Of Tyrants And Dangerous Old Men

Posted by Bob Owens on October 12, 2014 at 4:49 pm



[In the weeks following the Sandy Hook, statist politicians—never ones to let a crisis go to waste—took dead-aim at the Second Amendment, hoping to use the actions of one mentally ill young man to disarm an entire nation. At that time (New Year's Day, 2013), I wrote the following warning, Of Tyrants and Dangerous Old Men, and posted it to my personal site, which Glenn Reynolds reminded me of today. How well has it held up over the past 22 months?]

Jerrold Nadler is an “average” elected member of Congress. He represents New York’s 8th congressional district, and has been in office for 20 years. He’s seen little of the world outside of New York City and Washington, D.C.. He did little of note with his life before becoming a politician, and has done little while in office, other than picking up a few titular roles by the nature of his long incumbency. He is reliably leftist in his views, using the Constitution as a cudgel when it serves him, and rejecting it when it doesn’t.

He’s utterly an utterly average, representative politician, which is why this statement is so concerning:

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) said only the federal government should have “high-capacity” gun magazines and that the “state ought to have a monopoly on legitimate violence.”

At a Capitol Hill press conference on Wednesday, Nadler gathered with other House Democrats to push for stricter gun control in the wake of last week’s massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., which left 26 dead, including 20 children.

The lawmaker told CNSNews.com that he not only supports prohibiting the future sale of 10-round gun magazines, but he would like to confiscate high-capacity clips already legally possessed by American citizens.

Historically speaking, most nation-states have had monopolies of violence over their subjects. Nadler’s qualifier “legitimate” simply means that politicians view the violence they distribute as being beyond reproach, while viewing the option of resisting government force as not just illegitimate and wrong, but evil.

We could easily spend the rest of the day (and much of the next) merely listing the governments in recorded history that have used that “monopoly of legitimate violence” to oppress their subjects and commit the occasional genocide against their people. We could point out that this precise mindset is one shared among the educated men of Parliament and the British Monarchy in the 1770s towards upstart Colonials in the New World.

Such an opinion was held in the head of General Thomas Gage when he ordered Royal Marines and Regulars rowed across the Charles River in the dead of night on April 19,1775 to conduct gun control raids from Lexington to Concord. A perversely rewritten history taught by liberal academics in schools these days suggests that the cause of the American Revolution was “taxation without representation.” A reading of original sources puts that lie to rest.

Read more: BEARING ARMS