The End of Gun Control: 1.35 This is The Way
The difference between feudal Japan's samurai & citizen-warriors in a free state is the rights & responsibilities of a being armed are not restricted to a class or caste but apply to the whole people.
The great samurai swordsman Miyamoto Musashi wrote in his influential Book of Five Rings that, The Way is in training. Of course, Musashi was referring to warriors in the latter stages of Japan’s feudal era yet also wrote about general character-building principles that are transferrable to any skill, occupation, or age.
The term “bushi” denotes a warrior in Japanese and is composed of two ideographic characters, or kanji. The latter of the two “shi”, in this case, means a gentleman, scholar, a member of a group, or a well – respected professional. Someone who is loyal, righteous, honorable, and just is known as a “gi-shi”, especially those who put themselves in jeopardy to uphold morality or justice.
For example, there is a famous story about an independent samurai militia company that stayed loyal to their oaths and each other even as their group was decimated on the losing side of the war that shaped Japan’s entrance into modernity. It is known as the Mibu Gishi Den.
This characterization could also apply to a citizen or member in good standing within a political body, such as what is required to secure a free state. Every able-bodied citizen should be a Gishi, organized, armed, and disciplined to execute the laws, repel invasions, and suppress insurrections. That is, each citizen acts out of a sense of duty and belonging to actively participate in the operations of self-government, where it matters most: contributing to security, justice, and ensuring adherence to constitutional order.
While the era of feudal warriors may be over, and the political-economic system that supported the samurai as a tax-funded, legally restricted caste is obsolete, the ideals of citizen-warriors contributing to security and justice with lethal capacities is quite appropriate in a free society. Indeed, it is necessary to the security of a free state as the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution makes abundantly clear. That the citizenry is derelict of the duty to ‘execute the laws’ and, instead, has misplaced faith in politicians and bureaucrats to fulfill these crucial functions, is why there is so much lawlessness and disorder currently.
The key difference between the samurai of feudal Japan and the citizen-warriors of a free state is that the rights and responsibilities of a being armed are not legally restricted to a class or caste but universally applicable to the entire citizenry. To allow any subset of the population, regardless of what titles they hold or costumes they wear, to grasp exclusive privileges to themselves is to abolish equal justice under law.
Further, unlike the samurai of Japan’s later medieval period (or the Spartans of ancient Greece for that matter), citizen-warriors in a free state do not subsist off of the compulsory taxation of a slave or peasant class. The Framers understood that a ‘standing army’, or the extended ‘defense establishment’ and the attendant ‘defense industrial and technology base’ of the current era was anathema to liberty. The very existence of these unconstitutional security institutions, feeding off of the tax-paying public while pursuing their own ends, cannot comport with a free society.
Remember what I call the Ruler’s Dilemma: Political actors must continually access ever more resources to buy support from those who will help maintain their ‘plenipotentiary position’, the ability to make choices on how political power is exercised. Yet, political actors have no resources of their own and their activities to do not create wealth. All resources, particularly in modern social democracies, are derived through taxation, the coercive expropriation of other people’s property.
In fact, politics is a negative sum function in a system designed to produce security. Private property cannot be secured by institutions that operate by confiscating the property of their clients. Just imagine if a contracted security provider, say at a gated community, tried to offer such terms during contract negotiations. Absurd!
Security and justice providers are, indeed, entitled to remuneration and just compensation for their services. This is equally applicable to governments and governmental employees, as Samuel Adams articulated in 1772. However, as Adams points out, it is the community served that assesses the ‘stipulated price’ paid for these ‘common defense’ services.
Nowadays, there is no stipulated price for security and justice services provided by the current governmental arrangement. There are no fixed boundaries for governmental activity, with most spending wholly outside the bounds of defending life, liberty, or property, and citizens are charged by tax ‘rates’ rather than a firm price. One could reasonably argue that only a tiny fraction of current military spending is directed toward the actual “common defense” of the United States and instead gets squandered on foreign misadventures to the benefit of the Military Industrial Congressional Complex.
Without a known price point, the citizen clients of tax-funded ‘civil servants’ are unable to calculate the value of the services rendered. Again, imagine trying to figure out if installing an alarm system in your home or office with a company that refuses to tell you how much the installation or monthly monitoring service will cost. Further, the terms of service, such as hours of coverage or the included number of physical responses to alarms per month, remain nebulous and subject to constant change.
Who in their right mind would hire such a firm? Would you?
Constitutional order, the contract stipulating the terms of service among the people and the provider of governmental services, does not rely on such nonsensical propositions that would allow free reign to the political caste. Assuming so inverts the flow of legitimacy and makes the servants into masters and the source of authority, the people, into subjects.
Restoring constitutional order, where government serves the security needs of the people and not the enrichment of the political caste or the coddling of criminals, requires placing the hilt of the sword of justice squarely, and literally, into the hands of the citizenry. Doing so, as designed by the institutional arrangements of the Supreme Law of the Land, limits the political caste’s access to the instruments of state power and rightfully restores We The People as the proper source and wielder of political power.
Whether George Mason intended this in 1788 during the Virginia ratification debates, by stating that the militia consisted of the whole people, “except for few public officials”, is unknown. However, excluding tax-funded office holders from wielding control over the means of force is the prudent message of his phrase.
For, as much as bootstrapping entrepreneurs with “skin in the game” are commendable in the private sector, the moral hazard inversely launched by political monopoly is to be condemned with equal enthusiasm. While the republican theory behind dividing the general government into the legislative, executive, and judicial branches was intended to prevent abuses of power, everyone drawing their sustenance through taxation has an incentive for greater property expropriation, and in practice gladly conspire with each other to expand the size and scope of the state.
This is why the fact that We The People are the government, and not the politicians, bureaucrats, or cronies that have hijacked the institutions, needs affirmation and actualization. That is the real purpose of the Second Amendment, the security of a free state, where the people self-govern with representatives subordinate to the real source of authority…and not the other way around as it is now. It is time to right the ship of state and dissolve the unconstitutional arrangements that have allowed rights infringements, ‘gun control’, and every other form of property expropriation to arise.
The right to keep and bear arms, as well as the possession of every other kind of property, will never be safe until the legal theory and institutional configurations are corrected.
Of course, this is a tall order, a herculean task in fact. The path to liberty is perilous and requires faith as much as courage. The potential for betrayal is high. The likelihood of slander, subterfuge, and sabotage is assured, and progress is uncertain. Yet, eternal vigilance is, indeed, the price of liberty.
So, if you want to see The End of Gun Control, be prepared and hold fast. We The People carved free and independent states out of the tyranny of an illegitimate monarchy and then constituted a republic to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. It is our right and duty to assert for ourselves in the present, and then pass down to future generations, a ‘more perfect union’ where people can be secure in their lives, liberties, and properties.
Again, arms are both the means and end to securing liberty. Being organized, armed, and disciplined to execute the law, repel invasions, and suppress insurrections is The Way. It is not optional but necessary to the security of a free state.
It is time for each individual to intellectually, spiritually, and actually, like Alexander the Great, cut the Gordian Knot of state servility and, claim their right to rule as sovereigns over their lives and destiny. The great only appear great because we are on our knees. Let us rise.