Gun Control and Tyrannical Government.

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America, America 911, American Liberty, ar-15, Barack Obama, constitution, Defend the modern world, firearms, firearms and liberty, firearms laws, Glenn Beck, Gun Control, gun ownership in switzerland, gun politics in America, guns, guns guns, guns in america, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, The Blaze, United States

The debate over gun ownership has dominated the politics of the United States for over 20 years. No Presidential candidate can afford to ignore it. The Media covers it obsessively. After abortion, it provokes more demonstrations than any other issue.

The American Left (and much of the centre) support the Europeanisation of US firearm laws – in other words, the restriction of guns to security and military use. The political Right, with a passion many find confusing, see the right to keep and bear arms as an integral part of American democracy – and the attempt to restrict it as an omen of impending dictatorship.

That last anxiety in particular must be pondered if one wishes to understand the spirit of America. For over 300 years, the Patriotic Right have argued that American democracy is vulnerable to abolition by a tyrannical elite, and that such a regime can only be effectively resisted by an armed population.

As the commentator Glenn Beck put it in his recent book Control: The Truth About Guns – “If we continue to stand up for our rights, none of us alive today will ever have to pick up a weapon against our government. The bad news is that if those rights are watered down or taken away, the risk of tyranny will increase with each passing generation.”

For a long time, like most Europeans, I found this American belief in the importance of firearms absurd. But the more I have reflected upon it, the more suspicious I find the refusal of our own government to bestow the same liberty.

While it’s true that a real totalitarian regime could not be overthrown by civil militias armed with semi-automatic weapons, the general populace, so equipped and working in concert, could surely resist arrest, molestation or abuse by that regime.

When Nazi henchmen jackbooted their way through German suburbs to capture Communists, Jews and democrats, they were cheerful and fearless from the certainty their prey was unarmed. Had the general population been equipped to the extent Americans are today, communities could have disrupted the process to such a degree that state policy may have been altered.

Had SS troops been killed or injured by the dozen as they sought to round up Jewish families, the situation might have arisen in which the groups who wished (anyway) to rebel finally found the occasion to try.

Just like that decisive moment when a schoolyard bully is enfeebled in front of his victim by another (stronger) child, thus leading to the collapse of the bully-victim relationship, in a totalitarian society a moment of state weakness can be fatally provocative. That is why if the North Korean regime (or any other regime like it) ever collapses, it will be the result of the people losing respect for the state, rather than because the state weakens in its systemic design.

You cannot respect a state whose enforcers run from your own bullets, whose bodies line the street having tried to line it with the bodies of your family. Little victories lead naturally onto bigger ones.

So the next time you hear Americans link gun ownership to the maintenance of liberty, try to empathise with them. You may even see your own security in a different, rather more horrifying light.

D, LDN.

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Prelude to a Second American Civil War?

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American Civil War, Counter-Jihad, Defend the modern world, Glenn Beck, Gun Control, National Rifle Association, Rihanna Muslim, Tyranny, United States, Western world

Anyone who saw Glenn Beck’s performance at the NRA convention last week will struggle to describe it in words. On the one hand, the former Fox-contributor was ridiculous, over-emotive, faux-Shakespearean and tended to ramble on from one point to the next rather than focus on the issue he was invited to speak about. On the other hand, he was eminently convincing in his case that firearms and the right of the common man to own them was something above the merely political. It involved, he suggested, one of the naked, pre-political liberties of mankind – the right to defend one’s family, and given that this right precedes politics, he argued, nobody should dare threaten it but that they rightly be called a tyrant.

And with this, I wholeheartedly agree. Beck, however, is a difficult man to agree with. He can embarrass an argument as well as he can express one. And at the NRA convention, Beck provided a lot of unnecessary amateur dramatics. His voice occasionally trembled for decorum and then, just as easily (and artificially) rose with a preacher’s emphasis for applause and confirmation. It’s difficult to keep Beck on track at a live event, but look at his speech in transcript form, and you’ll find much more to engage with.

Beck didn’t mention it explicitly, but the language of ‘civil war’ ran implicitly through his entire speech. His rhetoric about being ready to ‘stand and fight’ hardly needs elaborating upon. Nor does his use of the iconography of soldiers and historic battles. The audience knew what he meant. They whooped and cheered on cue and off, intimating that they understood him, tone and undertone.

It is the undertones which concern me most.

A political tendency is developing in America which, unless some concerted effort is made to arrest it, will bring the prospect of a very damaging civil conflict into view. This tendency is based on a growing doubt that the elected Obama administration is the rightful government of the United States. There are Americans, many of them decent and rational to their bone-marrow, who do not believe that ‘America’ elected Barack Obama, either in 2008 or 2012. They believe that an alien coalition of Mexicans, Africans and Cubans elected him, after he bribed them with their money.

The fact that they’re not entirely wrong doesn’t help us here. Of course the Democrats have engineered immigration policy with the electoral college in mind. Nobody disputes this. But if this belief is followed through to its logical end, we may end up with a catastrophe.

America is not an ordinary country. It is the greatest nation in the Western World. American innovation created and secured the mechanics of democratic capitalism, which itself defeated both Communism and Fascism to ensure that mankind remained free, and that the democratic idea became a global standard. A modern history without America would have seen politics reduced to a question of allegiance between Berlin or Moscow. A choice (if it is one) from hell.

Given this indispensability, everyone the world over has a right to be concerned about America’s internal affairs. With Islamism lapping at European shores and autocratic Russian and Chinese states rising to ever greater economic might, the need for a stable, united, and confident America is increasing.

And yet it is at this point in history that America risks falling to pieces. One cannot now bet safely against a major civil implosion in certain American states. The most likely catalyst for the beginning of a Second American Civil War would (let’s not say ‘will’ just yet), probably be the next election. If the republicans fail to win in 2016, then that really is it for the party of Reagan. After this, people may start looking for primordial, pre-political solutions.

And in case you don’t know what that entails, I refer you back to Mr Beck’s speech.

D, LDN.