Arms Control in National Parks and the Roman Empire

A bill just signed into law will permit citizens to carry loaded guns in national parks. This is a huge setback for Gun-Control advocates because it shows that the Democrats, despite being in the majority, are not going to line up with them. A majority in America still favors Second Amendment Rights.

We should spend more time comparing the positions of Gun-Control advocates with those of earlier Centralized Governments. I listened to one Gun-Control Congressmen last night advancing the idea that some camper will be sure to shoot a fellow camper because he mistook him for a bear. You never hear that the Gun Control people want guns out of the hands of citizens in order to keep them from challenging Centralized authority. But read any history of a major autocratic regime and you will find it taking the guns out of the hands of its citizens. On May 10^th I described the Weapon’s Control of 8^th Century Japan (http://www.lawrencehelm.com/2009/05/weapons-control-in-8th-century-japan.html ). Now consider Rome in its later period:

From David Fromkin’s The Way of the World, From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-First Century. On page 78 he writes, “Even those who enjoyed the benefits of the peace that Rome, at the height of her power, brought to the Mediterranean and parts of the Middle east displayed what a historian of the later empire, A. H. M. Jones, has called ‘passive inertia,’ which was probably in large part due to the fact that for generations the population had been accustomed to being protected by a professional army. The civil population was in fact, for reasons of internal security, forbidden to bear arms. . . . Citizens were not expected to fight.’

“According to Jones, ‘The Roman empire seems never to have evoked any active patriotism from the vast majority of its citizens. . . . Rome was to them a mighty and beneficent power which excited their admiration and gratitude, but the empire was too immense to evoke the kind of loyalty which they felt to their own cities.’. . .

“. . . Like Alexander’s empire, Rome’s was created entirely by an army. The commonwealth was not a joining together of people who chose of their own volition to federate and become one. The army garrisons stationed throughout the empire were there to keep invaders out but also to keep Rome’s subjects down. The army was needed not only to defend and attack but also to occupy and police. As Rostovtzeff observed, ‘Without such an army the world-state could not continue to exist, it was bound to fall to pieces. . . .”

COMMENT:

Well this doesn’t sound like anything going on in present-day America – or does it? The Left-Leaning Gun Control advocates have the reputation of being the least patriotic in present day America. Why would they want to remove guns from the hands of the more patriotic Second-Amendment Rights people? .

Imagine a Left-Wing Centralized Government here in the America, a Government setting about to advance all its Welfare State and Socialistic programs. What are such people going to worry about if not the ordinary patriotic non-Socialistic American citizen? Will they sit easy in their seats of power knowing that they want a different form of government then that advocated by our Founding Fathers and that all those Second-Amendment Rights Americans are out there some place taking target practice and then coming home and cleaning their guns while watching Westerns?

Lest a left-wing paranoiac imagine I am intending some sort of threat, let me hasten to say that I am not. I am drawing attention to motives of arms control people in earlier periods and arguing that those same motives inspire the arms control people of America today – not the fear that some camper is going to be mistaken for a bear. Their fear is akin to a coward’s fear when confronted by a more courageous individual: “Someone hold him; so I can do whatever I like.”