Gun Control = Despotism It has become very obvious that a vast majority of this country's citizens are totally ignorant of the hidden agenda and objective of those who have created and continue to direct the anti-firearm movement. The hidden agenda of this collective and conspiring group of politicians, bureaucrats, intelligentsia, and the fourth estate is the total disarmament of the law abiding citizens of this country so that this oligarchy can achieve their hidden political objective of establishing, without armed rebellion, a totalitarian socialistic state. Promoters of all gun control measures have repeatedly used a massive smoke screen of emotional and illogical fiction and falsehoods to hid their true agenda and political objective from the people. This potential act of despotism, alone, is the primary reason our Nation's founding fathers wrote the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. They saw the need to ensure that the PEOPLE (and not government) had the right and the empowerment to provide the final "check and balance" on government so as to prevent the usurpation of the liberties, rights, and freedoms of the PEOPLE by any abusive government, foreign or domestic. The secondary reason our founding fathers wrote the Second Amendment is that they saw the need to ensure that the PEOPLE had the right and the empowerment to provide for the self-defense of their life and property. Our founding fathers knew that they could not guarantee to the PEOPLE that the military, the militia, or the police would be everywhere, at all times, to protect every individual from violent criminal acts. Only those who have committed violent crimes, be they private citizens, police officers, or military personnel, should lose their basic civil right to keep and bear arms. Disarming the law abiding private citizens, while the government remains armed to the teeth, strikes at the very foundation of our Republic. Any politician that sponsors, votes for, or signs into law a bill that restricts the right of law abiding private citizens to keep and bear arms has committed another grave injustice upon the truths that our Nation's founding fathers believed as self-evident. The formation of our Nation would not have happened if the "gun grabbers" of 1768-1776 had been successful. In 1775, the British began a de facto policy of disarming the colonists and the Revolutionary War was sparked on April 19, 1775 when militiamen, exercising at Lexington, Massachusetts, refused to give up their arms. British General Thomas Gage proclaimed martial law June 12, 1775 and set about to seize the guns, pistols, muskets, and swords of the individual free citizens of Boston; thus sending a message to all the colonists that the right to keep and bear arms was in peril. The British resorted to every possible tactic to disarm the colonists --- entrapment, false promises of safekeeping, banning imports, direct seizure, arrest, and finally shooting persons bearing arms. This country's Declaration of Independence says it best: "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 provide new Guards for their future Security." And, James Madison said: "I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." Thomas Jefferson said: "The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government." U.S. Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story said: "The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them." Abraham Lincoln said: "If by the mere force of numbers a majority should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution --- certainly would if such a right were a vital one." Woodrow Wilson said: "The history of liberty is a history of limitation of government power, not the increase of it." ------------------------------------------------ (This file was found elsewhere on the Internet and uploaded to the Patriot FTP site by S.P.I.R.A.L., the Society for the Protection of Individual Rights and Liberties. E-mail alex@spiral.org)