Last of the BOHICANS

Excellent article...worth the read.

BANG!

I was right with him, until he wanted me to buy and distribute his comic books.

Throwing away your money, your efforts, freedom, and your future.

How many billions of dollars have freedom groups spent financing political campaigns, lobbying, or struggling to change laws through legislative letter-writing blitzes*?

How many checks have firearms manufacturers written to how many lawyers and lobbyists?
How many hundreds or thousands of your own hard-earned dollars have you poured into politics?
How many thousands of hours have you simply thrown away writing begging letters to politicians, standing at rallies, voting, campaigning, sending faxes, and making calls to "representatives" whose bored office staffers don't even bother to pass along your messages and whose bosses wouldn't listen if they did?

How many times have you helped send some guy to Washington or Albany or Sacramento thinking, "There, now he'll take care of us" -- only to have him come back a month later telling you, "You just don't understand how things are done on Capitol Hill" – as if he were representing the government, not you?

We rally 'round Party R, alarmed by the terrible things Party D wants to do to our Second Amendment rights. Party R marches into office, banners of "reform" flying high. In the name of "compromise," Party R then does exactly what Party D threatened to do – and comes back looking for more contributions and votes! "Think how much worse it would have hurt if Party D had done it to you!" they say. BOHICA!

And how many times have you felt sick as the public applauded the latest law or regulation against freedom -- because peoples' hearts belong to the other side, and their minds are uneducated about the real issues behind the feel-good language of "safety," "preventing crime," and "reasonable measures" to "protect children"?

Yes, you may have had an occasional, temporary victory, particularly at the local or state level. (Even a card sharp knows he sometimes needs to let the marks win to keep them hoping.) But in the end, every one of your political dollars, every one of your countless political hours, has not only been wasted, but has actually helped your opponents beat you in a rigged game.

The illusion that you're doing something to protect freedom has kept you occupied like a sucker trying to spot the shell with the pea under it while fast- talking politicians and remote bureaucrats carried out long-term anti-freedom plans that your eye couldn't follow.

Fighting to lose your gun rights
Second Amendment fighters: What have you gained by relying on politicians?

You've lost the right to own some firearms unless you pay a tax and submit to a government license.
You've lost the right to purchase a gun through a catalog and have it sent to you.

You've lost the right to own some firearms, simply because politicians and regulators thought they looked ugly or scary.

You've lost the right to carry a gun with big enough magazine capacity to be useful in a serious firefight.
You've lost the right to defend yourself in schools, churches, city hall, airports, parks, and hundreds of other places.

You've lost the right even to drive or walk in the neighborhood of a school.
You've lost the right to own guns if you were convicted of even certain minor crimes decades ago (and along with that, you've lost the ex post facto protections of the Constitution).

You've lost the right to carry concealed and exchanged it for a revocable, government-granted privilege, complete with fingerprints and criminal background checks.
You've lost the right to buy a gun quickly to protect yourself against someone who's threatening you.
You've lost privacy in all but a handful of gun purchases (and are soon to lose that, thanks to dogged and dishonest efforts to "close the gun- show loophole").

And you've ended up living in a culture that demonizes you as a violent, cretinous, "gun nut."
Despite short-term compromise "victories," the bottom line is that you've put up with a steady erosion of rights that hasn't stopped since you father's, grandfather's, or maybe even great- grandfather's day.
And now we rejoice because, with the Clinton regime gone, we believe politicians are going to be a LITTLE LESS QUICK about taking the next round of our rights.

We get excited when we learn that Attorney General John Ashcroft says the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own firearms -- so excited that we overlook the fine print, where he says next that Congress has the right to enact "gun control" laws "for compelling state interests."
What exactly does "compelling state interests" mean? Who defines it? Who'll enforce it -- and how brutally?

What kind of mentality have we developed, that we get excited over something like that? Have we adopted the numbed mindset of the carnival mark who walks away feeling victorious because he won some cheap piece of junk not worth one-tenth the money he invested in the crooked game?
Have we come to expect to lose our freedoms? Have we come to believe there's no realistic alternative? Good news: There is an alternative -- and a powerful one. But first, we've got to get over this BOHICA thinking and the BOHICA, "politics as usual" actions it leads to.

The key to understanding what's going on

Long ago, and for a very short time in America, what your teachers told you was true. You could change things by voting and campaigning and writing letters to your representatives -- because they actually were your representatives.

An informed citizenry and a legislature made up of ordinary fellow citizens could protect rights -- for a while. But that system was doomed to exactly the fate it has met. A professional class of politicians, bureaucrats, lawyers, and lobbyists took over, and citizens (increasingly uninformed or dis-informed) were left out in the cold. While the professional class still pays lip service to "democracy," their fundamental relationship to us is to 1) get money out of us, 2) make us dependent on them, and 3) keep us pacified enough that we don't pick up pitchforks and tear their little con castle down.

Now, when a teacher, politician, U.N. worker, bureaucrat, or some other government supporter preaches about your "responsibility" to vote and otherwise "work within the system" she's basically conning you. She's either ignorant of reality or trying desperately to prevent you from exercising the "pitchfork option." She's like the carnival pitchman whose patter and flamboyant gestures are designed to keep you from noticing what's going on behind the curtain.

A few fundamental facts to keep in mind:

Just as the press is free for the man who owns one, "The System" works for those who run it. And that isn't you. That isn't any group you belong to, not even the biggest and most powerful. "The System" works just fine - but doesn't work for your interests.

The one or two politicians who actually care about your rights are vastly outnumbered and rendered powerless by established ways of doing business. Their bills rarely even make it out of committee, thanks to manipulative leaders and procedural chicanery.

The whole process of "law-making" is about making more laws, not repealing them. It's about centralizing power, not distributing it.

Even if your representative claims to favor your rights, she almost certainly votes against them in huge, unread bills passed late at night.
Freedom can't be won back exactly as it was lost, through a long, slow process of lawmaking and regulation. The thousands of bureaucracies and special-interest fiefdoms that cling to government are easy to build, almost impossible to tear down. They'll only be dismantled if there's a vast change in the American consciousness -- which we aren't achieving through all our politicking.

Perhaps the most important thing to remember is that those posturing politicians you're begging to aren't even the ones in charge anymore. As Mark Bateman put it so well in a letter to Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership:

We defeat them in the ballot box. We defeat them in the legislature. We defeat them in the courts. However, here is where they CAN AND ARE WINNING: the bureaucracy.

The bureaucracy has for quite some time been the NEW lawmakers in our land and the ability of the BATF to simply make a ruling that turns YOU into a FELON for possession of what was once legal is creating law without representation. This is BANNING (through economics) and REGISTRATION by bureaucratic ruling!
All the voting, rallying, and political letter writing in the world won't reach this class of professional bureaucrats and enforcers. They're not elected by you. They're not answerable to you. They don't care about you and your pathetic little claims of "rights," and "justice."
Reality has changed. And if you don't change with it, your rights will soon perish.

Changing the culture

"But if we don't keep doing this," the freedom fighters cry, "things will get worse!"

Well, duh, things are getting worse ANYWAY.

In the ghettos of Europe, the "wise" men of the Jewish councils advised their communities to play by the Nazis' rules – to go along to get along. "If we don't," they warned, "things will get worse." People were loaded into cattle cars. People were taken into the woods and shot. People were enslaved, imprisoned, gassed, and flung naked into mass graves – and still the "wise" men counseled cooperation because otherwise, "things will get worse."

How much worse do things have to get before some people realize you can't win at a rigged political game? Stop cooperating in the con! If the mark won't play, the con artist can't win.
You don't even have to take the risks the young ghetto fighters eventually took. Your solution may be as simple as talking with your next-door neighbor. But it requires thinking far outside the political box. The solution is a grassroots reawakening. A rebirth of a Bill of Rights culture in America.

That's is a major change, to be sure. Accomplishing it will take hard work and time - but no more time than you're currently wasting on politics. Grassroots change is doable because, instead of trying vainly to influence unreachable men and women far away, it involves influencing the people around us -- family members, co-workers, neighbors, fellow students, children, fellow activists -- people we can reach.

Do something really dangerous, something that will truly scare our would-be rulers into taking us seriously -- encourage people to think and give them the tools to help them do it.

Bob LeFevre, the great, unconventional educator (on whom Robert Heinlein based his memorable character Bernardo de la Paz in the novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), once told an audience that, if he could push a button and instantly impose freedom he wouldn't do it, because unless people had a change of heart, they would quickly turn around and create a new (and perhaps even worse) system of oppression.

Once we have a Bill of Rights culture, including a strong, healthy appreciation and understanding of the Second Amendment, the government will follow. (If it fails to follow, it will fall.) Even the bureaucracy, unalterable as it seems now, will be dismantled once people no longer want, and are no longer willing to pay for, what it represents. On the other hand, if we don't attain a freedom- oriented culture at the most basic, grassroots level, then all the politics in the world won't save us.

What you can do

Let's be up front. This section includes an unabashed pitch for you to use JPFO literature. We're also going to ask you to help us finance a TV documentary "Innocents Betrayed," based on the new book Death by 'Gun Control' by Aaron Zelman and Richard W. Stevens.

But don't tune out. Even if you decide never to buy a single booklet from JPFO, the main thing you need to do to effect a grassroots culture change is the same.

You need to convey the value of the Bill of Rights, very simply and clearly, to people who've been "hypnotized and Jenningized" by television, who expect instant gratification, and who've been soothed into believing that government's purpose is to be a father and mother to them.

This kind of simple -- but factual and verifiable - pro-Bill of Rights message is what we at JPFO specialize in.

Well, that's true about the books, no intent on my end to attempt to get you to do so. However, the article does bring up some good points.

We rally 'round Party R, alarmed by the terrible things Party D wants to do to our Second Amendment rights. Party R marches into office, banners of "reform" flying high. In the name of "compromise," Party R then does exactly what Party D threatened to do – and comes back looking for more contributions and votes!
"Think how much worse it would have hurt if Party D had done it to you!" they say.

This must be true...I read it here every day at FR.

Here's Quigley's take on the so-called "two-party system, (which I agree with):

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and politics…of the Right and…Left, is a foolish idea…the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy…

It should be possible, to replace one party with the other party which will pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same basic policy. --Dr. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope

Yes, it does bring up some awesome points! The sales pitch just wrecked the genuine nature of the essay, but that's just my opinion.

I was right with him, until he wanted me to buy and distribute his comic books.

Nobody is forcing you to buy them, or even make any monetary donations whatsoever.

If you don't want to buy Gran'pa Jack booklets or donate to the documentary, that's your decision, of course.

I think the main thrust of the article is to DO SOMETHING! Even if it's just taking a anti-gunner to the range, or explaining the 2nd Amendment to your gunophobe neighbor.

But please go out and do something that gets the Bill of Rights message across in ways as simple, dramatic, friendly, and clear as Gran'pa Jack does it.

Excellent. I wish more people were aware of Claire Wolfe and Aaron Zelman.

There are very few people who can make the basic essentials of firearms freedom both understandable and compelling to the average, topically ignorant citizen. They are worth reading.

BTTT

Excellent. I wish more people were aware of Claire Wolfe and Aaron Zelman.

Hardyville Does Drugs-Claire Wolfe

Won't do a bit of good as long as the non-thinking sheeple continue to send dangerous control freaks like Dianne Feinstein to congress.

People don't realize how the gun-grabbers are not primarily after your gun, they are after your freedom and independence. Your right to own and use your gun is a great impediment to their agenda.

Thanks for the delightful link. Even before I clicked on it I was thinking that people wouldn't need their guns so often for self-defense if we didn't have that stupid "War on Drugs" driving up prices and enabling criminals to become rich by meeting the demand.

Glad to see someone else who appreciates Claire's writing.

I couldn't agree with you more. Claire Wolfe and Aaron Zelman are great patriots, talented writers, and imaginative fighters for our freedoms. May God bless them.