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FFQF: My Double-Barrelled Bill of Rights

I said it once, and I’ll say it again (although you are all probably tired of hearing it): our theme for this week has sounded more or less like an elegy to the late great Bill of Rights. Our Founders were aware that, in the usual course of history, governments would look out more and more for their own self-interest than for their responsibility: to protect the people’s rights and to protect the order of society. As an extra safeguard, the Founders instituted the Second Amendment to the Constitution:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

That means, that we the people (who were the meat and muscle of militia in the Founders’ days) have the right to possess our own private arms, for our own protection, for the protection of our families, properties, and communities, and of course, for the protection of our other civil liberties. Hence, when the government and our own laws cease to protect our rights, and instead become a threat to them, we have a right and responsibility to protect them by force.

“[W]hereas, to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them; nor does it follow from this, that all promiscuously must go into actual service on every occasion. The mind that aims at a select militia, must be influenced by a truly anti-republican principle; and when we see many men disposed to practice upon it, whenever they can prevail, no wonder true republicans are for carefully guarding against it.”

Richard Henry Lee, Letters from the Federal Farmer, 1788

“[W]hen the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, – who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually, by totally disusing and neglecting the militia.”

George Mason, speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 14 June 1778

“Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined.”

Patrick Henry, speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 5 June 1778

Before I leave off here, I would like to conclude today’s post and this month’s theme with a note of caution. I have already discussed this in a previous post, but I think that it is worth repeating; many seem to have the fervor to take back liberty, by force if necessary, but it is hardly tempered by knowledge, by wisdom, or by virtue. The Scriptures teach that such uninformed, untempered zeal is dangerous (see, for example, Proverbs 19:2).

We tend to romanticize our American Revolution, and to romanticize revolutions in general. War, even for a good and just cause, is never good and many times, one rarely finds justice observed. War brings out the worst in human nature, and revolution and revolt is one of those kinds of war that doubles the bad effects. Why? Because revolutions are inherently the pulling down of authorities, which, although despotic, once held society together, and served as a restraining force upon the evil passions of men. Once that is removed, the more ambitious, the more facetious, the more active, and the more radical men begin to control the tide of revolution. They assume the role of demagogues, and eventually, they establish a new despotic order over the chaos they helped to create.

I regret to say that thanks to our moral state, it is impossible to climb backwards up the slope, back to liberty and law. Revolt will only plummet us to the bottom more quickly. Think about it. If the people of this country got up in armed conflict with the federal government, the United Nations (or some other armed agency interested in our conquest — there are too many to list here!) would step in, and bring “peace and order” to the chaos. Having been divided, we shall be conquered, and not by our own countrymen.

Consider this also. Our federal government is not at the top of the despotic conspiratorial ladder. They have just been bought and paid for, and they are very happy to sell their consciences, their country, and their souls for the money and the power that the globalist powers have offered them. We the people have been the stupid herds that just went along with it, and became part of the bargain. And now we are on our way to the slaughter, along with our American politician-herders who led us here. If we could not sustain a free country when it was easy — when we could have protected our rights by peaceful means — than we shall not be able to put it back and rebuild it if things get hard — when we catapult ourselves into revolt, and must feel a greater blow-back for our more difficult decisions.

I suppose I wasn’t able to end this so much on a cheery note. Alexander Hamilton will have to do that for me:

The triumphs of vice are no new thing under the sun, and I fear, till the millennium comes, in spite of all our boasted light and purification, hypocrisy and treachery will continue to be the most successful commodities in the political market.

Letter to Richard Harrison, 1793

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