"What country before ever existed a century & a half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms."
Thomas Jefferson
"This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the existing Government, they can exercise their constitutional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to dismember or overthrow it."
Abraham Lincoln
“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks. Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.”
Donald Trump
What did Trump say that does not echo what Jefferson and Lincoln said? And why is our perception of Trump's words different from what people used to think about Jefferson and Lincoln?
What do Jefferson, Lincoln, and Trump (and the NRA) have in common? The misconception that guns are tools of liberation.
Here is an excerpt from my book No More Patriots which illustrates what I mean:
... it occurred to me there were factors in play here other than just guns and militia per se. For some reason the whole event reminded me of the following observation made by Audre Lorde many years ago:
"The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change."
The legend of the Minutemen implied that guns were tools of liberation, and as a nation we had previously promoted the private ownership of firearms partly because, in the words of the Second Amendment, they were “necessary to the security of a free State”.
But in reality guns are tools of subjugation, oppression, regime change, and counterinsurgency. They can never “dismantle the master’s house” because as one of the master’s chief tools, they are essential to the very building and maintenance of that house.
The proof of this is writ large in America’s history. How did our ancestors clear North America of its original inhabitants? By giving them guns, liquor, and blankets contaminated with smallpox or the measles. And how do we continue to subjugate the peoples around the world whose natural resources and/or land we covet? By giving them guns, drugs, and HIV/AIDS. Would we have given them guns if firearms were tools of liberation? Of course not.
Every instance in which we gave guns to so-called “freedom fighters” was motivated by a desire for regime change and subjugation. And the result nearly every time was a new regime which oppressed its own people so that our extractive businesses could siphon off the wealth of that nation while its American-armed new rulers kept the local population under control. It was a well-honed strategy which worked everywhere, including right here in the good ol’ U S of A.
No, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Perhaps if people understood that principle, they also would understand why Jefferson, Lincoln, and Trump made the statements they did ... and why all three of them were wrong.
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