What do Charlton Heston and Rev. Martin Luther King have in common? Along with the fact that both men pursued callings in which they portrayed the Biblical role of Moses descending from the mountain top, both men were committed to the struggle for civil rights. In fact, Heston marched with Rev. King in the South and often stated that his commitment to Second Amendment issues was a natural corollary to the struggle for racial equality. The history of that struggle reveals that Heston was not engaging in mere NRA rhetoric. (more…)
Category: History
Texas Rangers Were Once Volunteer Minutemen
Robert M. Utley is a historian that appreciates the part that firearms technology had in transforming the Old West into what we know today. It is hard to imagine a more appropriate arena in which to study the impact of innovation on a society than Texas in the Eighteen Hundreds. The story of innovation in the design of pistols and rifles contributes a great deal to the story of how Texas acquired its renowned character as a state. (more…)
Protecting Human Life vs Genocide: All About Values
Click on the link above and you can see the site from which we obtain all the great posters. There is much more. The Second Amendment is the original Pro-Life Amendment and expresses a fundamental human right that is bestowed by God (thus, it is inalienable, according to the Founding Fathers). Armed self-defense has proven much more effective than the United Nations in preventing genocide. Just read Samantha Power’s article on the UN’s record in Rwanda for fighting genocide. It could be argued that the UN enabled those that would engage in ethnic cleansing. And there seems to be a pattern where the United Nations is concerned. (more…)
Chipyongni; Lessons in Combat from the Korean War
https://firearmslawyer.net…2009/06/01/p213
On May 27, 2010 the Korean People’s Army issued a statement declaring that it “will not be bound” by the 1953 armistice that halted hostilities in the Korean War:
David Halberstam completed THE COLDEST WINTER right before he was killed in a car accident on April 27, 2007. Halberstam, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Vietnam reporting, is known for using personal history and techniques favored by novelists to write serious journalism. Although many of the assumptions and conclusions are what you would expect from a book acclaimed by the New York Times as “a grand gesture of reclamation and remembrance”, THE COLDEST Winter is the most readable historical account I have found of America’s “forgotten war”. (more…)
Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting and the Siege of Mafeking
An NRA firearms instructor was visiting our Federal Way Noon Kiwanis Club and I found out he goes all over the Northwest instructing Boy Scouts in firearms safety and marksmanship skills. I also found out that Major General Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting, was a hero during the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) due to his central role in holding a railroad town called Mafeking on the edge of the Transvaal and the Kalahari Desert. (more…)
My Days in the Underground, Sixties Militants & How to Foment Anarchy
On April 8th, the Tacoma News Tribune published an editorial about alleged death threats against Sen. Patty Murray. The editors stated, “In the furious arguments over health care reform, legitimate conservatives have sometimes been accused of fomenting violence with bitter and angry rhetoric”.
The next day in Olympia, almost three-dozen leftists dressed in black, wearing masks and calling themselves anarchists chanted obscenities at law enforcement officers. The anarchists attacked a newspaper photographer, spray-painted buildings, broke windows and threw newspaper boxes into the street. Police arrested 29 leftists. Two officers were hit – one in the head and one in the groin. (more…)
DC vs. Heller
The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed DC v Heller in a five to four landmark decision last year. Justice Scalia firmly placed the Court’s decision, which knocks down Washington DC’s ban on firearms within the bedrock of the Founding Fathers’ original intentions; i.e., the decision sets forth a principle scorned by tyrants over the centuries. It is in the people that the power of governmental force resides. The government’s use of deadly force ultimately derives from an individual’s duty to protect herself or himself, one’s family and neighbors.
The fact that the discussion of self-defense is usually framed in terms of rights is, perhaps, unfortunate in that Americans can easily become exhausted by the perpetual yapping about “rights“. We have welfare rights, immigration rights, First Amendment right to purvey obscenity. The “right” to keep and bear arms is first of all a duty. Many states, especially in the Eastern U.S., still have laws on the books requiring men of certain ages to have a military weapon and suitable ammunition in specific quantities in order to be ready to perform militia service: (more…)
What Would John Adams Do?
I cut my teeth as a Structural Ironworker but I love literature and philosophy. Standing on a steel I-beam forty stories above the streets of San Francisco with a load of iron swinging over my head taught me about what was important. (more…)
Deacons for Defense and Justice
The Deacons for Defense and Justice formed in the Deep South during the 1960s.The Deacons exercised armed self-defense and often operated in conjunction with other civil rights organizations. Local law enforcement, state authorities and the Ku Klux Klan often enforced Jim Crow laws with impunity in places where the federal government was ineffective or unable to intervene. (more…)
Guns, Civil Rights & Black Americans
Sometimes I hear people say that the Civil War was not really about slavery. I find that difficult to believe. Nevertheless, the fight for African-American freedom began in earnest after the Civil War ended. The U.S. Supreme Court cited firearms lawyer Stephen Halbrook in the landmark DC vs. Heller decision:
“Blacks were routinely disarmed by Southern States after the Civil War. Those who opposed these injustices frequently stated that they infringed blacks’ constitutional right to keep and bear arms. Needless to say, the claim was not that blacks were being prohibited from carrying arms in an organized state militia.”
The legislative history of the Fourteenth Amendment includes a joint Congressional Report that described how after the Civil War “in some parts of (South Carolina), armed parties… without proper authority, engaged in seizing all firearms found in the hands of the freemen. Such conduct is in clear and direct violation of their personal rights as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States….” (more…)