I heard Michael Bane’s podcast this morning and this is one of the things it struck me the most.
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. See Kleinfeld Dissent at 578-579. 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.
Josh Blackman » Kozinski on Hitler, Stalin, and the Second Amendment
And the other bit ever so important in the podcast was that whomever you don’t know (or may know in passing) who suddenly becomes overly friendly and wishes to know “gun stuff” or wants you to join them in shady shit, is by definition a Federal agent. If you read Unintended Consequences, refer to the Gun Show part of the story where the curious young man was asking questions about full auto.
While I agree about the doomsday aspect of the second amendment, there was another and perhaps more important function. The Founding Fathers were very distrustful of a standing army. Throughout history standing armies were used to prosecute foreign wars for the benefit of the nobility but with the ordinary citizens doing most of the fighting and dying. By deferring to the armed citizenry and state militias, the government couldn’t engage in a war without the support of the states to fill out the ranks of a national army. This arrangement also kept the national army relatively weak so that a military coup, or a tyrant would not be able to stand up to the combined militias of the states. Unfortunately two world wars, a police action, and whatever the hell Vietnam was, have left us with an all volunteer, standing army controlled by the President rather than the states and the people. Thus leading us with endless wars and proxy wars. Precisely the opposite of the original intent.