Quote of the day—Jeff Snyder

The people, among the most highly regulated on earth, told themselves that they were free because they retained the means of revolt. Just in case things ever got really bad. No one, however, seemed to have too clear an idea what “really bad” really meant. The people accepted the fact that their government no longer even remotely resembled the plan set forth in their original constitution. And the people’s values no longer remotely resembled those of their Founding Forebears. The people, in their naiveté, really believed that the means of revolt were to be found in a piece of inanimate metal! Really it was laughable. And pathetic.

No, the rulers knew that the people could safely be trusted with arms. The government educated their children, provided for their retirement in old age, bequeathed assistance if they lost their jobs, mandated that they receive health care, and even doled out food and shelter if they were poor.

Jeff Snyder
October 18, 2004
Walter Mitty’s Second Amendment
[This relates to what Lyle said the other day.

I have Snyder’s Nation of Cowards which is a collection of his essays. Nearly every paragraph of every essays qualifies as QOTD material. And as Sean F. told me a few months ago, Snyder is just mind blowing with his views on the right to keep and bear arms. If I could get every anti-gun person to read just one simple book, this would be it. I’m tempted to buy a stack of them and hand them out to people. It is absolutely amazing stuff.—Joe]

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5 thoughts on “Quote of the day—Jeff Snyder

  1. Its apparently out of print, with decent copies costing $100+ on Amazon…

  2. It makes an excellent point. Once we’re dumbed-down enough, flabby, weak, immoral and beholden enough, we with our 300 million guns have nothing of worth to defend. At what point does that noble “Nation of Riflemen” become a discordant society of warring bands of pirates?

    I guess we’ve lost the term “health care”, which no longer means health care at all but rather “medical insurance”. So, no insurance, no care, is the implication, as though insurance adjusters were healers. We speak of insurance as though it were synonymous with the actual care. In fact the mandate is not for “health care” at all. The mandate is that, in addition to the purported healers, we support a nation of bureaucrat middlemen. It’s a false term, and we should not participate in falsehoods.

  3. I’m gonna go against the grain here and state this: Jeff Snyder is peddling hokum.

    Please, by all means, show me an authoritarian/totalitarian regime that EVER allowed the proles to keep arms. It’s one thing to have dissent — better if you can subvert it or at least monitor it, of course. It’s QUITE another if they have the means to cause problems (and by ‘problems’ I mean ‘secret police and bureaucrats getting killed’).

    No, no, no. This isn’t rocket science. This is ‘you’re violating the Evil Overlord’s List’ levels of foolishness. Yeah, it’s all great and good to keep the commoners dumb and happy… but why take the chance of some of them snapping out of the lotus dream and kicking up a fuss?

    • Other totalitarian regimes were in places without a culture of gun ownership and a tradition that the people should be armed (and why). If that culture is first eliminated, then indeed a totalitarian government can disarm us safely, though at that point there wouldn’t be much reason to do so. But for the moment, would-be totalitarians, or at least a reasonable fraction of them, know it’s much too dangerous to make the attempt.

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