Download The Right to Bear Arms to Overthrow the Government?

The Right to Bear Arms to Overthrow the
Government?
by Mark Strecker
I consider the debate over the right to bear arms a settled matter. No one will
ever take guns from Americans because doing so would result in political suicide.
Let me repeat that: no one will ever take the guns of U.S. citizens away. While I
personally own no firearms (a pointless venture as I can’t hit anything), I have no
problem with law-abiding citizens possessing guns. I live in a rural area and know
far too many responsible gun owners to think otherwise.
Most Americans buy guns for purely utilitarian purposes: target shooting,
hunting, and self-defense. But a small minority believe our Founding Fathers
passed the Second Amendment to ensure that if the government ever became
tyrannical, the people could rise up and overthrow it. This fiction probably has its
origin with something Thomas Jefferson once wrote: “The tree of liberty must be
refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Both his actions
and many of the other things he wrote over his long lifetime made clear he did not
want the common people to rise up unless they followed the elite, the only group
he believed had the ability to decide what constituted the proper time for
revolution.
But never mind that. Let us for one moment assume the Founders really did
have in mind making gun ownership a right to ensure the masses could overthrow
the government if it became too oppressive. Well, this has happened several times
in history of the United States. As you might have guessed, the government won
every time.
George Washington faced the first such insurrection in 1794 after the passing of
a new tax imposed on the distillation of spirits. This caused farmers in western
Pennsylvania a hardship because they distilled most of their corn crop into whiskey
to make it easier to transport to market and serve as currency since they lacked a
sufficient amount of specie. Washington tried diplomacy first and, when that did not
work, raised a force of 13,000 men. Upon realizing what they faced, the rebels
dispersed without a shot being fired.
In 1859, John Brown led a band of blacks and whites to seize an the arsenal at
Harpers Ferry. This would have given he and his followers the same arms used by
the U.S. military. Colonel Robert E. Lee made short work of this armed insurrect.
One would think the incident proved beyond a doubt the futility of violently defying
the federal government, yet just two years later eleven states ignored that lesson.
If arming yourselves with guns to overthrow the government worked, the South
should have handily won the Civil War. Many of the best military officers from the
United States Army led its forces. The Confederate Army had among its ranks some
of the finest shots in America as well as superior horsemen for their cavalry. But
guns alone do not win a war. A well organized and established government has
money, good credit, and the ability to produce what it needs. The Confederate
government had neither the money nor industrial capacity nor the number of men
to execute a long term war, and giving every citizen a gun did nothing to alter this
hard reality.
More recently, small groups such as the Branch Davidians at Waco have
amassed guns to overthrow, or at least resist, the U.S. government, but these, too,
have failed. So what can one do to change the direction of the government when
our politicians have failed us and voting does us no good? Well, in the history of the
United States, the most successful agent of change has always come in the form of
nonviolent resistance. During the Great Depression, for example, the UAW used the
sit-in to great effect, and in the 1950s and 1960s Martin Luther King, Jr., and allied
groups used nonviolent resistance to end Jim Crow and other types of legalized
discrimination. Guns might kill people, but peaceful resistance changes them.
Copyright © Mark Strecker 2012