no civil alternative are avenging real or imagined transgressions with guns. Also, uneducated and ignorant police today with no psychological alternative are overreacting to real or imagined threats with guns.

FROM Weekend Edition: Doug Casey on Guns: And anyway, you can't rely on the police to be there when you need them. Even as societies are increasingly disarming themselves, relying more on the state for everything, the police are becoming more and more of a clique unto themselves. In other words, the first obligation of police officers is to other cops – their co-workers. Their second obligation is to their employers – the government. And their third obligation – and it's a distant third – is to "serve and protect" society. "Serve and protect" is increasingly just a PR slogan. So, in today's world, you actually need a gun more, not less.

It's a happy coincidence that the moral and the practical are the same. But I find that's almost always the case. - Doug Casey

[Ayn] Rand would argue that the practical is practical because it is moral. So, what about the third leg of the "right to keep and bear arms" argument? As the character V put it so well in V for Vendetta, people should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of the people. A disarmed population is at the mercy of the worst thugs of all: those in uniform and their masters. - Louis James, Editor, International Speculator

Anyone who believes this country is free is an idiot!

RESTORE AMERICA! CUT GOVERNMENT 50%!

"The politicians only want power so they can 'serve' you."

"Extortion and thuggery are good things when they're called law!"

Larken Rose

Uncle Sam, the thief, taking citizens for a ride!!!
"I'm for a flat tax -- as long as the flat rate is zero.
The object is to get rid of big government,
not find a new way of financing it." Harry Browne

• "Ineptocracy"
• Presidental Ineptitude
• 6 Fixes to America's Fiscal Crisis
• The Best Place in the World to be Born
• FED caused N.I.N.J.A. Loans
• Pay Your 'Fair Share'
• US Government Debt Clock
• MELTDOWN AMERICA
• Federal Government Sewage Leak!!
• YA GOTTA VOTE!
• Personal Responsibility or Government?
• DECLINE, DECAY, DENIAL, DELUSION, & DESPAIR
• WE DID BUILD THAT!
• Libertarian Party Platform - Amended 2012
• The Great Destroyer!
• The Great 'Equaliser'?
• Government is for Elites!
• Visit RANDPAC to Restore LIBERTY

Joseph Story (1779–1845) was born during the American Revolution, and came of age in the early years of the new United States of America. He was a scholar of the U.S. Constitution, and, eventually helped found the Harvard Law School.

In 1811, Story was appointed to the Supreme Court by President James Madison — who knew a few things about the U.S. Constitution, in that he helped write it. Story was a contemporary of another famous member of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Marshall (1755–1835).

In 1833, Justice Story published a study titled, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States. In a discussion of the Second Amendment, Story stated:

"The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them."

If events in the USA progress to where citizens must kill federal agents to "resist and triumph over them.", then we, as citizens have NOT performed our duties that are necessary to re-emphasize our rights and history as FREE INDIVIDUALS. Contrary to all the many discussions about whether the Constitution is a "living document" to be modified at whim by legislation, the intent of the authors was to provide citizens their protection against government infringement. See Let’s Abandon The Constitution, Says Professor by Tom Woods for an analysis of a professor's suggestion of abandoning the Constitution.

Notwithstanding today's violence perpetrated by insane, very angry people incapable of dealing with their personal, psychopathological problems, "Guns don't kill people, people do!" One might theorize that agents of the Socialist Left in CONgress and the Executive have instigated and incited the recent violent gun incidents by chosing and chaneling mentally unstable young people into acting out with gun violence so the public will be "scammed" into supporting "emergency" legislation to further slaughter the 2nd Amendment. Eric Holder easily comes to mind. Given our government's past performance on multiple occasions, such a theory would not be difficult to believe.

If the CONgress wants "emergency" laws to pile on top of the mounds of existing laws that already make gun owners and prospective gun owners second class citizens, the CONgress should evaluate their position objectively and factually without the radical emotion from people who have experienced recent gun violence. Instead of the National Criminal database maybe CONgress should further restrict citizens' rights with a National Insane Americans database.

History shows that citizens in countries of the world, devoid of knowledge and influence in their governments, who acquiesced to government mandates to disarm themselves eventually lost not just their firearms but ALL freedoms because disarmed citizens cannot defend themselves or resist tyranny. Any heavily armed, criminal, corrupt government can control its citizenry if citizens are swindled by supposed 'well meaning' government mis-representatives. Worse still would be the situation where citizens facing overwhelming firepower are forced to relinquish their weapons.

FROM The Ultimate Doomsday Provision: “Designed For Those Exceptionally Rare Circumstances Where All Other Rights Have Failed”

The majority falls prey to the delusion—popular in some circles—that ordinary people are too careless and stupid to own guns, and we would be far better off leaving all weapons in the hands of professionals on the government payroll. But the simple truth—born of experience—is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people. Our own sorry history bears this out: Disarmament was the tool of choice for subjugating both slaves and free blacks in the South. In Florida, patrols searched blacks’ homes for weapons, confiscated those found and punished their owners without judicial process. See Robert J. Cottrol & Raymond T. Diamond, The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration, 80 Geo. L.J. 309, 338 (1991). In the North, by contrast, blacks exercised their right to bear arms to defend against racial mob violence. Id. at 341- 42. As Chief Justice Taney well appreciated, the institution of slavery required a class of people who lacked the means to resist. See Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 417 (1857) (finding black citizenship unthinkable because it would give blacks the right to “keep and carry arms wherever they went”). A revolt by Nat Turner and a few dozen other armed blacks could be put down without much difficulty; one by four million armed blacks would have meant big trouble.

 . . .

All too many of the other great tragedies of history – Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few – were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.

My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history.

The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late.

The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees.

However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.

Judge Alex Kozinski dissenting in Silveira v. Lockyer, 328 F.3d 567 (9th Circuit 2003) (full text)

Also, the above decision which concluded that individuals did NOT have the right to keep and bear arms was nullified by the Supreme Court in 2008.