[Powderman]

I really believe the American Congress will call for a confiscation, and unlike in Australia, there won’t be any compensation or fair compensation to gun owners. It will be done quick and cheap.

I took an oath--a few times over. It stated that I would support and defend the Constitution of the United States, against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

The people in DC would do very well to remember the last time that was tried on these shores.

The British Army sent a detachment to confiscate arms, powder and shot from a group of colonials.

They went to a small town called Concord; in front of them were some Colonists--who stood armed and ready.

On April 19, 1775, one Major John Pitcairn, second in command of the British, said--in an effort to prevent bloodshed:

"Disperse, you damned rebels! Disperse!"

I believe we all know how that worked out.

In the ensuing contretemps, the United States of America was born--in bloody revolution. Some of those colonists were our Founding Fathers. They authored our Constitution, and enumerated and recognized certain rights, which were noted as our Bill of Rights.

One of those rights is the Second Amendment. It was never about sporting purposes. In short--our Founding Fathers knew that the only way to ensure our continuing freedom was to ensure that our citizens were armed.

I have seldom seen a more thorough articulation of what our firearms mean than an opinion, authored by a Justice of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, cited here in an excerpt:

The majority falls prey to the delusion — popular in some circles — that ordinary people are too careless and stupid to own guns, and we would be far better off leaving all weapons in the hands of professionals on the government payroll. But the simple truth — born of experience — is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people. Our own sorry history bears this out: Disarmament was the tool of choice for subjugating both slaves and free blacks in the South. In Florida, patrols searched blacks' homes for weapons, confiscated those found and punished their owners without judicial process. See Robert J. Cottrol & Raymond T. Diamond, The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration, 80 Geo. L.J. 309, 338 (1991). In the North, by contrast, blacks exercised their right to bear arms to defend against racial mob violence. Id. at 341-42. As Chief Justice Taney well appreciated, the institution of slavery required a class of people who lacked the means to resist. See Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 417, 15 L.Ed. 691 (1857) (finding black citizenship unthinkable because it would give blacks the right to "keep and carry arms wherever they went"). A revolt by Nat Turner and a few dozen other armed blacks could be put down without much difficulty; one by four million armed blacks would have meant big trouble.

All too many of the other great tragedies of history — Stalin's atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few — were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. 570*570 Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. See Kleinfeld Dissent at 578-579. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.

My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed — where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.

(Enphasis added)

--Silveira v. Lockyer, 328 F. 3d 567 - Court of Appeals, 9th Circuit 2003

Ladies and gentlemen, make no mistake. I will NOT lay down my arms. Nor will I yield them. Nor will I participate in any activity to unlawfully confiscate these arms.

And any one who wants, can take that as they will. I am an American, not a subject. I bow to no one. Too many good men and women have laid their lives upon the cause of freedom for me to yield without a whimper.

I have faith, still, that our differences can be resolved at the legislative and judicial level. I have faith that we can change our circumstances with the rule of law, and by the ballot box as long as we exercise our right to vote.

But I am an American. And to simply roll over and show my belly in the face of this is not in my nature, nor in my upbringing. I will not let some petty, scared people dictate my future nor my actions. I--and my son, and my wife--are Americans. We will not forget nor abrogate that privilege.

For those who wish to do so, please--go to this site's library, and read the essay "Metal and Wood" by Dennis Bateman. We have not lost yet, my fellow citizens. Let's stop acting like we have.