Jets, Tanks, and Nukes To Defeat Tyranny?
Pathological liar Biden won’t stop lying about AR-15 owners and the Second Amendment, but he should stop titillating blood-thirsty Democrats with fantasies of the military wiping out conservatives.
Threatening to ban guns has rabble-roused vindictive Democrats since the 1970s, and speculating about “civil war” excites the Party of Evil’s Robespierrist fanatics today.
Combining the two themes, nominal, figurehead president Joe Biden first pretends that millions of Americans who own AR-15s are obsessed with Thomas Jefferson’s statement that it’s sometimes necessary to fight for liberty. (In this instance, Biden deviates from his history of plagiarism by omitting that Jefferson was referring to fighting for liberty against tyrants.)
Having misquoted Jefferson for the obvious reason, Biden then claims cannons and other weapons were banned when the Second Amendment was adopted, and that because AR-15s, like cannons, are “weapons of war,” they should be banned too.
However, Biden says AR-15s are not adequate “weapons of war,” if the war is the kind Jefferson had in mind. In June, he said for that, you need “an F-16. You need something else than just an AR-15.” In January, he said “taking on the federal government, you need some F-15s. You don’t need an AR-15.” Last year, he said to “take on the government . . . you need an F-15, you need an Abrams tank.” In 2021, he said “you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.”
Previously, warfare and self-defense expert Biden said that if criminals break into your house, you should “fire two blasts” from a double-barreled shotgun into the air while standing outside on your balcony or “fire the shotgun through the door.”
Biden’s “two blasts” would render the gun empty while criminals are still inside your house and alert them to your location. Also, both of his recommendations are generally illegal because they would risk killing or injuring innocent people. Biden might have known that, but in addition to being a chronic plagiarist, he’s a chronic liar. Contrary to his lie that he graduated “in the top half of my class” in law school, he finished 76th of 85 students at the 111th-ranked law school in the country.
Normally, no one as dishonest and asinine as Biden deserves a response to anything he says. Arguing with liars and imbeciles only empowers them. But Biden somehow occupies the White House, the media dutifully report his lies (not so much his apparent crimes, covered in numerous articles by Margot Cleveland for The Federalist), and he’ll presumably continue lying about AR-15s, fighter jets, tanks, and nukes. So, here goes:
First, while millions of AR-15 owners might want to purge the federal government of crooks and other villains via elections, impeachment proceedings in Congress, criminal proceedings in the courts, and abolishing or reorganizing several federal departments and agencies, there’s no evidence that they want to do so via a shooting war.
Second, when the Second Amendment was adopted, all weapons, including cannons, were within the scope of the individual right to keep and bear arms, and individuals owned them. As the Supreme Court said in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) (though it didn’t mean it, as I explained here), “the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms,” which the Framers understood to be “weapons of offense and armour of defence.”
Third, whether AR-15s are “weapons of war” is debatable, because they haven’t been used for that purpose. Ideally, they never will be. As Gen. Robert E. Lee said, “It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”
However, millions of Americans have AR-15s in case of war, because, with one exception, they’re identical to the best all-around warfighting rifle on the planet for more than 50 years: the M16. The exception is that while both rifles can be fired semi-automatically, only the M16 can also be fired fully-automatically. However, M16s are almost never fired fully-automatically in war, suggesting that the difference, for warfighting purposes, is of almost no practical consequence.
Judge Roger Benitez, of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, recognized the usefulness of AR-15s for warfighting and other defensive purposes in Miller v. Bonta (2021). Ruling against California’s “assault weapon” ban, Judge Benitez wrote, “the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment. . . . Quite apart from its practicality as a peacekeeping arm for home-defense, [it] can also be useful for war.” Recognizing the underlying design of AR-15s and the constitutional purposes for which they are quintessentially useful, Judge Benitez rejected the National Shooting Sports Foundation’s laughable term for them, “modern sporting rifles.”
Judge Benitez cited the Supreme Court’s decisions in Heller and McDonald v. Chicago (2010) (reiterated in NYSRPA v. Bruen, 2022), that the core purpose of the right is “self-defense.” He also cited the Court’s decision in U.S. v. Miller (1934), which said that the right to arms includes those that relate to “the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia,” such as “ordinary military equipment” and others the use of which “could contribute to the common defense.”
In turn, U.S. v. Miller cited the Tennessee Supreme Court’s decision in Aymette v. The State (1840), that under the Tennessee constitution, “the arms, the right to keep which is secured, are such as are usually employed in civilized warfare, and that constitute the ordinary military equipment. If the citizens have these arms in their hands, they are prepared in the best possible manner to repel any encroachments upon their rights by those in authority.” (Emphasis in the original.)
(Note: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has remanded [returned] Miller v. Bonta and Rupp v. Bonta, challenging California’s ban in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, to the district courts for reconsideration in light of Bruen, which said that restrictions on the right to arms must be consistent with the history and tradition of such restrictions. See Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s concurring opinion in Bruen, suggesting that the history that matters is that which is contemporary with the founding era, not that of the “mid-to-late 19th century” and, presumably, thereafter.)
Fourth, Biden’s claim that “weapons of war” wouldn’t be useful in war is ridiculous on its face. Simpleton Democrats who delight at anything that sounds anti-gun probably bob their heads affirmatively when they hear such English-language-defying nonsense. As French historian Alain Besançon said, “it is impossible to remain intelligent under the spell of ideology.” However, rifles are the weapons most commonly issued to military personnel for a reason, and they’re what Ukraine gave residents of Kiev when they thought the Russians were about to invade their city.
Fifth, when Biden says “take on the government,” he necessarily means a tyrannical one, because that’s the only kind millions of AR-15 owners and other reasonable people would “take on.” After all, the point of the Second Amendment is being armed to fight against tyranny only if remedies guaranteed in the First Amendment and provided for by (honest) elections and (not packed) courts are unsuccessful or denied, not to start a fight on a whim, at the drop of a hat.
To that point, the Framers of the Bill of Rights were familiar with English jurist William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769), which observed: “[T]o vindicate these rights [personal security, personal liberty, and private property], when actually violated or attacked, the subjects of England are entitled, in the first place, to the regular administration and free course of justice in the courts of law; next to the right of petitioning the king and parliament for redress of grievances; and lastly to the right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defense.” (Emphases added.)
Also, the old saw—“today’s Democrat Party is not your grandparents’ Democrat Party”—is baloney. Tyranny has always been accompanied by civilian disarmament and Democrats have been working on disarmament a long time. In the 1800s, when they were the party of slavery and lynchings, Democrats disarmed blacks so they’d be easy prey for the Democrat KKK. (See the Independence Institute’s Dave Kopel, The Dark Secret of Jim Crow and the Racist Roots of Gun Control, and Clayton Cramer, The Racist Roots of Gun Control.)
In 1934, Democrats began trying to incrementally disarm everybody, imposing a prohibitive tax on automatic firearms, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns. In 1968, they banned the importation of the same types of firearms, plus small handguns and surplus military firearms. In the 1970s and 1980s, they tried to ban all handguns.
Since the 1980s, they’ve tried to ban AR-15s and the other semi-automatic firearms Biden agitates about, to keep agitable Democrat voters agitated. In 1986, they banned the manufacture of automatic firearms for sale to civilians.
Also, for the last couple of decades, Democrats have tried to incrementally morph the firearm-purchase-related background check system into a national gun registry (which they call “common sense” “universal checks”), so they can know from whom to try to confiscate guns when the time comes. Perhaps to assist with such an effort, the FBI has been receiving records from Bank of America, and perhaps other banks, indicating which of its customers have bought firearms.
In the meantime, to seize power permanently, Democrats want to abolish the Electoral College (unnecessary, if they can steal the vote in the so-called “battleground” states), abolish the Senate filibuster, increase the number of seats on the Supreme Court and fill the new seats with leftists (an idea that originated with FDR in 1937), impeach the six members of the Court who aren’t leftists, and/or impose term limits on the Court’s members.
In the House of Representatives, legislation along those lines is being pushed by Democrats Jerrold Nadler (who said that banning commonly owned guns is “the point” of an “assault weapon” ban), Hank Johnson (who said stationing troops on Guam would cause the island to “become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize”), and Mondaire Jones (who advocates confiscating Americans’ 20 million or so AR-15s).
(Note: Abolishing the Electoral College was one of the goals of socialist, woman-woman relationship advocate Frances Willard, in the late 1800s the president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, which also supported Prohibition and giving women the ability to vote. See Daniel OKrent’s book “Last Call.” See also the “Causes” of the Freethought Movement of the period.)
Democrats have also weaponized the Department of Justice, its FBI, federal and local prosecutors, and some courts against conservative Americans and Republican politicians. And some Democrats attempt or plan to murder, openly advocate or allude to murdering, or otherwise threaten prominent Republicans and conservative members of the Supreme Court. Commonly-known examples include:
In 2017, a Democrat shot (non-fatally, thank God) a Republican congressman playing softball.
In 2020, the leader of the Democrats in the Senate, Charles Schumer, threatened two Supreme Court justices by name. Schumer spewed even more venom at the Court after its 6-3 rulings on June 29 and 30, which held that the First Amendment prohibits Colorado from forcing a website designer to design websites for same-sex “marriages,” overturned race-based university admission policies, and struck down Biden’s plan to make taxpayers pay off college students’ loans to help Democrats seize power permanently by bribing irresponsible young people to vote for them. (Same thing with their plan to lower the voting age to 16.)
In 2022, a man who was mad about the Court’s Dobbs opinion, overturning Roe v. Wade, was arrested for planning to assassinate three justices, including one of the two named by Schumer.
In June, the non-voting Democrat delegate to the House of Representatives from the Virgin Islands, Stacey Plaskett, said on national TV that President Trump should be “shot.” (Previously, during congressional hearings, Plaskett called highly credentialed journalist Matt Taibbi a “so-called journalist” because his “Twitter Files” articles exposed the social media platform’s suppression of conservative opinions on a variety of topics.)
Democrats are prosecuting President Trump, who as president had authority to declassify documents, for possessing allegedly classified documents in his Florida home, but giving a pass to Biden, who, as vice-president with no authority to declassify documents, possessed a larger number of classified documents in his garage and other unsecured locations.
Sixth, though it would make many Democrats happy if he did, Biden isn’t going to order the military against people who speak out against . . .
Democrats’ acts and threats of violence;
Biden taking money-laundered bribes from communist China, Ukraine, and elsewhere;
The Biden administration pressuring social media platforms to suppress the freedom of speech (a district court preliminary injunction against the government in Missouri v. Biden was suspended by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on July 14);
Drag queen-pedophile-grooming-transgender indoctrination of little children in public schools behind parents’ backs, and the Democrat Department of Justice labeling outraged parents as “terrorists;”
Abortion at any time, for any reason, and murdering babies on the delivery table;
Pandemic lockdowns and “vaccine” mandates;
The invasion of illegal aliens, human trafficking, and transiting of Chinese fentanyl across our southern border;
Increased crime because Democrats have defunded police departments, refuse to prosecute criminals, and have opened the border to destabilize society;
Marxist critical race theory and DEI policies, including in the military;
Undermining America’s energy industry and pushing electric vehicles to appease “climate emergency” fanatics;
Vote fraud in presidential elections;
The abolition of cash and the imposition of a digital currency and social credit score system (so a leftist government can zero out your bank accounts with the push of a button if you say something it doesn’t like, like in communist China, in which case it wouldn’t need jets, tanks, and nukes to impose tyranny) and/or;
Civilian disarmament, the last thing leftist dictatorships do before mass murdering their middle class, Christian, and/or Jewish opponents.
But if he did, most active-duty and National Guard troops, at least for now, would refuse to comply. Therefore, to the disappointment of Robespierrist Democrats, as things stand, there isn’t going to be a “civil war.”
Seventh and, fortunately, for only the sake of discussion, if fanatic leftists got the war they desire, it might not turn out the way they hoped. While most AR-15 owners don’t have the discipline, physical fitness, knowledge, skills, and other equipment necessary to be effective on a battlefield, their number, in the millions, is vastly higher than the number of military infantrymen, and even more vastly higher than the number that could be scraped together to follow the illegal orders of a tyrant. And most Americans who have combat experience and the ability to train others have left the military and are now civilians.
The numbers would be relevant because, as James Madison and Alexander Hamilton observed in The Federalist, #s 46 and 29, respectively, (see also #28, Hamilton), in a war between a tyrannical army and the citizenry, the latter would massively outnumber the former and, if well-trained and led, would win. Notably, such a war would be fought on urban terrain—street to street, building to building, and room to room—an environment in which AR-15s would be more useful than jets and tanks, and in which nuclear weapons would be out of the question.
Even though such a war is currently unlikely, pathological liar Biden won’t stop lying about AR-15 owners and the Second Amendment. But unless and until a leftist tyrant and leftists in the military’s senior officer ranks fundamentally transform the military into a woke band of Marxist mercenaries, and can bring swarms of weaponized miniature drones to bear for the Left’s historically evil purposes, he should stop titillating blood-thirsty Democrats with fantasies of the military wiping out conservatives. It’s not nice of him to promise something he won’t be able to deliver.
© 2023 Mark Overstreet