The argument that an armed citizenry cannot hope to overthrow a modern military machine flies directly in the face of the history of partisan guerilla and civil wars in the twentieth century. To make this argument (which is invariably supported, if at all, by reference only to the American military experience in non-revolutionary struggles like the two World Wars), one must indulge in the assumption that a handgun-armed citizenry will eschew guerrilla tactics in favor of throwing themselves headlong under the tracks of advancing tanks. Far from proving invincible, in the vast majority of cases in this century in which they have confronted popular insurgencies, modern armies have been unable to suppress the insurgents. This is why the British no longer rule in Israel and Ireland, the French in Indo-China, Algeria and Madagascar, the Portugese in Angola, the whites in Rhodesia, or General Somoza, General Battista, or the Shah in Nicaragua, Cuba and Iran respectively–not to mention the examples of the United States in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. It is, of course, quite irrelevant for present purposes whether each of the struggles just mentioned is or was justified or whether the people benefitted therefrom. However one may appraise those victories, the fact remains that they were achieved against regimes equipped with all the military technology which, it is asserted, inevitably dooms popular revolt.

Perhaps more important, in a free country like our own, the issue is not really overthrowing a tyranny but deterring its institution in the first place. To persuade his officers and men to support a coup, a potential military despot must convince them that his rule will succeed where our current civilian leadership and policies are failing. In a country whose widely divergent citizenry possesses upwards of 160 million firearms, however, the most likely outcome of usurpation (no matter how initially successful) is not benevolent dictatorship, but prolonged, internecine civil war.

Don B. Kates Jr.
Handgun Prohibition and the Original Meaning of the Second Amendment
Michigan Law Review 82 (1983): 204-273.
[Via Proclaiming Liberty: What Patriots and Heroes Really Said About the Right to Keep and Bear Arms by Philip Mulivor.

This is along the same lines as what Lyle described as the Plausible Threat.

It’s worth noting that the estimate of 160 million firearms in the U.S. was in 1983. The estimate is nearly double that now.—Joe]

Sporting events involving automatic firearms are similar to those events such as silhouette shooting and other target-related endeavors and deserve the same respect and support.

NRA-ILA
NRA to Fight Machine Gun Ban
Monitor, Vol. 13, No. 13, (August 15, 1986), p. 3.
The Monitor was a publication of the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action.
[We still have a way to go before the NRA and other gun rights organizations can start working on support for fully automatic weapons. But people should not think the NRA kicked them to the curb without a second thought.

For more background on the situation behind the scenes at the NRA at the time see Neal Knox – The Gun Rights War.—Joe]

I think the era of the mass marketing of handguns is going to end.

Tom Diaz
Violence Policy Center analyst
April 13, 2001
U.S. Handgun Production Dives 52%
[Lest anyone get too cocky about our current situation keep in mind this was just 10 years ago. A lot can happen in ten years.—Joe]

Handgun Control Inc. has long said that the NRA leadership was out of step with the NRA membership. And HCI was right—but in exactly the opposite way from what HCI wanted to believe. For the second straight year the NRA membership has overwhelmingly elected Directors sponsored and promoted by Second Amendment Action, of which I am chairman. Last year, the members elected 11 of our 16 candidates.

This time,  in the results reported to NRA Directors today, Second Amendment Action swept every one of its 17 nominees into the 26 vacant seats on the NRA Board.

The house-cleaning assures that NRA will be taking a tougher stance in the legislative arenas.

Read the NRA election results and weep, Handgun Control, Inc. You’ve got a fight on your hands.

Neal Knox
April 13, 1992
Hardliners Sweep NRA Elections, from The Gun Rights War, pages 351 and 352.
[I love this book.

Nearly 20 years ago HCI had “long said the NRA leadership was out of step” with members. HCI was renamed “The Brady Campaign” in 2001 but they haven’t changed their rhetoric. They still claim the NRA is an extremist organization that does not represent its members. But if you read the blogs and the forums you will find far, far, more people critical of the NRA for not being aggressive enough than you will find those that say the NRA is too aggressive.

HCI or Brady Campaign–it doesn’t matter. They are out of touch with reality and have been for well over 20 years.—Joe]

Institute for Legislative Action Executive Director Bob Kukla, in an extremely courageous act, confirmed that the independence of ILA, and its effectiveness in fighting repressive gun legislation had been threatened by the Management Committee, composed of the three top officers. As proof, Kukla played an openly recorded tape of the February 26 Management Committee meeting in which he was criticized for ILA’s opposition to Smith & Wesson’s proposal for national handgun licensing, and ILA’s opposition to the National Education Association’s anti-handgun position. Kukla’s evidence convinced the neutral members of the seriousness of the problems within NRA; although relatively few members in the meeting had known of the Federation’s reform program, they supported it overwhelmingly.

Neal Knox
July 1977
From The Gun Rights War, page 311.
[I have often heard of “The Cincinnati Revolution” within the NRA but had never gotten any details. The Gun Rights War has several articles by Neal Knox about the revolt. Wow! No wonder there was a revolt.

Smith & Wesson proposed national handgun licensing? Was there a boycott then? Or was the first boycott in early 2000 when they tried to force all dealers and distributors to abide by a “code of conduct”? The “code of conduct” would have required all sales at gun shows to go through a background check, prohibited dealers and distributors from selling “assault weapons” or standard capacity magazines, and numerous other backdoor Second Amendment infringements. Gun owners decided then and there that Smith & Wesson must die and we almost did it too. Why wasn’t it well publicized that the Smith & Wesson betrayal was nothing new and had sided with the anti-gun people 23 years earlier?

If there was a boycott in 1977 Smith & Wesson apparently had forgotten about it. Let’s hope all gun manufactures learned their lesson in 2000 and we don’t have to repeat it. We need to be fighting the enemies of freedom rather than our own.—Joe]

…the California Justice Department’s Criminalists Institute conducted a survey of all the crime labs in the state, trying to determine how many so-called “assault weapons” were seized, and how many were used in violent crimes, during 1990. Those forensic labs, which included 22 state-run units, have all the data concerning the guns used in crimes in the state.

According to the 1991 Helsley internal memo, those involved in pushing the “Roberti-Roos’ bill—including some of the state’s highest-ranking police administrators, the Senate President, one of the most-powerful members of the assembly, and the Attorney General, himself—had made the deliberate decision not to seek information from the crime labs.

Helsley wrote: “Information on assault weapons would not be sought from forensic laboratories as it was unlikely to support the theses on which the legislation would be based.”

The current Justice Department apparently wishes it hadn’t asked the laboratories for hard information either, for the data—with responses from the labs covering two-thirds of the state’s population—shows there is no significant problem. The DOJ has refused to provide their draft summary of the results, but has released the raw data, in compliance with the state’s freedom of information law.

According to reliable sources the survey showed that of all firearms confiscated, less than 5 percent were guns in the Roberti-Roos list. And of guns involved in violent crimes, only six-tenths of one percent were “assault weapons.”

Neal Knox
January 31, 1992
The “Assault Weapon” Hysteria
From The Gun Rights War, page 273.
[f they knew an assault weapon ban would not, could not possibly, reduce crime the what was the real reason for wanting an “assault weapon” ban?

That was over 18 years ago. Why do organizations like the Brady Campaign still advocate for such a ban? Just what could possibly be the real reason?

This book is a wealth of information for gun rights activists. But I have a love/hate relationship with it. The articles go back 40 years. 40 years of fighting against this kind of stuff! The deliberate deceptions and misrepresentations of the anti-gun people has been constant. I love to see the history but I hate it that we still are fighting the same battles against, apparently evil, and obviously lying, people. We currently have them on the run in the courts. We need to drive a stake in the heart of this beast this time. We need to do that both legally and culturally. Make them the 21^st century cultural equivalent of the KKK. Because that is what they are.—Joe]

As I pointed out during the October 1985 testimony before Hughes and Rodino, the proposed ban couldn’t possibly reduce crime with licensed machine guns, since there was none. Further, their bill was an admission that the 50-year-old National Firearms Act had demonstrably failed to reduce crime with machine guns. Those facts made no difference, for the anti-gunners’ objective is not to reduce crime, but to get rid of guns.

That’s not alarmist rhetoric. It’s both a logical conclusion and an historical fact. No matter how restrictive a gun law exists, the anti-gunners always come back for more.

Neal Knox
September 26, 1987
Keep The Second Out Of Court–For Now
The Gun Rights War, page 177.
[Emphasis in the original.

That was almost 25 years ago. The big deception of the anti-gun people is still alive today.

We need to kill it. We need to drive a stake in it’s heart. We need to bury it. We need to build a monument on it’s grave to all the tens of millions of people whose murder was enabled with gun control.

About 10 years ago I told Alan Gottlieb the gun rights movement should start a national campaign with the slogan, “What is the real reason?” Sell or give away T-shirts, put up billboards, advertise in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. Ask the anti-gun people, “What is the real reason you want to restrict firearms?” We have hard proof that it is not about reducing crime. There has to be another reason and they aren’t telling the public what that reason is. Force them, through public pressure, to disclose that reason.

Alan was of the opinion that it was too difficult to get the message across. “What is the real reason?” makes sense to us, but to the vast majority of people it would pass right over the top without even ruffling their hair.

I wonder if times have changed enough. The Internet makes it easier/cheaper/faster to get the message out. Perhaps now is the time to start asking that question.–Joe]

Handgun Control Inc. often quotes from Cruikshank, which says, “the bearing of arms for a lawful purpose is not a right granted by the Constitution.” They never quote the next sentence from that decision: “Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.“

The Court stated in Cruikshank that since the First and Second amendments limited only the Congress they did not prohibit the Ku Klux Klan from conspiring with local officials to prevent newly freed black slaves from holding political meetings or having guns. It boggles the mind to hear so-called “Liberals” proudly cite the Cruikshank decision.

Neal Knox
October 9, 1987
The Gun Rights War, page 74.
[In 1992 or 1993 I received a mailing from HCI with this quote in the letter.* That letter sealed my relationship with them. It was like remembering where you were when you found out President Kennedy had been shot.**

I was in the bathroom next to the kitchen in our house in Moscow Idaho. I remember setting the letter down on the counter next to the washbasin. I was stunned. Had the Supreme court really said the 2nd Amendment doesn’t mean what it says? I was very shaken by this. HCI wouldn’t put something that profound in writing if it weren’t true. They couldn’t. It would be devastating to their cause if it was found out they had lied. Right?

I don’t remember how I checked up on it. But within a few days I had discovered what Knox had reported in 1987. HCI hadn’t really flat out lied, they “just” didn’t tell the whole truth. It had to be deliberate misinformation on their part. It was, as Knox said, the very next sentence which refuted their point.

This infuriated me. I have not forgiven them. Changing their name to “The Brady Campaign” did not help. That they used Jim Brady’s injury as a justification for a law that would not have prevented, in even the most optimistic scenarios, the tragic shooting of Jim Brady and President Reagan reinforced my opinion of them as deliberate deceivers.

In 2004 then Brady President Michael D. Barnes claimed they had about “a half million” members. Then a couple weeks ago I found out they only have about 50,000 members and that is only if you want to include those that haven’t donated any money in over two years. If you measure “membership” as most people do then the real numbers are about 28K or less.

When they said they would not share supporter names with unaffiliated groups they lied.

There is a reason I have frequently called their lawyer “Half-Truth Henigan“.

When I asked Paul Helmke why he was not concerned with the total violence rather than just “gun violence” it was because I wanted to point out to the rest of the audience that Helmke was, as usual, selectively reporting data that would propagate his half-truth.

Deception has been a part of their organization for decades. I believe deception has become institutionalized in their organization. It is a part of their culture. Perhaps they believe the end justifies the means. I don’t really know why. I just know that to this day they still deceive. And it isn’t all that important to know why. It’s just important that we destroy them politically and as an institution. They may have good intentions but Hell is paved with good intentions and their political goals enable evil.

When Brady people hear or read my name or links to my blog posts in relation to news that hurts them it I want them to know something. I want them to know a major part of the reason I am on their case is because I have never gotten over them sending out a deliberate half-truth in that letter nearly 20 years ago.

*Yes, it’s possible that they still have my name and address in their list of “members” even though I have never donated any money to them. I did send them my address requesting they keep me informed…

**Okay, so that doesn’t resonate with all that many people anymore. How about like remembering where you were when you found out the twin towers where hit by an airplane?–Joe]