41-MINUTE VIDEO: HISTORY, MEANING, AND PURPOSE OF THE 2ND AMENDMENT. NEVER DISARM TO GOVERNMENT [!!]
Mark Passio presented a 41-minute talk, The True Meaning And Purpose Of The 2nd Amendment, at the monthly Philadelphia Liberty On The Rocks meet-up on February 10, 2015. Mark discussed the 2nd Amendment in depth with history, meaning and purpose (filmed by John King):
Download 2nd Amendment Presentation Slides, Zip Archive, 13.7 MB.
Documentations of government-dictated gun control/confiscation show ~70 million deaths in the 20th Century (and here). Regarding US government history to use its own guns in unlawful murders, documentations show up to 30 million US government victims from unlawful armed war attacks since WW2.
Adding these figures together provide Americans with useful history to inform their policy position from US “leadership” propaganda for Americans to disarm.
The data show ~20% of given populations who disarm to their governments are thereafter killed by those who disarmed them. For Americans, that history would equal ~60 million Americans killed by our own government if we disarm.
US government motivation for gun confiscation has nothing to do with protecting innocent human lives. US reneged promises to end poverty kill ~20,000 children daily. Since the 1990 World Summit for Children where the US promised 0.7% of income to save a million innocent lives every month, and have delivered only token gestures, more innocent human beings have suffered prolonged and gruesome deaths from poverty than deaths from all wars and violence in recorded human history.
Useful history leading up to our world of the present is that the same government acting to disarm Americans engage in:
- Unlawful Wars of Aggression based on easily-provable lies (here, here, here, here),
- Bankster-looting economics (here, here, here, here, here),
- Lying sacks of spin corporate media that “cover” the crimes.
The criminal .01%’s motivation to disarm the 99.99% seems clear.
Importantly, the American Revolution began when our own government escalated from violation of rights to gun confiscation. As I shared from David B. Kopel’s historical work:
“This Article reviews the British gun control program that precipitated the American Revolution: the 1774 import ban on firearms and gunpowder; the 1774-75 confiscations of firearms and gunpowder; and the use of violence to effectuate the confiscations. It was these events that changed a situation of political tension into a shooting war. Each of these British abuses provides insights into the scope of the modern Second Amendment.
Furious at the December 1773 Boston Tea Party, Parliament in 1774 passed the Coercive Acts. The particular provisions of the Coercive Acts were offensive to Americans, but it was the possibility that the British might deploy the army to enforce them that primed many colonists for armed resistance. The Patriots of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, resolved: “That in the event of Great Britain attempting to force unjust laws upon us by the strength of arms, our cause we leave to heaven and our rifles.” A South Carolina newspaper essay, reprinted in Virginia, urged that any law that had to be enforced by the military was necessarily illegitimate.
The Royal Governor of Massachusetts, General Thomas Gage, had forbidden town meetings from taking place more than once a year. When he dispatched the Redcoats to break up an illegal town meeting in Salem, 3000 armed Americans appeared in response, and the British retreated. Gage’s aide John Andrews explained that everyone in the area aged 16 years or older owned a gun and plenty of gunpowder.
Military rule would be difficult to impose on an armed populace. Gage had only 2,000 troops in Boston. There were thousands of armed men in Boston alone, and more in the surrounding area. One response to the problem was to deprive the Americans of gunpowder.
Modern “smokeless” gunpowder is stable under most conditions. The “black powder” of the 18th Century was far more volatile. Accordingly, large quantities of black powder were often stored in a town’s “powder house,” typically a reinforced brick building. The powder house would hold merchants’ reserves, large quantities stored by individuals, as well as powder for use by the local militia. Although colonial laws generally required militiamen (and sometimes all householders, too) to have their own firearm and a minimum quantity of powder, not everyone could afford it. Consequently, the government sometimes supplied “public arms” and powder to individual militiamen. Policies varied on whether militiamen who had been given public arms would keep them at home. Public arms would often be stored in a special armory, which might also be the powder house.
Before dawn on September 1, 1774, 260 of Gage’s Redcoats sailed up the Mystic River and seized hundreds of barrels of powder from the Charlestown powder house.
The “Powder Alarm,” as it became known, was a serious provocation. By the end of the day, 20,000 militiamen had mobilized and started marching towards Boston. In Connecticut and Western Massachusetts, rumors quickly spread that the Powder Alarm had actually involved fighting in the streets of Boston. More accurate reports reached the militia companies before that militia reached Boston, and so the war did not begin in September. The message, though, was unmistakable: If the British used violence to seize arms or powder, the Americans would treat that violent seizure as an act of war, and would fight. And that is exactly what happened several months later, on April 19, 1775.”
* the rest of Mr. Kopel’s excellent analysis is here * This article is adapted from How the British Gun Control Program Precipitated the American Revolution, 6 Charleston L. Rev. 283 (2012), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1967702, Administrative and Regulatory Law News (American Bar Association). Vol. 37, no. 4, Summer 2012. More by Kopel on the right to arms in the Founding Era.
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