Assaulting Jim Zumbo The NRA on Extremists NRA scams its members The Lionel Show AirAm Radio's ignorant, crude, ugly, air waves barbarian Dear John Ashcroft The armed populace doctrine at the DOJ The Washington Post cultivating ignorance. Gun Policy News news stories compiled daily. "Sixty Minutes" Failing its Mission NPR's Diane Rehm Civilized without Substance. A longstanding dereliction. Violence Policy Center The public health agenda falls in line with the NRA. AFL-CIO Getting it right but failing its mission in the larger struggle Militia Act of 1792 To enroll— conscript, register Return of Militia Inventory of private weapons in the early Republic reported to the President of the US History John Kenneth Rowland Lawrence Cress John K. Mahon Others Pseudohistory LaPierre's list The Quotes, the Quotes Fabricating the armed populace doctrine Libertarians, Conservatives Tenn. Law Rev., 1995 Chicago-Kent Symposium, 2000 What does the NRA want?

The former homepage through March 5, 2008, has been moved to a new file. Addressing Gun Violence contains more information. The homepage from March 5, 2008, to July 16, 2008, the most important part of which is a letter to Walter Dellinger who argued for the DC gov to the Supreme Court, has been moved to "Whither the United States of America?". There are other important observations. The Supreme Court released its opinion in DC Gov. v. Heller on June 26, 2008, http://www.potowmack.org/hellerSC.pdf, proving again that the most vital and fundamental issues of political life are very far removed from public consciousness. By internet standards the 50-80 viewers who show up at this page everyday are not significantly different from zero. There is no further activism or consciousness. This where we discover who we are. This is where we become seriously political. This is not where we will find intellectual and political leadership. Or, at least not so far. The urban populations that are suffering the scourge of gun violence have failed to change anything, but with the Heller opinion now in place as a guide for public policy, what may blow away the anarchic "armed populace at large" fantasy is the growing crisis of violence and sovereignty on the Southwest border. Public necessity could force big change very suddenly. When this country gets serious, it can get very serious. We are not serious now and there is no serious constituency for a viable concept of constitutional government. The Potowmack Institute was at the MillionMomMarches in 2000 and 2004 and could not find a single person out of hundreds asked who had heard of the gun rights cases in court. Meanwhile the gun rights ideologies have made it all the way to the Supreme Court almost completely without public notice or knowledge in Heller and received some qualified and ultimately rather meaningless "right". The gun rights militants follow these cases with intense interest. The gun controllers have not educated the public or even their own constituency. They haven't gotten beyond promoting trigger locks and suing the gun manufacturers. The DC government cannot do better than tinker with its failed gun law. The Potowmack Institute wrote in its amicus brief in Parker et al. v. DC Gov., filed in July, 2006: When federal judges in dissent to the Ninth Circuit denial of an en banc hearing of Silveira speak of an "amorphous body” of the armed people, no different from the NRA’s "armed populace at large" or LENIN’s “armed masses”, a burden falls on the federal judiciary to define and defend constitutional government against anarchy. http://www.potowmack.org/parkarg.pdf, p. 20 The Silveira dissents are at: http://www.ca9.uscourts.gov/ca9/newopinions.nsf/019661EF3BAAF4C488256D1D00793D3A/$file/0115098o.pdf?openelement It was Judge Kleinfeld's dissent that spoke of an amorphous body of the armed populace. In his Parker opinion, Judge Silberman cites Kleinfeld's dissent twelve times. By affirming Judge Silberman's opinion the Supreme Court has embraced indirectly at least Kleinfeld's dissent. This is what we have come to. Instead of defining and defending constitutional government against anarchy, the DC Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court, in throwing a meaningless political sop to the gun vote and the gun rights ideologies, has embraced anarchy and otherwise created a constitutional mess. This is all about politics and demagoguery not constitutional doctrine. On rereading, the dissent is much worse than it originally appeared. This is all really quite confused and nonsensical. The gun rights ideologies did not get what they want: The right to be armed outside of the knowledge and reach of law and government. The "amorphous body"—that is, the "armed populace at large"— is still subject to "reasonable regulations and restrictions" and registered like the jury pool for call-up. Is there any political leadership to make sense out of the absurdity? The courts have broken down on the larger context of the "right of the people" in the Second Amendment. The larger context is the republican right of the people to participate in the military functions of the state as conscript citizen soldiers rather than leave those functions up to a mercenary army whether the British Army recently removed in the Revolution or the US Army which as created in the Constitution was explicitly modeled after the British Army. The Second Amendment only makes sense in those eighteenth century terms. Gun rights ideologies completely confuse the difference between the republican right of the people to participate in the military functions of the state— that is, fulfill a coerced civic obligation— and a right of private individuals to be armed outside of the knowledge and reach of law and government. The Second Amendment was cryptically worded because it was controversial when ratified but for reasons completely different from the controversy now. The original controversy is one time forgot. The Constitution created a delicate military balance or military federalism between the conscript state militias and the voluntarily enlisted professional US Army at the disposal of the new and untried Federal Government which to many resembled too much the British system. The original antagonistic relationship between the militias and the army was combined in the twentieth century Selective Service Acts. The US Army became in a very republican sense a national militia. It was only yesterday. The Supreme Court does not get it, but neither does anyone else. This is who we are now. The Framers gave us free institutions to sort out controversies as they emerged. We have failed them.

The struggle is over civic values and political culture. The Supreme Court has completely missed this. Justice Kennedy in his talk to the Ninth Circuit judicial conference, July 31, 2008, on C-Span's archive dated August 9, said,
"Law cannot be isolated from history."
"Each generation shapes its destiny."
"The rule of law is in mortal danger."
"The state must have the monopoly on force."
It was incumbent on Justice Anthony Kennedy to explain his statements in light of his vote in Heller. He does not have to worry that anyone else will take him or the Supreme Court to task. The court has isolated the law from history to pander to a present day anarchic constituency. If he will admit that every generation shapes its destiny, he is in conflict with Justice Scalia who wrote the Heller opinion. Scalia wants us to be frozen in the political values, concepts, and institutions of the 1780s— as he will redefine them to satisfy present agendas. None of this is examined in public consciousness.

The gun rights ideologies' malignant vision of social and political life parallels the malignant vision of economic life in primitive free market capitalism. The two are intimately connected ideologically and politically. After a long struggle that started in the 1970s, the malignant values have now received the smallest accommodation in constitutional doctrine. Justice Scalia's Heller opinion is a rehash of the arguments in "The Rise of Citizen Militias" published in the John Birch Society's magazine, The New American, in February, 1995. The John Birch Society is part of the ideological persuasion that has never accepted the modern state. It is the source of much Libertarian Right ideology— ideology which in the present political context no one will talk about.

It should become obvious that there is more to addressing gun violence than promoting trigger locks. The gun vote is not about guns. It progresses from a malignant vision of social and political life to controlling political and electoral outcomes in a much larger struggle over the modern state and the political economy of capitalism. Other context is at:
http://www.potowmack.org/196rehm.html#5trans,
http://www.potowmack.org/lionel.html#natstate
Robber baron capitalism is our past. The Libertarian Right's future for us is the Mariana Islands. This is real, raw capitalism. The capitalist becomes the sovereign individual of gun rights fantasies ungoverned by laws against slave labor. Search http://www.google.com for "Mariana Islands slave labor". Let us live up to the gun lobby's political fantasy and fulfill Levy and Mellor's constitutional agenda. Let's ship the slave laborers there crates of machine guns, handgrenades and sawed off shotguns so they can be free. Will they then used them against their capitalist oppressors, whom some members of Congress find pure and noble, or their government oppressors, which would include some members of Congress who deny them the protections of law?

What is so difficult to understand about this? Treason is the only crime defined in the Constitution. In giving some measure of protection to an individual right to be privately armed outside of a military or militia purpose, five justices on the Supreme Court have given some measure of validity to the gun lobby's insurrectionist— that is, treasonous— doctrine. The Libertarian Right will throw out the constitutional state baby with the modern state bathwater.

The insurrectionist fantasies cannot be separated from the struggle over capitalism. This agenda has progressed completely without notice in the larger political culture. There is no political leadership or, if discourse in the present election season is any indication, no enlightened citizenry that understands anything about the political world we live in.

Reasonable restrictions also might be thought consistent with a "well regulated Militia." The registration of firearms gives the government information as to how many people would be armed for militia service if called up. Reasonable firearm proficiency testing would both promote public safety and produce better candidates for military service. Personal characteristics, such as insanity or felonious conduct, that make gun ownership dangerous to society also make someone unsuitable for service in the militia.
http://pacer.cadc.uscourts.gov/docs/common/opinions/200703/04-7041a.pdf p. 54

Registration of ownership, militia call up, proficiency testing, public safety regulation, screening for militia suitability: These are the makings of a firearms policy. No local policy will work without a national policy that addresses the illegal traffic between and among jurisdictions. That can only be accomplished with registration and reporting of private sales— constitutional under the militia clauses not the Commerce Clause. The Federal Government need do little more. The obstacles are political not constitutional. There is nothing in Scalia's Supreme Court opinion which invalidates Silberman's conclusions. Who can be opposed and for what reason?

There has been argument and disagreement within the gun rights crowd but not anywhere else.
Registration and Licensing, NRA Fact Sheet
"The NRA's Gun Control Schizophenia"

The DC government had no business taking Parker to the Supreme Court. There were murmmerings in the news leading up to the Supreme Court opinion that the DC government would have to rethink its gun control law.

There is nothing unconstitutional about a national policy based on registration and reporting of private sales. The Militia Act of 1792, enacted by the same people who ratified the Second Amendment, required gun owners to be enrolled for militia duty— that is, registered in gun rights consciousness— and that their privately owned weapons be placed on inventories.
http://www.potowmack.org/parkappf.pdf
http://www.potowmack.org/milret.html
The inventories were reported to the President of the United States who reported them to Congress. Those inventories were maintained into the 1830s by which time the conscript militia had become a moribund institution. Militia duty was conscript duty. The coerced civic obligation was resurrected and transformed in the twentieth century Selective Service Acts. By original design and intent, military preparedness trumps all rights and other concerns and interests as Judge Silberman in the end seemed to appreciate. The Supreme Court has not contradicted his conclusions.

In 1983, gun rights advocate Don Kates in an article in the Mich. Law. Rev. was intellectually honest enough to recognize that registration was okay by original design and intent. Civil obligation, again, triumphs over insurrectionist fantasies. Kates gives no compelling purpose that the courts need to protect for the right to have a registered gun. The NRA's chief "scholar", Stephen Halbrook, was horrified by Kates' registration concession and the disagreement within the gun lobby and among its "scholars" has never been resolved. It has been resolved by the courts.

There is a much greater burden of historic responsibility. The DC Government cannot be faulted too severely for failed leadership when everyone else fails. Failure spans the whole spectrum of politicians and the multiplicity and multitude of our shallow, lazy news organs. This is where we discover who we are.

There is a reason why the NRA, which now embraces Heller, has worked very hard to keep gun rights cases out of court. The gun lobby, led by the NRA, would fight viciously to defeat any legislative attempts to implement Judge Silberman's conclusions. His conclusions make the much ballyhooed individual right he seeks to invent and the core doctrine the gun lobby works hardest to maintain by defeating legislation perfectly meaningless.

Meanwhile, adolescent insolence proclaims anarchic, insurrectionist fantasies on hundreds of internet bulletin boards. The adolescent insolence controls political outcomes. There is no political leadership to tell some people they cannot have their childish political fantasy. The gun rights militants need not worry. There is no constituency in the present political culture for the rule of law, civic obligation, and the contours of citizenship. We are all libertarians now. To raise these issues is like going to a assembly of over-sexed fraternity louts and preaching that the only permissible context for sexual expression is lifetime commitment in monogamous marriage. They might listen politely but would be quietly giggling. It is not as if there are not many lives and whole communities at risk. This is who we are.

Among other things, all the following anti-gun laws are A-OK according to the Supreme Court:
*** Mandatory licensing to purchase firearms;
*** Bans on the open and concealed-carry of firearms;
*** Bans on private sales of firearms;
*** Bans of so-called assault weapons and other "unusual" weapons (that's the actual language Scalia uses);
*** Bans on firearms on government property;
*** Bans on certain calibers of ammunition;
*** Bans on high-powered hunting scopes;
*** One-month waiting periods;
*** One-gun-a-month schemes;
*** Mandatory ammunition fingerprinting.

Public necessity and civic obligation have serious consequences for citizens under law and government and, by historical practice, for their private weapons.

This showed up on
http://elmtreeforge.blogspot.com/2008/07/other-day-kevin-linked-to-this-place.html
on July 4, 2008:

The Potowmack Institute does not know what PSH is.

If you want a fair working definition of PSH, that place [the Potowmack Institute] is it. I especially liked the absolute horror of the idea of anyone other than the government having arms, illustrated by ... The rule of law, the state's monopoly on violence, and the state's internal sovereignty all mean the same thing. It’s kind of amazing, really, the flat terror and rage he seems to feel for the very idea of anyone telling the gummint to piss off. How anyone can read the founding documents of this country and get that, I do not know (of course, he may not consider the Declaration something people should really be aware of). The Consitution largely consists of “This the government should do; this the government may do; anything else, the government should NOT do”. What makes me think he either has not read both the founding documents, or dismisses one completely is this quote: Any hint of protection for a fundamental or procedural right to be privately armed outside of a military or militia context would validate not just a malignant, anarchic vision of social and political life but also an insurrectionist doctrine. The Constitution becomes perverted. It defines treason as the waging of war against the United States and then secures a civil right to commit the same. Several amici refer to the insurrectionist doctrine but do not emphasize the centrality of this in gun right ideologies, how widely it is adhered to, and its constitutional impermissibility. The right of armed self-defense includes the right of armed self-defense against the government itself, the same government the gun rights claimants want to secure the right. Contrast that with
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. The people who argued out and wrote and signed this took this idea very, very seriously. They were fully aware that just by attending the meetings they were committing acts that the Crown would happily have them arrested and imprisoned- quite possibly executed— for; by signing their names to this document, their lives were forfeit to the Crown if captured. ‘Forfeit’ as in ‘hanged until dead’ or ‘stood against a wall and shot’ if lucky: hanged, drawn and quartered if not.

And it’s been pointed out before: they were declaring rebellion which would have them facing the most powerful, best-trained, best-equipped military force in the world. When the Colonies had been deliberately kept as weak in some ways as possible. England considered that the Colonies should be forced to buy virtually all manufactured goods from Britain, including iron, powder, shot and firearms. Which means not much in the way of materiel to fight with. But they signed anyway. You can’t say they were not aware of what was coming, many of them had fought before, knew the noise and horror of battle.

And signed anyway.

And yet, according to blank [must be the Potowmack Institute], it’s unthinkable that they would write a document noting the importance of the people A: having arms and B: being, in extremis, able and willing to use them against the government.

‘Fraid not, guy.

This one line, to me, shows how he just doesn't(or won't) get it:
The right of armed self-defense includes the right of armed self-defense against the government itself, the same government the gun rights claimants want to secure the right.
That's exactly right, but he's horrified by the idea. The Declaration specifically notes 'it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government', and the Constitution specifically notes the right to arms(which all nine justices agreed is an individual right); and yet he thinks that both are to be dismissed.

Enough to make you need a drink.

The Potowmack Institute has some people worried. Notice that the only people who are paying attention are the gun rights militants. We have not heard anything about the most vital and fundamental issues of political life from the DC government, the lawyers, the mayors, the gun controllers, our shallow, lazy news clowns, or least of all our cowards under oath of public office.

Here is a treatise on Personal Sovereignty

Of course, it says right there in the Second Amendment that the right of the people is the right to personal or individual sovereignty, a right in the State of Nature before there is law and government. The Founding Generation must have been in serious conflict with itself. It has been lost today that the Constitution is a frame of government not a treaty among personal sovereigns. A sovereign gives law. It does not accommodate to a law giving authority. We have no political or intellectual leadership that addresses what we have become.

So, what is it? I thought about it long and hard.

And it's this simple truth:If you f**k with me bad enough, I'll kill your ass.

What both of these quotes illustrate is the concept of personal sovereignty.

What is it? Here's a good definition:

Personal sovereignty is an issue which affects each of us as individuals and as a society, whether we realize it or not. Understanding it can help us to interpret what is going on within us and around us. Increasing it can radically transform our existence.

The word "sovereign" means to be in supreme authority over someone or something, and to be extremely effective and powerful. Therefore, it is usually applied to gods, royalty and governments. We speak of kings and queens as sovereigns (even when they are figureheads), and of the sovereign rights of nations and States.

Personal sovereignty, then, would imply the intrinsic authority and power of an individual to determine his or her own direction and destiny. If that sounds suspiciously like free will, it's because personal sovereignty and free will are the same thing.

It is, in fact, the polar opposite of statism. It is the thing that statists fear above all [link to Potowmack Institute] — a population that won't do as it's told by its betters...

The next struggle in the courts is over Fourteenth Amendment incorporation against the states. That is the only real meaning for a Bill of Rights guarantee for individuals. That becomes very problematic. The hard core Libertarian Right has never accepted the expansion of federal authority to protect other rights against state infringment. Why the exception for Second Amendment rights? If the courts will find a fundamental right in private gun ownership and protect that right against "infringement" or "abridgement" against the states the court have to find a compelling state purpose for the infringement. The only compelling purpose the gun rights ideologies have offered is the anti-state purpose of insurrection— that is, a civil right to treason. If the courts will protect that right against infringement— that is, in gun rights ideologies, against accountability to law and regulation. Will the courts now embrace this compelling purpose as a civil liberty? The Supreme Court's justices are already in conflict with themselves if they want to go in the direction of any Fourteenth Amendment incorporation.
http://www.potowmack.org/5issues.html#14th.

[PotowmackForum] interactive posting