The murderous presumption behind every citizen disarmament argument.

Malcolm Reynolds: Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill 'em right back! Wife or no, you are no one's property to be tossed aside. You got the right same as anyone to live and try to kill people.

Back in July of 2008, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Madison Times in Wisconsin. The subject matter was the latest citizen disarmament scheme, and my advice was blunt:

Dear Editor:

Joe Bialek from Cleveland proposes the licensing and registration of all weapons currently in civilian hands. My question is, how exactly do you propose to do that, Joe?

There are some of us "cold dead hands" types, perhaps 3 percent of gun owners, who would kill anyone who tried to further restrict our God-given liberty. Don't extrapolate from your own cowardice and assume that just because you would do anything the government told you to do that we would.

Are you proposing to come yourself, or do you want someone else's son or daughter in federal service to take the risk? Are you truly prepared to stack up the bodies necessary to accomplish your plan? Seems a strange way to make a "safer society." More to the point, are you willing to risk your sorry hide to do it? No? I thought not.

Then quit proposing the next American civil war. We're done being pushed back from our natural rights without a fight. Be careful what you wish for.

Mike Vanderboegh

Pinson, Ala.

Now this made a number of people very put out, especially Sebastian of the NRA-friendly Snowflakes in Hell blog. He wrote on 23 July (my birthday):

Could we please not make gun owners look like lunatics in the media for all to see? You know what ends up happening when the majority of the people in this country who don’t own gun, and don’t care much about gun rights, start believing that gun owners are out to foment a civil war? They start agreeing to take our guns away.

Some may want an armed revolution, but I don’t want to see it come to that. It is not inevitable or necessary at this point in time. I’d prefer to solve this problem politically, and guys like this aren’t helping. We’re winning right now, both politically, and the hearts and minds. Could we please not do stupid shit like this to fuck it up? Thank you.

Later that day, Kevin Baker commented:

Mike Vanderboegh has adopted the position as the Malcolm X of the gun-rights fight. He’s as extreme and in-your-face as he can be, and he revels in “frightening the white people.”

"The Malcolm X of the gun-rights fight" who "revels in 'frightening the white people.'"

"Okay," as Forrest Gump said. I'll accept that moniker. I'm also the guy who said to the impatient gun confiscationist who demanded my "short answer" opinion of his scheme, "If you try to take our firearms we will kill you."

But here's the thing. I'm "scaring white people" who have already proposed my murder by forces of the federal government. Oh, they don't admit it (perhaps not even to themselves), and they wrap their arguments in "public safety" and "for the children," but that is the hard core of the murderous presumption behind every citizen disarmament initiative. Just as it was behind the "individual mandate" of Obamacare which I reacted to the prospect of by calling for broken windows. As I wrote in March of last year:

Nancy Pelosi's Intolerable Act is within days of passage by devious means so corrupt and twisted that even members of her own party recoil in disgust.

This act will order all of us to play or pay, and if we do not wish to, we will be fined.

If we refuse to pay the fine out of principle, we will be jailed.

If we resist arrest, we will be killed.

They will send the Internal Revenue Service and other federal police to do this in thousands of small Wacos, if that is what it takes to force us to submit.

This arrogant elite pretends that this oppression is for our own good, while everyone else understands that this is about their selfish, insatiable appetite for control over our liberty, our money, our property and our lives.

I made the call, and a few folks answered, and it made all the papers. I was vilified for advocating violence against Democrat party property. A very few understood the humanity of the warning of the rattlesnake's rattle. The overwhelming majority did not.

If a man comes up to me on the street and tells me that he is going to come to my house, break in and steal my property, rape my wife and daughters and kill me, then how should I react? Since he has not yet crossed my threshold or committed a crime I will tell him: "If you try to do that I will kill you."

He will then shout to the nearest cop, "He threatened me!" On the contrary, I was just trying to explain to him what the unintended consequences of his action would be. The rationales of the individual thief and the tyrant are the same, the only difference being the size of the threat and the greater amount of violence that the government can visit upon its selected victim.

All liberty loving people want is to be left alone whether by the petty thief or the tyrant. The petty thief is generally content with merely stealing your property. The government thief comes to the party prepared to steal everything you have, including your life, in order to enforce its will with overwhelming violence.

This presumption is at the center of every citizen disarmament proposal. They understand that there are millions of us "cold, dead hand types," as I said in my letter to the editor. They understand, if they think it through, that the federal government will have to kill us before we submit to their wishes. They simply don't care. They don't believe that the unintended consequences of this tyrannical proposals will ever touch THEM.

This is, as history has shown, utter foolishness and unfounded conceit. But whatever happens to them, they should understand that it was they, not us, who first plunked the gun of government violence on the table between us, in the wrong-headed idea that we would be as frightened by it as they are.

As all collectivists of every stripe have been throughout the centuries, they are perfectly willing to see millions of folks who disagree with them dead in order to achieve their purposes. Unfortunately for them, such people do not yet understand that Malcolm Reynolds' First Law of Societal Interaction applies to them: "Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill 'em right back."

If the citizen disarmament advocates get what they want, they will.

Understand, I mean.