The news about American resistance to federal tyranny is getting out – among alternative media sources that don’t follow dinosaur media marching orders.
And that’s an exciting thing to report.
From December 18, 2018 -- when President Trump issued his doubly unconstitutional so-called “Bump Stock Ban” and “Acting Attorney General” Matthew G. Whitaker signed on – to its late March 2019 deadline, the vast, vast majority of bump stock owners have not complied with the federal commands to “turn them in”.
As David Sherfinski reports for The Washington Times:
The federal government collected fewer than 1,000 bump stocks during the run-up to a new ban in March, despite estimates that hundreds of thousands of the devices that mimic machine gun fire are in circulation, according to federal data provided to The Washington Times by the Justice Department.
Sometimes, one sees the dire need for people to use quotation marks more frequently, such as with the term “Justice Department”. But the key in the report is that only a tiny fraction of Americans who legally owned bump stocks complied with the unethical and unconstitutional edict. In fact, the number 1,000 is a wide over-statement, as Sherfinski reveals:
Between the issuance of the final rule banning the devices in December 2018 and April 4, 2019, shortly after the prohibition took effect in late March, 582 bump stocks were “abandoned” to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, according to Justice Department records, and 98 bump stocks were kept as evidence.
That would be fewer than 600, of an estimated 280,000 to 520,000 bump stocks in private hands, meaning that, on the low end of ownership, they received .00219 or 22 hundredths of a percent of the bump stocks in circulation, and, on the high end of ownership, they saw .00115 of the total, or less than twelve hundredths of a percent.
Which gives us important ammunition for our intellectual arsenal.
First, if this small fraction of mostly law-abiding citizens did not comply with a mandate to turn in a firearm accessory, what sensible politician or bureaucrat could possibly expect criminally-minded people to comply with actual guns?
Prohibition fails. When there is a demand, supply will not disappear. People will simply go black market and do not abide by the statute.
Second, the pop-media fear-mongering about bump stocks did produce the unconstitutional federal “ban” so sought by progressives. But it did not instill fear of the devices – or fear of government retribution – the progressives also sought.
Why didn’t it?
Well, first, let’s be sure we cover what bump stocks are.
Bump stocks are ancient Mayan demons that possess guns and make them kill people without being directed by a criminal human mind.
Kidding, of course. They’re firearm attachments that use recoil to allow a trigger to be “pulled” rapidly on semi-autos, making their rounds fire more rapidly. And, similar to my facetious description, in their edict of December, 2018, the gang at the writhingly unconstitutional Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATF), reclassified bump stocks “machine guns”, thus giving them what they think to be cover to ban them under the insultingly titled 1986 “Gun Owners Protection Act”, the unconstitutional claims of “licensing” and in the forbidding “Gun Control Act” of 1968, and the grand-daddy of them all, the “National Firearms Act” of 1934.
It was FDR’s lovely 1934 edict that “banned” new “machine guns” from being sold, and required federal “permission” for a person to build one.
So, of course, the Trump Administration’s BATF simply called a bump stock a machine gun, and, voila.
As “Awr Hawkins” wrote for Brietbart in January of 2018:
The gist of this move is simple — right now bump stocks are not under the purview of the National Firearms Act (1934) because they do not fit the definition of “machine gun.” So, change the meaning of “machine gun” to include them, and they can be banned or stringently regulated by the ATF.
And since belts can be used to do what bump stocks do, the BATF might turn belts into machine guns as well. It’s magic.
But don’t expect the wrongdoers at the BATF to move their magic show to Vegas and ask you to watch voluntarily. Their act is done by force and threat of force. The government will have all the guns – auto, semi-auto, large caliber, small caliber, bombs, tanks, cannons, and so on – and you will be an unarmed, well-behaved serf who complies. Period.
Or, perhaps you won’t.
Given how few people complied to the “bump stock ban”, perhaps there’s hope.
Which brings us to our last three lessons to carry with us.
First, this “ban” was not only carried out in an unconstitutional fashion via BATF “regulatory change”, it is patently unconstitutional regardless of how it was instituted.
If the government wants to play word games and call a non-firearm a “machine gun”, that means the feds and every government entity in this country are forbidden from infringing on the inherent human right to keep and bear one. The Second Amendment is clear.
Second, even if the feds did not pull a Newspeak and redefine a non-machine gun as a machine gun, they would have no more constitutional authority to ban the bump stock anyway. There simply is no provision for the feds to ban any device from sale or peaceful ownership. Some politicians might try to tell you that they have the authority under the “interstate commerce clause” of the Constitution (in Article One, Section Eight), but James Madison – who took the most detailed notes of the Constitutional Convention – noted that the clause was supposed to be a remedial option for Congress to intervene in commercial disputes between the States as governments, not to regulate anything that crosses state borders.
The last lesson we can learn from this powerful refusal to comply with the bump stock ban is that Americans are following in the footsteps of the philosophers whose ideas the Founders used as the bases for the Constitution (and the less dangerous, less centralized, Articles of Confederation, anterior to it). Despite his collectivist tendencies, Greek philosopher Socrates noted that people could defy unjust laws. Aristotle agreed, and attached the principle to the importance of self-defense and property. In the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas expanded the idea, elucidating the principles of Natural Rights and noting that people could defy statutes that ran afoul of Natural Law. John Locke took that idea a step further and said people could rebel against a state that engaged in such statutory activity.
And Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence brought it to its logical conclusion, noting that people had a “duty” to cast off such a government.
Why? Because humans were created by God with inalienable rights, and if one did not defend those rights, he or she was doing a disservice to God.
The right to self-defense, the right to peaceful interaction and trade with others, the right to keep the fruits of one’s labor – all are innate.
People have not complied with the bump stock ban because they have an inherent right to self-defense. Additionally, bump stocks were never “registered/licensed” by the government, so keeping them off the federal radar will have been easy for owners to do.
Already, most new purchases of firearms are syphoned through an unconstitutional “background check”. What might happen when the government demands “registration” of all guns, anywhere in the country?
Will people comply, or will they stand up for their inherent rights?
It’s clear what Jefferson would have recommended.