U.S. Supreme Court destroys two-step review in NYSRPA!

Contents

• Topics
• Welcome
  • Ethics Of Being Armed
  • How Pacifism Is Unethical
  • Negative Rights vs. Positive Rights
  • "The state has a monopoly on force."
  • From Frederick the Great to Hitler: The Great Man Theory
• ls-lR: list of all files
• Other issues
  • Permissions
  • File types and names
    • Table of file types
  • File currency
  • Disclaimer
  • Web/FTP site no longer at Portal
• Acknowledgments

Welcome!

Welcome to my collection of mostly firearms information. I hope you find this archive useful for educating yourself and others about the issues, for writing letters to the editor and your legislators, and for finding out how to get involved in defending your freedom. Remember that the battle for our freedom is won at the voting booth and in the hearts and minds of the undecided. I also hope that you will work on election campaigns and get your friends and family registered and out to vote; this is how to preserve your freedoms.

Be sure to check out some of the highlights of my archive. (Includes a link to my Guide to Internet Firearms Information Resources.) Use the Topics to look around the archive generally; there's lots of good stuff.

I have not built indices for every topic, but with WWW, viewing files is easy so browse around. Hopefully, descriptive file names and reasonable organization will help you find things. If you have questions or comments, email me.

Ethics Of Being Armed

Being armed is being rational.

If two rational people are armed, there is little benefit and great risk from them committing aggression against each other. Therefore they can obtain mutual benefit best by using reasoned persuasion instead.

Being armed is being free.

If you are not armed, then your continued existence in the face of attack often depends on someone else who is armed. Like a serf living under a knight or king, samurai or emperor, you do not own your own life if you can't defend it effectively. You can not be free if you are not armed.

Being armed is being responsible.

The police cannot physically protect everyone, and they have no legal liability to do so. If they did, then every crime victim could sue the police for failing to protect them. The only person truly responsible for your defense is you. Firearms are the safest and most effective means of defense. Being defenseless is being irresponsible.

Being armed is being ethical.

Having the means and ability to defend your life and the lives of those around you is ethically superior to being helpless to prevent harm to yourself or others. Being unarmed is unethical.

How Pacifism Is Unethical

Pacifism is often upheld as being ethically superior to self-defense, as if forceful resistance to crime or tyranny lowers oneself to the level of the attacker. This presupposes that all use of force is equally unethical, but this is incorrect. If offensive force is unethical, then defensive force must be ethical because:

• Not countering offensive force with defensive force rewards the attacker, thus encouraging its use. In the most extreme case, the defender is left dead and the attacker is left alive to profit from the attack, spread the behavior, and generally benefit from the attack. The game theory, economics and logic of this should be clear. It's what has fueled invasions and conquest throughout the human experience.
• If the defender had the opportunity to stop the attacker but did not, then by her act of omission she has enabled the attacker to continue his aggressive behavior against others. In the case of serial murderers, lack of defense may enable or at least fail to prevent future attacks on others. In that way pacifism is culpability for murder. The same principle applies to aggressive countries that invade other countries, i.e., imperialism.
• A credible defense discourages attack and therefore favors and maintains peace since it raises the costs to an aggressor. If one truly values peace, then one should support having a credible defense including the potential use of defensive force in order to counter attacks.
• Similarly, being defenseless encourages attack and discourages peace by lowering the obstacles to successful attack. If committing aggression is unethical, then being unprepared or unable to stop it is also unethical. Therefore, pacifism is unethical.

P. S. A translation of the ten commandments that says "you shall not kill" is incorrect. In Hebrew, the Bible says "you shall not murder." The two meanings are crucially different. The latter proscribes attack. It does not proscribe potentially lethal defense against attack.

Negative Rights vs. Positive Rights

A common way to differentiate negative from positive rights is that negative rights belong to you and can't be taken away, while positive rights require some resources to be (taken away from someone else in order for them to be) provided for you. Negative rights don't have a direct cost to the government/collective. In contrast paying for resources needed to provide for positive rights could come from the value of resources extracted from the earth, taxes that you pay, or taxes on your time such as forced labor in government owned farms or factories under communism or socialism.

Negative rights are fundamentally different from positive rights. Negative rights are restrictions on government power. Positive rights are government power exercised as reduction in everyones' freedom in order to redistribute wealth, e.g., socialism.

Under some systems of thought, such as English enlightenment which underpins America's founding, or most forms of libertarianism which arguably also underpins America's idealogical origins, positive rights aren't rights at all since they require using the (threat of) force of government power to take resources from people in order to pay for providing those rights. It can be argued that such use of force is fundamentally incompatible with a free society. Certainly it is incompatible with libertarianism which proscribes the initiation of force as unethical.

In practical terms, it's nearly possible to work in some rural or suburban areas without a personally owned automobile. Does this mean car repair is a fundamental right? Should you be forced to pay for my car repairs so that I can work? To me car repair is a service that you pay for, just like health care is a service that you pay for. I have no right to use the force of government to take your money to pay for either. Positive rights are no rights without the threat of force against you. Negative rights, in restraining government power, do not entail initiating force against others. They protect inalienable natural rights you have, including the right to not have force used against you to pay for someone else's positive rights.

As a more concrete example, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights mentions both positive and negative rights; it presupposes socialism. The Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States of America recognizes pre-existing, God-given (Natural) negative rights. The Bill of Right is a set of restrictions on government power. It does not mention any positive rights because they are fundamentally incompatible with freedom.

"The state has a monopoly on force."

• The concept of a state monopoly on force traces mostly to the Treaty of Westphalia, which generally established the sovereign states that led to modern countries. The Treaty of Westphalia also gave only national governments the right to make war on other countries. At the time, it meant that private armies such as those belonging to a minor noble lord or warlord could not invade other countries; only the national army could do that. Arguably the Treaty of Westphalia applies to the external relationships between countries and not to the lives of individual civilians within a given country. (Those civilians would be subjects of their monarch, which doesn't apply to free individuals in a nominally free state such as the United States, or arguably in other modern democracies.)
• Applied to individuals as opposed to countries, a state monopoly on force is contrary to both Individual Sovereignty under the Enlightenment, and Natural Law. Both are bases for the concept of representative government of the United States. Under Natural Law, individuals have a fundamental right to protect their lives and property, and under Individual Sovereignty, individuals are inherently free and not subject to or owned by a government or king. Free individuals only allow a government to exist by giving their consent to be governed. The government is the servant, and the people are its masters, not the other way around, as in (political systems derived from) monarchies. Even some Europeans today don't fully appreciate this difference.
• If you're being attacked, you have a natural right to defend your life. You don't have to wait for the police to show up before attempting to stop an immediate threat to life. That's probably a good thing since the several minutes it can take for police to arrive is more than enough time for a criminal to harm or kill you or your loved ones.
• You have a natural right to try to preserve your life. Your life belongs to you, and you are responsible for it. Unlike feudal serfs or slaves, you are not property belonging to a government or king. The government has no general responsibility to protect your life. You do. You can't do that if the state has a monopoly on all force, including force in defense of self. You can't do that safely or effectively if the government has a monopoly on the means of coercive force, i.e., firearms. Firearms are measurably the safest and most effective tools of defense against violent crime.

All of the major genocides of the 20th century were executed by governments with an effective and deliberate monopoly on force. As George Mason said in the debates about the U.S. Constitution: "to disarm the people - that was the best and most effectual way to enslave them." As we've seen from the 20th century, it also turns out to be the most effective way to genocide them. All the major dictators of the 20th century who murdered tens of millions of people systematically disarmed them first.

From Frederick the Great to Hitler: The Great Man Theory

The occasion was flying into Germany for a trade conference. A left-leaning acquaintance of German-American ancestry posed the question of how Germany went from a good ruler such as Frederick the Great to a bad one such as Hitler in the span of not many generations. I didn't have a good answer for her at the time, but as a libertarian, the answer should have been more obvious: putting faith in great leaders instead of the people.

By most accounts Frederick the Great lived up to his reputation and was a truly great leader. When he invaded other countries, the great warrior personally led his armies, and he shared the conquered wealth with his people. He was a very good musician, excellent composer of music and talented artist. He was tolerant of and protected minorities such as Jews. He was a scholar of multiple topics. He significantly supported and advanced education, the arts, science and engineering, helping make Germany a world leader in them. He certainly fed into the idea that a "great leader" could improve the lives of his people and the destiny of his nation.

Modern leaders who have created significant improvements for their people such as Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore also feed into this idea. Like Frederick the Great, Lee could be considered a "benevolent dictator." While it's true that under some circumstances a "great leader" can do some remarkably good things, it's also true that creating a system of government that concentrates too much power in the hands of one person can be dangerous.

If Frederick the Great in any way led people to putting their faith in "great leaders," then he may have at least indirectly helped pave the way for Hitler by planting the idea that a leader could guide and benefit a nation and its people from a position of strength and great power. Frederick created a prototype that is seldom filled so well, but that in contrast has led to mass murder on unprecedented scales by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and unfortunately many others in the past century. Hitler actively and publically likened himself to Frederick the Great, and took comfort in his writings during the last days of his life in his bunker under Berlin.

The great leader principle is also a premise of the left, which presupposes that if at least competent leaders and bureaucrats ran the government and economy, for example under communism, then things like justice and the economy would work optimally and Karl Marx's promise of paradise would be achieved. In practice this almost never seems to work out well for the left, and it's the people who suffer, while the leaders collect riches and consolidate power further.

Similar arguments are made for more government control of our economic and private lives in modern democracies, particularly in the left's desire to control the economy and regulate and restrict private enterprise, but also in the right's desire to control private lives. A wise leader and her army of bureaucrats will serve public interests better than individuals and private organizations can. They're smarter and know what's best for you better than you do. It's why they deserve to be in control over your life. They are your betters. They are your deserved masters.

Remember Thomas Jefferson's riddle about representative democracy in his First Inaugural Address: "Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question." It seems that history has answered the question prevailingly and repeatedly in the negative, but we seem not to have noticed or cared.

List of all files

ls-lR

recursive listing of all files in my archive (currently about 170k)

ls-lR.Z

UNIX compress of ls-lR

ls-lR.gz

GNU Zip of ls-lR

Other issues

Copyrights and Permissions

Some material here is included with the express permission of the author or publisher. Often it is stipulated for non-commercial use. That means do not sell the information here, for example on a CDROM, unless you contact the publisher or edit each article enough to qualify for fair use.

File types and names

I've rationalized filenames from BBSes. In particular, text files end in .txt instead of .ext and other bizarre endings. WordPerfect files end in .wp? Some file names are also changed. For example, gunsall.zip from GunTalk BBS is rkba-faq.zip. The contained zipfile is changed from gun.faq to rkba.faq I was reluctant to change names because doing so de-references them to the original, but I think my names are much more descriptive. The contents are not changed.

Zip files are compressed in either Zip 1.x or Zip 2.x format. For DOS text files see dos2unix and unix2dos UNIX text file converters.

Table of file types

.html

World Wide Web

.txt

DOS, ANSI, or ASCII text

.dos

DOS text (cr + lf at end of each line)

.ps

PostScript

.zip

Zip archive

.exe

DOS executable: program or self-extracting archive

.Z

UNIX 32-bit Lempel-Ziv compress

.uue

UNIX uuencode: binary files represented as text for mailing

.tar

UNIX tar: from TApe aRchive, but really just an archive file

.doc

plaintext or Microsoft Word

.rtf

Microsoft Rich Text Format: very portable, captures a lot

.pub

Windows Microsoft Publisher

.pm

PageMaker

.wp?

WordPerfect, DOS or Windows

File currency

Note that I do not automatically expire files. If you have any updates or corrections, please send them to me.

Disclaimer

Files here are presented as is. I make every reasonable attempt to check and verify information, but I cannot guarantee the accuracy of every piece of information. It is always wise and a good practice to independently verify any facts you plan to use.

Web/FTP site no longer at Portal

There are occasional references in some of the files here and elsewhere to the web/ftp site when it was at Portal. The Portal site no longer exists. The correct URL for this site is now: https://rkba.org/

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Dave Stine, James A. Donald and others for encouraging me to check out WWW several years ago. Thanks also to those who build and use the Web and the 'Net, for bringing the world closer to freedom and enlightenment. In practical terms WWW is a tremendous advance in making use of the Internet; it's also a tremendous advance in making the Internet useful to the world.

I hope the information here will encourage you to make your feelings known to your representatives, the media and the people around you. Educating the people around you is the only way we're going to keep our rights.