Publicola

Via Kim DuToit I was pointed to an essay by Vin Suprynowicz called THE LIBERTARIAN.

An excerpt:

"Suppose the president of the United States got fed up tomorrow with some band of recalcitrant rebels operating in your city. For our purposes (as well as for his), it doesn't matter whether he chooses to condemn these folks as drug dealers, home schoolers, child abusers, tax resisters, or obstreperous gun nuts who refuse to turn in their "murderous, paramilitary" arms as ordered.

The president orders the National Guard and the FBI's thousand-strong, black-shirted paramilitary "Hostage Rescue Team" into your city to clean out the pockets of "antisocial, bandit resistance" under an emergency decree of martial law.

Quick: With the weapons you have on hand, and the degree of organization currently maintained between yourself and your neighbors (envisioned by our founding fathers as members along with you of your local militia), is your ability and likelihood to resist this unconstitutional incursion on your liberties by a few thousand professional soldiers armed with tanks, helicopter gunships, and fully-automatic M-16 rifles more closely akin to the condition of the citizen farmers who met General Burgoyne at Saratoga, armed with weapons (start ital)better(end ital) than the standard British army issue musket -- that is to say, of a "well-regulated militia, necessary to the security of a free state," whose right to keep and bear military style arms (like the householders of today's free and peaceful Switzerland, each expected to keep a fully-automatic machine gun in the closet) has never been "infringed"?

Or would your circumstance be more closely akin to that of those medieval peasants we were discussing, whose only chance of survival was found in laying down their scythes and pitchforks, dropping to their knees, and begging the king's soldiers for mercy?"

Now, as they say, go read the rest of it.