Trump’s Assault on Our Right to Keep and Bear Arms

Is it illegal to carry a gun to a demonstration against ICE? According to the Trump Administration, it is. According to a story in The New York Times on February 4, “Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, on Monday threatened jail time for anyone who enters the capital with a gun. In remarks on Fox News that could deepen a growing rift between gun owners and the Trump administration, Ms. Pirro declared that if anyone brings ‘a gun into the District, you mark my words, you’re going to jail. I don’t care if you have a license in another district and I don’t care if you’re a law-abiding gun owner somewhere else.’

“Her remarks prompted swift pushback from the Republican Party’s pro-Second Amendment wing, which was thrown into a cycle of confusion and frustration over comments from President Trump and some in his administration after Alex Pretti, a licensed gun owner, was shot by federal immigration agents last month during a protest in Minneapolis. The shooting has fueled debate among conservatives over the administration’s vacillating posture toward lawful gun ownership. After the shooting, Mr. Trump and some senior administration officials sought to blame Mr. Pretti for carrying a concealed firearm during the protest. ‘I don’t like that he had a gun, I don’t like that he had two fully loaded magazines, that’s a lot of bad stuff,’ Mr. Trump said last week in Iowa.

“Ms. Pirro’s remarks caught the attention of several Republican lawmakers, including Representative Greg Steube of Florida, a U.S. Army veteran, who said on social media that he travels into Washington from his home district every week with a firearm. ‘I have a license in Florida and DC to carry. And I will continue to carry to protect myself and others,’ Mr. Steube wrote. . .Come and Take it! Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, sought to dispute the legality of Ms. Pirro’s assertion by pointing to laws within the U.S. capital. ‘Non-residents can obtain a permit in DC — don’t ask me how I know,’ he wrote on social media.’ Ms. Pirro’s remarks could breach the alliance between the Republican Party and gun rights groups or, like Mr. Trump’s, be brushed off by pro-gun rights groups as a passing controversy. But that did not stop Democrats from seizing on it. Representative Brendan Boyle, Democrat of Pennsylvania, said on social media that he was ‘Old enough to remember the ‘Obama is going to grab your guns’ hysteria. Turns out it was the Trump White House.’”

The great Ron Unz also noted that the supposedly rightwing and pro-gun Trump Administration appeared to have changed course: “I’ve carefully followed American politics for nearly the last half-century, and during all those years a leading element of the conservative political coalition, especially lauded by right-wingers, had been the pro-gun groups. These were always fiercely protective of the rights of all Americans to keep and bear firearms, and they sometimes even took those ideological positions to extremes. Most of Trump’s administration has been notoriously right-wing, and everyone would have assumed that nearly all its members fell into that pro-gun camp. Yet as the exact circumstances of the Pretti killing became known, an ideological reversal of staggering proportions immediately occurred. As they defended and justified the ICE killing, Trump officials seemed to be arguing that federal agents were authorized to summarily execute any American citizen who exercised his legal right to own and carry a handgun. Judge Andrew Napolitano is a former FoxNews host, and one of his recent videos conveniently included a montage of numerous senior Trump administration officials taking that surprising position. In their public remarks, they suggested that anyone who brought a perfectly legal firearm to a protest could justifiably be shot and killed by federal ICE agents  …They are facing pushback from an unlikely quarter: gun-rights groups that traditionally have largely sided with the GOP. ‘The first thing that politicians want to do is blame the gun, said Taylor Rhodes, spokesman for the National Association for Gun Rights, based in Greenville, S.C. Rhodes said he has attended hundreds of protests and rallies over the years, always with a gun. He said a thorough investigation is needed, but judging from videos of the shooting, ‘I don’t think it looks good on the ICE agents.’ . . Many other news stories and interviews reinforced the same stunned reaction to that sharp and totally unexpected ideological reversal: FBI Director Kash Patel magnified the blowback Sunday on Fox News’s ‘Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo.’ No one, Patel said, can ‘bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want. It’s that simple.’ Erich Pratt, vice president of Gun Owners of America, was incredulous. ‘I have attended protest rallies while armed, and no one got injured,’ he said on CNN. Conservative officials around the country made the same connection between the First and Second amendments. ‘Showing up at a protest is very American. Showing up with a weapon is very American,’ state Rep. Jeremy Faison, who leads the GOP caucus in Tennessee, said on social media. Trump’s first-term vice president, Mike Pence, called for ‘full and transparent investigation of this officer involved shooting’… ‘You remember Kyle Rittenhouse and how he was made a hero on the right,’ said Trey Gowdy, a Republican former congressman and attorney for Trump during one of his first-term impeachments. ‘Alex Pretti’s firearm was being lawfully carried. … He never brandished it.’ Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor who has studied the history of the gun debate, said the fallout ‘shows how tribal we’ve become.’ Republicans spent years talking about the Second Amendment as a means to fight government tyranny, he said. ‘The moment someone who’s thought to be from the left, they abandon that principled stance,’ Winkler said.”

The Trump Administration’s tergiversations on gun rights are no aberration. Rather they reflect the fundamental nature of the state, as Murray Rothbard, the greatest political and economic thinker of the twentieth century, has taught us. As he says in his wonderful essay Anatomy of the State,“The State is that organization in society which attempts to maintain a monopoly of the use of force and violence in a given territorial area; in particular, it is the only organization in society that obtains its revenue not by voluntary contribution or payment for services rendered but by coercion. While other individuals or institutions obtain their income by production of goods and services and by the peaceful and voluntary sale of these goods and services to others, the State obtains its revenue by the use of compulsion; that is, by the use and the threat of the jailhouse and the bayonet. Having used force and violence to obtain its revenue, the State generally goes on to regulate and dictate the other actions of its individual subjects. One would think that simple observation of all States through history and over the globe would be proof enough of this assertion”

Because of the state’s inherent nature, the proper response to the Trump Administration should not place exclusive emphasis on our constitutional rights, although they do have a role in our battle. The crucial weakness in  exclusively relying on the constitution is that the Supreme Court is part of the federal government and will tend to settle disputed issues in a way that enhances centralized power. Rothbard credits John C. Calhoun for demonstrating this fundamental point: “In his Disquisition, Calhoun demonstrated the inherent tendency of the State to break through the limits of such a constitution: ‘A written constitution certainly has many and considerable advantages, but it is a great mistake to suppose that the mere insertion of provisions to restrict and limit the power of the government, without investing those for whose protection they are inserted with the means of enforcing their observance [my italics] will be sufficient to prevent the major and dominant party from abusing its powers. Being the party in possession of the government, they will, from the same constitution of man which makes government necessary to protect society, be in favor of the powers granted by the constitution and opposed to the restrictions intended to limit them.’”

Nevertheless, our constitutional right to keep and bear arms is indeed important. As Stephen P. Halbrook, a leading authority on the topic, has pointed out, the American Revolution was in large part a response to the attempt of the British to confiscate American guns: “The ‘shot heard ‘round the world’ at Lexington and Concord in 1775 entailed the Redcoats’ attempted seizure of arms being hoarded by militiamen and the repulse of these troops by the local citizens armed with their own muskets and sporting arms.  This led General Gage to impose the confiscation of all firearms from Boston’s civilians, under the promise that those in compliance could depart the besieged city.  After seizing the arms, ‘the perfidious Gage’ held the townsfolk as hostages. During these years, history was not standing still in the other colonies.  The patriots in such colonies as Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New York were being radicalized because of events in Boston, and the British authorities saw Boston as the root of all evil in the colonies.  The Boston experience showed that many colonists were armed or sought to obtain arms, and that Gage’s successful and unsuccessful attempts to disarm them constituted yet more proof of the Crown’s objective to destroy their rights as Englishmen. The above were key events which led the Founders to adopt the Second Amendment.  A tyrannical government supported by a standing army had sought to disarm a people through various artifices.  It took these repressive measures against both citizens organized as militia and against citizens as individuals.  The patriots then exercised their right to keep and bear arms to protect both this right and their many other rights. The American Revolution had now been sparked.  Its philosophy, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence (1776), was that the people must endure some amount of injustice, but they may wage armed resistance when injustice becomes tyranny. Beginning in 1776 and continuing during the War for Independence, the States took measures to provide for their own governance.  Virginia was the first State to adopt a declaration of rights, which included the admonition for ‘a well regulated Militia, composed of the Body of the People, trained to Arms.’  And Pennsylvania was the first to declare that ‘the people have a right to bear arms for the defense of themselves and the state.’  These principles were held dear in all of the States, without regard to whether they adopted a bill of rights.’

Let’s do everything we can to resist the Trump Administration’s  assault on our right to keep and bear arms!

The Best of Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.