ARRANGING  AMERICAN  GUN  CONFISCATION

 

 

 

Friday, October 23, 2015 11:20

by Daren Jonescu

 

America’s progressive chatter on guns has been shifting noticeably from the abstract language of “control” to the concrete language of “confiscation.” Hillary Clinton is just the latest leading voice to serve notice that the forced disarmament of law-abiding Americans is not the dystopian fantasy of paranoids, but a matter of current policy discussion — and action.

During an October 16 Town Hall in New Hampshire, a voter asked Hillary Clinton about Australia’s national gun “buyback” program — more accurately dubbed “confiscation” — in which large numbers of firearms were outlawed, and owners compelled to surrender them (for financial compensation).  

Here is the question:

Recently, Australia managed to get away, or take away tens of thousands, millions, of handguns.  In one year, they were all gone. Can we do that? If we can’t, why can’t we?

And here, after meandering through international gun laws, and citing localized American buyback programs, was the conclusion of Clinton’s response:

I think it would be worth considering doing it on the national level, if that could be arranged.

So when asked, in effect, what would prevent a President Hillary Clinton from initiating a gun confiscation program similar to Australia’s, she expressed sympathy with the idea, barring practical difficulties.

As the NRA’s Chris Cox pointed out in a press release:

This validates what the NRA has said all along. The real goal of gun control supporters is gun confiscation. Hillary Clinton, echoing President Obama’s recent remarks on the same issue, made that very clear.

True, but that is only the obvious half of the issue. Let us focus for a moment not on Clinton’s approval of Australia’s gun confiscation, but on the condition she establishes for adopting similar measures in America: “if that could be arranged.” 

Hillary has a knack for punctuating her mendacity with words that reveal her audacity.  From “a vast right-wing conspiracy” to “[we'll] make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted” (spoken to the father of a man killed in an attack that she knew had nothing to do with any film) to “What difference, at this point, does it make?” (spoken to escape the web of lies in which she had entangled herself with regard to the Benghazi killings), she repeatedly shows herself to be not merely a remorseless dissembler, but also disturbingly coldblooded towards the human obstacles in her path.  

Now, with a quaintly detached, faintly bureaucratic clause — “if that could be arranged” — Clinton has defined the terms of what might turn out to be modern civilization’s symbolic last stand. 

For the most pertinent fact about Australia’s gun confiscation is that for all the justifiable protest among Australian gun owners, they finally complied. They turned in the legally-acquired property that their government demanded they relinquish, and accepted the national registration of firearms that were not confiscated outright.  

Would American gun owners do the same?

Many would likely obey orders, but a substantial number surely would not. American history is more deeply invested in the idea of private gun ownership than are the histories of other nations.  

America has always identified an armed citizenry as essential to its very founding principle, namely the principle of limited, republican government. 

Listen to Australian and British victims of their countries’ respective gun bans, and you will consistently find they are mainly lamenting the loss of a vaguely defined “tradition,” the violation of their property, or the denial of their freedom to pursue a preferred kind of sportsman’s life. 

Only in America is resistance to restrictions on private gun ownership still discussed primarily in terms of political philosophy, i.e., as a question concerning the legitimacy of an established government. 

   In this sense, America may be the only nation which still has a living political philosophy at all, if by political philosophy we mean a theory of the terms upon which governments may properly be founded, and of the corresponding conditions in which rulers forfeit their moral authority to govern. 

Most of the modern democratic world has devolved to the pre-philosophical (or, if you like, pre-Western) position that power is legitimated by its own mere existence, the position Socrates confronted in the earliest days of genuine political philosophy, in the form of Thrasymachus’ sophistical definition of justice as “the advantage of the stronger.” 

Hence, in the rest of the so-called civilized world, the notion of a national government forcibly disarming the population is accepted, however uncomfortably, as entirely within the government’s “rights,” or at best a matter to be decided at the ballot box. 

In Socrates’ lifetime, the disarming of the Athenian population by the Thirty Tyrants, in 404 B.C., ended in a violent revolt, and the restoration of democracy in 403 B.C. In our late modernity, by contrast, the heirs to Athens’ civilizational legacy face their emasculation with, “Well, I hate to give up my target-shooting pistols, but after all, the law’s the law.” 

But is it? Is a law establishing tyranny “the law”?  Is a law forcing the citizenry to surrender their (already-flimsy) power to defend themselves against unjust government expansion — in effect, a law establishing invincible, and hence effectively unlimited, government — “the law”?  

Would the progenitors of modern political liberty, from Aquinas to Locke to Jefferson, have accepted the legitimacy of a government that coercively disarmed the population, rendering itself impervious to any practical checks on its action? 
 
The issue is not whether any nation’s population should take arms against its presiding establishment, but rather whether the pursuit of freedom and political legitimacy does not require that populations be permitted to retain the means of resistance, i.e., the tools to defend their life, liberty, and property if government should become hostile to the task. Without such means, a government’s only limits are those it imposes on itself, which is to say it has no real limits at all. 

The tacit understanding of the population’s power to rise up against the most extreme forms of political injustice — that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government” — was the condition that marked the dividing line between a just ruler and a tyrant for centuries, even before the idea of limited government had been developed in its modern forms. 

Thus, limited government in the true sense entails the state’s tolerance of an armed civilian population — or perhaps more than mere tolerance. During the Virginia ratification debates, George Mason made the following argument for maintaining private militias:

Read more at American Thinker:   http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/10/arranging_american_gun_confiscation.html#ixzz3pPrmlgg5
http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2015/10/arranging-american-gun-confiscation-3233012.html