The Unfortunate Cost of Liberty — by Polydamas
Whenever there are mass murders of the kind that took place on July 20, 2012 in Aurora, Colorado, many ordinary people question the wisdom of a country like the United States that allows its citizens, especially insane ones like James Holmes, to own firearms. It is mostly among the people of Europe, its generally well-educated intelligentsia, its sophisticates, and its cultural elites, that such murderous rampages confirm their view of Americans as an uncultured and barbarous people, and what the Soviets called ne kulturny (некультурный). Incidentally, the same low opinion of Americans, held by Europeans, is entirely shared by their American equivalents, the New York Upper East Side society matrons, the New England Ivy League academicians, the Washington, D.C. “inside the beltway” policy wonks and political strategists, the politically sensitive Hollywood crowd, the nouveau rich of Silicon Valley, and the artistes, pseudo-intellectuals, and the “Limousine Liberals” of America’s more cosmopolitan cities. The America that these American sophisticates look down upon lies in “Flyover Country”, the vast expanse of land between the East and West Coasts of the United States, which is supposedly populated by inbred and xenophobic country bumpkins who cling to their intolerant religion and anachronistic guns.
The Europeans and their American imitators can always be counted upon to seize upon any mass murder as confirmation of the superiority of their orderly culture and class-regimented political system as juxtaposed against the utter chaos and inferiority of the United States. These tragedies validate their vision of America as a place where rivers of blood run in the streets, angry Caucasian men bearing a striking resemblance to Sylvester Stallone’s “Rambo” can be found everywhere with machine guns in their hands and bandoleers across their chests, and gun battles between such men can erupt anywhere and at any time. If this were Europe or Canada or Australia or New Zealand, they scoff, only the military would have machine guns and only the local police and constabulary would carry pistols. Chaos should be banished and replaced by genteel social order, where every person knew his or her precise place in that order. What possible countervailing justification could Americans have against such an orderly system?
The answer is more involved and requires an understanding of American history and public policy decisions that were made centuries ago. The Federalist Papers is a series of 85 unprecedented newspaper articles, published in the New York newspapers of the late 1780s, and written by the Founding Fathers of the United States in justification of the Constitution and of the system of government that they were erecting. Writing anonymously as “Publius” in The Federalist No. 46, published on January 29, 1788, James Madison, principal author of the Constitution and the fourth President of the United States, explained that an armed citizenry that forms the militia was a necessary bulwark against government tyranny that controlled the armed forces. He wrote:
“It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it. Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of. Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain, that with this aid alone they would not be able to shake off their yokes. But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will and direct the national force, and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments, and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance, that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned in spite of the legions which surround it.”
In other words, the Founders of the United States were well aware that the nations of Europe disarmed their citizenry out of fear that an armed citizenry could resist their tyranny. The same Founders, who had lived under the despotic rule of King George III, were not about to allow a foreign tyrant to be replaced by a domestic tyrant and, therefore, fully intended that American citizens should always have the ability to resist government tyranny.
The same sentiment was echoed by fellow Founding Father Noah Webster, who wrote in “An Examination of the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution” (Philadelphia 1787) that:
“Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive.”
Another Founder, known as “The Republican”, writing in the Hartford newspaper, The Connecticut Courant, on January 7, 1788 explained:
“It is a capital circumstance in favor of our liberty that the people themselves are the military power of our country. In countries under arbitrary government, the people oppressed and dispirited neither possess arms nor know how to use them. Tyrants never feel secure until they have disarmed the people. They can rely upon nothing but standing armies of mercenary troops for the support of their power. But the people of this country have arms in their hands; they are not destitute of military knowledge; every citizen is required by law to be a soldier; we are all marshaled into companies, regiments, and brigades, for the defense of our country. This is a circumstance which increases the power and consequence of the people; and enables them to defend their rights and privileges against every invader…. The spirit of the people would oppose every open and direct attempt to enslave them.”
The prescient wisdom of America’s Founders to insist upon an armed citizenry has protected the liberties of its people over the past more than two centuries. According to renowned Political Science Professor Rudolph Joseph Rummel, democide, which he defined as “the murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder”, a definition which excludes war against other countries, has accounted for 262 million victims in the 20th century. (http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/). Professor Rummel calculated that six times as many victims were killed by their own governments than have died in wars. This ghastly number includes the Ottoman Empire’s genocide of its Armenian, Assyrian,and Greek minorities, the Soviet Union’s liquidation of its ethnic minorities and political dissidents, Nazi Germany’s extermination of Jews, Slavs, and Gypsies, China’s genocide of its citizens under Mao Tse Tung, Pakistan’s genocide in Bangladesh, and the genocides in North Korea, Ethiopia, Tibet, Rwanda, Cambodia under Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, Sudan, and the like. (We here at The Cassandra Times much admire and recommend Prof. Rummel’s scholarly work as well as his “Never Again” alternative history novels).
This is not to say that the historical record of the United States is completely unblemished. The institution of slavery remains a blot on its historical conscience against its de facto citizens whom the Constitution classified de jure as 3/5ths citizens. The campaign of the United States against the American Indians was technically a war of colonialism and conquest against a sovereign people rather than its own people. Nevertheless, its overall record is far superior to the vast majority of other countries and especially during the 20th century with its 262 million victims of government democide.
The objection to American citizenry keeping and bearing arms as the Founding Fathers’ fail-safe mechanism against a tyrannical government could be the result of a simple ignorance of history. As the Spanish-born, American philosopher George Santayana once wrote, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” After accounting for ignorance of history, any other objection must be either borne of ostrich-like foolhardiness, the “nonsense, it cannot possibly happen here” argument, or the morally-reprehensible desire for unchecked government power by those who wish to exercise it themselves as tyrants or their apologists and abettors.
The point made here is that the tragic deaths of scores of innocents by insane mass murderers like James Holmes should not be minimized or trivialized in any way. Yet, the deaths caused by such murderers are criminal acts that differ markedly from the systematic genocidal extermination that governments have accomplished with impunity against their disarmed citizens. If an armed citizenry is an effective if imperfect American vaccine to the plague of government tyranny and genocide on a massive scale, one can only try to reason that occasional firearm deaths caused by criminals are a regrettable adverse reaction or interaction to the vaccine and represent a tragic albeit an unavoidable cost of the human condition.
