Presents
Pamphlet #229
Demonizing the Militia
by Vin Suprynowicz
Are you shirking your duty to help keep America free?
Given the number of unconstitutional enactments blithely
put into force in this country in recent decades, the most
common defense in any federal courtroom should be:
1) The Declaration of Independence instructs us that legitimate governments
are instituted among men to "secure the
unalienable Rights" with which we are "endowed by our Creator," among these
being "life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness" -- necessarily including an unalienable right to retain and
profit from the fruits of our labors.
2) Following logically from this precedent, the U.S. Constitution creates
a government of sharply limited powers, such
powers being limited to those specifically listed.
3) The Ninth and 10th Amendments -- still part of the highest law of the
land, superseding all subsequent enactments
-- further assure us that the people have many rights "not enumerated"
in the Constitution, and that "any powers not
delegated to the United States by the Constitution" are reserved to the
states or the people.
4) In his definitive 1803 ruling in the watershed case "Marbury vs. Madison,"
Chief Justice Marshall instructed us that
any unconstitutional enactment must be treated as though it never existed.
5) Therefore, since the statute, regulation, ordinance, edict, or "interpretation
of code" under which the defendant
now stands accused, represents an attempt by the federal legislature and/or
bureaucracy to meddle in an area where
it has no constitutional authorization (trafficking in constitutionally
protected firearms, trafficking in medicinal plant
extracts, declining to "volunteer" to pay unconstitutional direct federal
taxes or to participate in a federal retirement
pension or "payroll withholdings" scheme; "money laundering" to facilitate
such commerce, etc. etc. etc.)
6) These charges should be dismissed; and the defendant declared innocent.
The reason this widely appropriate and fully adequate defense is seldom
heard, of course, is that the black-robed
lawyers who today masquerade as "judges" in our court system will not permit
such things to be spoken. Defense
attorneys are actually threatened with jail if they so much as dare to
advance such an argument, the rationale being
that "We're only here to decide the facts of the case. If you want to argue
unconstitutionality of the underlying
statute, the time to do that is years from now at the appellate level,
after the defendant is bankrupt, has lost his
home and family, and has been infected with a fatal disease by being gang-raped
in the prisons for a couple of years."
This is a lie, of course, and any judge who says such a thing should him
(or her)self be indicted for violation of his
oath of office (treason), and for depriving a citizen of his civil rights
under color of law. If and only if unanimously
convicted by a randomly selected jury, such judges should be stripped of
their office for life, imprisoned, and -- in
cases where such misconduct has had a particularly egregious effect on
the life of an innocent defendant --
executed.
That's not going to happen any time soon, of course. So decadent has our
nation become that our lawmakers laugh
scornfully at the notion that there are any restrictions whatsoever on
how much they can tax or what they can spend
it on, while the cynical, ambitious lawyers who staff our prosecutors'
offices would never dream of enforcing the Bill of
Rights by indicting most of our sitting politician/judges for violating
their oaths.
Does any constitutional safeguard remain? Actually, yes. Though the Constitution
is primarily a bill of limitations on
government action, it does create through strong implication a few duties
for the citizen.
Since no fewer than three of the first 10 amendments deal with the right
to a trial before a randomly selected citizen
jury, there must obviously be some duty for citizens not only to serve
on juries when called, but also to remain
knowledgeable about their duty to stand as a last line of defense for fellow
citizens being railroaded under
unconstitutional edicts.
One searches the writings of the founders in vain
for the notion that jurors should "decide only the facts and not the
law" -- in fact, constitutions of early states
like Maryland specifically mention that jurors
must be allowed to decide
the law as well
as the facts of the case. Nor
will we find any mention of "runaway juries" or "rogue juries" to describe
jurors who acquit despite a judge's instructions that the law gives them
"no choice but to convict if you find that the
defendant acted as charged" -- in fact, America's
freedom of the press was born in New York's John Peter Zenger
case, where the jury acquitted under just such circumstances.
Poisoning the language of freedom
Similarly, today's champions of tyranny -- and the victim disarmament which
is a necessary condition for the
advancement of any enduring tyranny -- have been busy for some years attempting
to demonize the term "militia."
What does "militia" actually mean? Richard Henry Lee, who drafted the Second
Amendment as well as the rest of the
Bill of Rights, gave us a definitive answer in 1788:
"A militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves. ...
The Constitution ought to secure a
genuine [militia] and guard against a select militia, by providing that
the militias shall always be kept well
organized, armed, and disciplined, and include ... all men capable of bearing
arms, and that all regulations
tending to render this militia useless and defenseless, by establishing
select corps of militia, or distinct
bodies of military men not having permanent interests and attachments in
the community [are] to be
avoided. ... To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of
the people always possess arms,
and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them."
But mention "militia" in polite company today, and many folks -- having
been fed regular doses of the aforementioned
carefully crafted collectivist propaganda -- automatically think of some
small band of racist skinhead kooks in Montana
or Idaho, embracing the laughable racism of "The Turner Diaries" and preaching
some deviant doctrine of white
supremacy and racial separation.
Yet the arguments of these gun-grabbers quickly turn in on themselves,
"as dogs upon their masters," in
Shakespeare's phrase. They have long assured us -- despite the firm disagreement
of such well-known left-wing legal
scholars as Lawrence Tribe -- that the Second Amendment doesn't mean what
is clearly says ("The right of the
people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.") Why? Because those
of us who would honor our Constitution
and do our duty to defend it (and the free country it created) supposedly
ignore the introductory clause of the
amendment, to wit: "A well regulated Militia being necessary to the security
of a free State ..."
Well, what's the plain meaning of this clause? Note the use of the word
"free." A well-practiced citizen militia is not
necessary to the security of a police state, since police states have droves
of uniformed bully boys goose-stepping
about in fancy black uniforms and willing to follow the Imperator's orders
to arrest and imprison anyone who refuses to
Get With the Program.
What the founders meant by that "militia" which must be maintained as our
main source of armed men for national
defense, if we are to remain a free country, are companies of citizens
like the farmers and tradesmen who picked up
their rifles and swarmed to Saratoga in the fall of 1777 to ambush Gentleman
Johnnie Burgoyne's foraging parties,
eventually bringing the invading redcoat regulars to battle and defeating
them under the ad hoc leadership of one of
America's great combat heroes, New Haven storekeeper-turned-soldier Benedict
Arnold (yes, I know he later messed
up) -- thus guaranteeing the colonists' triumph by drawing France into
the war on our side.
As Americans have a duty not merely to show up for
jury duty but to understand their right and obligation to acquit
any defendant on trial under an unconstitutional statute -- or any defendant
who has clearly been refused his right to
present a principled constitutional defense at trial -- so do Americans
have a strongly implied obligation under the
Second Amendment to stand ready to defend our freedoms (remember, "necessary
to the security of a free state") by
owning, maintaining and keeping in good practice with a firearm of "militia
usefulness" -- that being, in this day and
age, an M-16 or (preferably, in my opinion) a .308-caliber, M-14 combat
rifle.
Now, there is a slight problem. The would-be tyrants on the Potomac have
made it a federal crime for any American to
build or import a military-style, select-fire M-14 or M-16 rifle for sale
to a fellow citizen who does not wear a
government uniform -- the exception being granted for members of precisely
the kinds of "special militias" and
"standing armies" which the founders feared.
This leaves only a limited supply of "pre-ban" M-14s and M-16s still circulating.
The laws of supply and demand thus
mean I'm going to pay more than $4,000 for my fully-automatic M-14 -- after
I pay a $200 tax and submit myself to
fingerprinting and other clearly unconstitutional indignities and "infringements"
-- once I finally get enough saved up.
In the meantime, I can proudly declare myself a member of Nevada's unorganized
constitutional militia, by dint of my
ownership of the semi-automatic version of the military M-14 -- the semi-automatic
civilian M-1A.
The M-16 (in the lighter .223 caliber) has a similarly more affordable
semi-automatic civilian sister, the perfectly legal
little AR-15 ... though fans of tyranny like Chuck Schumer and Dianne Feinstein
and Ted Kennedy naturally seek to ban
these slightly less useful militia weapons at every turn, lying and calling
them "assault rifles" (an assault rifle must be
capable of fully-automatic fire; these are not) and by -- get this -- trying
to link them to "dangerous Militias" ... a
word which originally defined precisely the kind of peaceful, armed citizens
who might stand in the way of their plans
for a massive, cradle-to-grave, welfare/police state!
(What do the massacres of the Armenian Turks in 1915, of the Ukrainian
Kulaks under Stalin in the 1930s, of the Jews
and Gypsies under Hitler in the 1940s, of the "landlords" under Mao and
the "intellectuals" under Pol Pot all have in
common? The victims were all disarmed, by law, first.)
Some duties cannot be delegated
Have you ever shirked your jury duty? Does it make you proud
to know some fellow citizen who never harmed anyone
may now be serving time because you couldn't be bothered to go stand as
his last line of defense against a bad law or
overzealous prosecution -- or, worse yet, because you followed some black-robed
lawyer's "order" to convict, even
though you couldn't for the life of you figure out who the defendant had
hurt, and felt in your heart it was the
overzealous cops, trampling our precious Bill of Rights to "build their
case," who should really have been on trial?
And what about your obligation as a citizen to help maintain the militia,
so "necessary to the security of a free state"?
Have you bought into the hate-filled propaganda about "militia" being merely
a synonym for racist rednecks? The
absurdity that we "don't need militias any more; times have changed and
the standing armies of the DEA and FBI and
BATF and the National Guard" -- the guys who flew the helicopters that
machine-gunned the babies and nursing
mothers at Waco -- "can do the job just fine"?
Oh, there's a good excuse to spend the weekend on the couch, watching the game.
Be wary of any attempt to propagandize concepts and words which the founders
considered vital to instruct us about
our freedoms and the tools necessary to preserve them, turning them into
"hate speech" terms of scorn and derision.
John F. Kennedy said we should "ask not what our country can do for us,
but what we can do for our country." That
can be a dangerous doctrine, if it leads us to forget that in America the
state exists to protect the people and their
liberties -- not the other way around.
But we do indeed have a few duties to our countrymen.
Jury service is one. Owning a combat rifle is another. (No, you
cannot "delegate" such a duty to the police or the National Guard, because
your obligation to our progeny is precisely
to own arms sufficient to discourage the police or the National Guard from
ever getting too big for their britches.)
Have you shirked either of those duties, assuming "someone else will do
it -- someone better trained. I can't be
bothered, and besides -- what do I know?"
Sometimes, freedom requires a little investment, and a little work. If
you can't afford a $1,500 M-1A, a WWII surplus
Garand can be found for $500 ... or a WWI surplus Enfield for $250.
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