The Second Amendment as Genocide Insurance by Dr. Joanne Eisen and Dr. Paul Gallant "Given that one is a human being who has been subjected to unjust deadly assault since 1900, the conditional probability that the assailants were agents of one's own government is higher than the conditional probability that the assailant is a criminal by local standards of legitimacy." - Samuel Wheeler, "Arms as Insurance", Public Affairs Quarterly, April 1999 On April 19, 1993, and long thereafter, the fiery end of the siege at Waco, TX, was played and replayed by America's media. Even now, if you close your eyes, you can still conjure up vivid pictures of the horror of buildings ablaze with men, women, and children trapped inside. That drama planted the seeds among many Americans of a possibility most had never seriously considered, or were unwilling to: their own government going bad. Soon afterwards, in 1994, Lethal Laws was published by Jews for the Preservation of Firearm Ownership (JPFO). At that time, Lethal Laws was received with little fanfare or discussion. Said lead author and JPFO Executive Director Aaron Zelman: "It took people quite some time to want to deal with the new concept." Zelman was referring to genocide in the 20th century, the realization that a disarmed population was a precondition to the occurrence of genocide, and that it was firearm registration lists which, in every case, systematically facilitated the easy disarmament of those populations. Applied to Debate Today, the message of Lethal Laws has permeated the firearm debate to a degree unanticipated by its quiet arrival. Through its exhaustive and incontrovertible documentation, it has revealed the mechanism by which genocide - the death of innocent citizens at the hands of their own government - has been able to accomplish what all the street criminals in the world have not: the murder of what has been conservatively estimated at 55 million innocent citizens. However, the key to genocide was virtually ignored by scholars who had studied the subject. In the early 1990s, historian Robert Melson asked: Why were the victims of genocide "especially vulnerable to attack by the state?" But Melson never answered the question. And in 1997, Rudolph Rummel, a well-known author on the subject of genocide, observed of criminal governments that "only the regime is armed and those it kills are in its control or otherwise helpless." Like Melson, Rummel was unable to put all the pieces together, and came up short. He, too, failed to realize that, in the 20th century, not one genocide was perpetrated against an armed populace. Academics Academics like these write millions of words amounting to what most politically informed gun-owners would call sociological drivel, because their blindness to the process of civilian disarmament in the genocide equation is so complete it lies beyond their realm of consciousness. But criminologists David Kopel, Don Kates, and Daniel Polsby quickly recognized the validity of the relationship laid out in Lethal Laws. They focused attention on the message it contained instead of on the political incorrectness of that message, and thereby provided the platform for further examination and discussion of the book's main premise. Thus introduced to Lethal Laws, Dr. Samuel Wheeler, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, began to examine the issue of genocide at length, approaching it from a philosophical and pragmatic viewpoint. Explained Wheeler, "Ideally, rights to engage in activities that impose risks on others [i.e. private firearm ownership] are evaluated by weighing the expected losses on both sides...[But] a tiny probability of a terrible loss [i.e. genocide] can outweigh a relatively large probability of a relatively small loss [e.g. a firearm-related accident]." Small Risk Continuing, Wheeler explained that the small risk posed to neighbors of armed, peaceable Americans must be borne because of the larger, almost unnoticeable, risk from government. Those non-genocide firearm deaths are what Wheeler calls the "necessary costs of security: insurance premiums, as it were, rather than reasons to deny the right [to bear arms]." If one lumps together all firearm-related suicides, accidents, and homicides committed by common criminals, that sum total pales in comparison to the toll from genocide, and the risk of private firearm ownership to non-gun-owning Americans becomes minuscule. Even this small risk is more than canceled out by the protection and benefits our unarmed neighbors secondarily acquire from their armed neighbors. But can the "costs" of Wheeler's "insurance" be trimmed down? Cost Cutting We want our government to be able to protect the rights of its law-abiding citizens against criminal predators. However, in order for government to accomplish this, we must cede to it the power to do so. In doing so, we also cede to it the power that may, at some point, be wielded against us, the law-abiding, instead. If we then write into the contract between citizen and government a clause that permits citizens to resist such government abuse (like our Second Amendment), do we not then also weaken the government to the point that it cannot effectively provide the protection we sought from it in the first place? Philosopher Wheeler addressed this apparent contradiction: "A right to bear arms, practically speaking, enables a government and its citizens to make a deal whereby the government does not explicitly limit its powers of enforcement and interpretation, but where in fact there is a real possibility of effective resistance to government coercion. A right to bear arms is a right to be prepared to resist government coercion, if need be, even though there is no right to resist government as such." Keeping such a right viable is not an easy matter. The tendency of those in power is to act reflexively to disarm the citizenry. Wheeler put it in these terms: "Given that every government is quite certain that it is a good government, the idea that effective coercion should be the monopoly of the police and army is very strong among governors...The 'logic' of government, as it were, compels disarming the population." That logic is often well-camouflaged. "Gun-control" measures are always sold to a society's citizenry as "public safety" or "crime-control" measures. History, however, has shown that, invariably, there is a hidden underlying political motive. In America today, the mantra is "Close the gun show loophole!" That, we are told, will help keep guns away from criminals. But if this is the real reason for such proposals, why has CeaseFire (a group committed to firearm-prohibition) insisted that gun show legislation in the state of Washington include provisions for retaining the list of non-criminal purchasers - i.e. those who pass a criminal background check? While there is no credible evidence that background checks serve any useful purpose in keeping guns away from criminals, there are countless examples of the use of registration lists by government for the express purpose of firearm confiscation. The efforts of the FBI to compile lists of gun-owners and their firearms from our National Instant Check System - in direct violation of the law - have already been amply documented. It is obvious that the outcome of proposals like "closing the gun show loophole" is not the denial of criminal access to guns, but the creation of lists of non-criminal gun-owners. While gun-control's well-intentioned "useful idiots" may not understand this ramification, the leadership of America's anti-self-defense lobby does fully. And it becomes ever more creative in devising new lies to camouflage the intent of its legislative proposals, as old lies become exposed for what they are. Despite the (false) promises of a reduction in firearm-related violence from what are called "reasonable" gun laws, restrictive measures have accomplished exactly the opposite in any given society. The argument has been made that such an increase in violent crime is not an unintended consequence but the true intent, so that ever harsher restrictions can be demanded when "weak" laws "fail". Increases in violent crime following the enactment of restrictive firearm laws have certainly facilitated the "justification" of "stronger" new ones. JAMA Article For example, last summer, the verdict came in on the most famous gun law in America: the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, implemented in 1993. Brady was sold to the American people as a measure necessary for reducing violent crime. We now have scientific proof that Brady failed to deliver as advertised. In the August 2, 2000 Journal of the American Medical Association, anti-gun researchers Jens Ludwig and Philip Cook admitted that "Our analyses provide no evidence that implementation of the Brady Act was associated with a reduction in homicide rates...[or] overall suicide rates". Ludwig and Cook nevertheless quickly blamed the failings of Brady on the "enormous loophole" created by the "almost completely unregulated" secondary market in guns. They then set about proposing new, tighter gun laws purportedly designed to close that "loophole". While it may be impossible to confirm the intent behind this proposal, the fact that its implementation would provide additional information to government about gunowners - by extending the paper trail of firearm transactions - is obvious. And so the question that must be examined is this: Are there any "reasonable" restrictive firearm laws that can reduce the "cost" of Wheeler's "insurance", and that cannot be subverted by government? Changing Strategy During the recent confirmation hearings for Attorney General John Ashcroft, the former Senator from Missouri stated that the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution were this country's guarantees against America's government turning tyrannical. With his usual, selective outrage, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) bellowed "Tyrannical? Our government tyrannical?" Kennedy demanded an apology from Ashcroft for daring to state the truth. However, as Wheeler pointed out, "[I] can be fairly confident that my government will not go seriously bad during my lifetime without being so confident that the government will not go seriously bad during the lifetimes of my grandchildren or great-grandchildren." He nevertheless admonished that "...given that disarmament is so hard to unilaterally reverse, it is difficult to imagine sufficient assurance that one's government for the next two hundred years will keep its relatively clean record of government observance of rights." Wheeler's conclusion: "a social contract that does not make provisions for future governments and fellow citizens going bad is trusting to the point of foolishness." If restrictive firearm laws do not reduce violent crime, then the question becomes not which laws we need, but whether we need - or want - any restrictive firearm laws, at all. And just how costly are those laws already in effect? Could not Wheeler's "cost" be reduced by repealing all restrictive firearm laws so that society's predators don't have all the advantages? Can't Work That question was answered by former Chief Inspector of British Police Colin Greenwood almost 30 years ago: "[If the question is] 'How can we stop criminals from obtaining firearms?' From the evidence so far supplied, the answer appears to be that we cannot...Criminals have proved to us that firearms controls will not deny their small class of people access to firearms whenever they want them...Half a century of strict controls on pistols has ended, perversely, with a far greater use of this class of weapon in crime than ever before...one is forced to the rather startling conclusion that the use of firearms in crime was very much less when there were no controls of any sort and when anyone, convicted criminal or lunatic, could buy any type of firearm without restriction." Greenwood concluded: "Indeed, it is possible to build up a sound case for abolishing or substantially reducing controls." Lessons from Waco The lesson the firearm-prohibitionists would like us to take from the Waco fiasco is that it is foolish to even think that a citizenry, armed only with conventional firearms, can prevail against a government with state-of-the-art weaponry at its disposal. But the picture they present to us - a lone citizen with a rifle facing down an armored tank - is a counterfeit, and tantamount to tactical suicide. The real lesson of Waco is that a small group of determined people gave our government a hint of the price it would pay for attempting to coerce armed citizens. Can an armed citizenry succeed in resisting government? Prof. Wheeler put it this way: "In none of the deadly sequence of genocides and citizen-slaughters that have characterized the Third World in the eighties and nineties have ordinary citizens been better off for having been helpless before the assaults of government...The difference between not having a firearm at all and having some kind of firearm is so huge that, even with the superiority of police and military equipment, the danger and uncertainty [to government]...is increased by several orders of magnitude when there is an armed citizenry". Notes: (1) Arms as Insurance is accessible on the Internet at: http://i2i.org/SuptDocs/Crime/ArmsAsInsurance.htm (2) JPFO's newest publication, "Death by Gun Control", is due to be released later this spring. JPFO can be reached at PO Box 270143, Hartford, WI 53027. Tel (262) 673-9745, Fax (262) 673-9746, or http://www.jpfo.org. (3) Lethal Laws can be obtained from: Alan Rice/J.E. Simkin, POB 6189, Nashua, NH 03063-6189 ($26.95 + $3 shipping, check or money order).