Jerrold Nadler: Gun-Grabbing Leninist by William Norman Grigg

Jerrold Nadler: Gun-Grabbing Leninist by William Norman Grigg

During a recent Capitol Hill press conference, Rep. Nadler urged his colleagues to support confiscation of high-capacity ammo clips legally obtained by American citizens. When a reporter asked if the military should be allowed to keep its high capacity magazines, Nadler decanted a reply that was pure, unfiltered Leninism:




"One of the definitions of a nation state is that the state has a monopoly on legitimate violence. And the state ought to have a monopoly on legitimate violence…. If the premise of your question is that people are going to resist a tyrannical government by shooting machine guns at American troops, that’s insane."





The unexamined premise of Nadler’s reply is that it is perfectly sane and rational for the segment of society most deeply implicated in the violent deaths of innocent people to have a monopoly on "legitimate" violence. Embedded within that premise is the assumption that the same government that monopolizes violence will have the exclusive privilege of defining "legitimacy," as well. For him, as for totalitarians of all varieties, that which the government does is innately legitimate, and those whom the government decides to kill have an inescapable duty to die.



Nadler’s reply was a more verbose rendition of Lenin’s definition of government: "Power without limit, resting directly on force." The distinction he drew between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" violence brings to mind comments made by Dear Leader Emeritus Bill Clinton in an interview published by Foreign Policy magazine, in which he defined terrorism as "killing and robbery and coercion by people who do not have state authority and go beyond national borders."

The Second Amendment is actually a much worthier document than the Constitution itself. That Amendment served two indispensable purposes. One was to forbid (in concept, if not in execution) the federal government from disarming the state militias, which would (and did) lead to a deadly concentration of power. The second, and more important, purpose of that amendment was to recognize, unambiguously, the individual right to armed self-defense. That right exists independent of government, and cannot be infringed by it. Most importantly, it establishes a critical threshold at which the government relinquishes any claim to legitimacy (at least among those who are willing to grant it such). Any government that seeks to disarm the people is one that can and must be resisted through force of arms. Tax-devouring, ambulatory obscenities like Jerrold Nadler serve a useful function by making vivid and tangible the otherwise abstract evil connoted by the word "government." The reason we have guns is to prevent the likes of Nadler from working their will upon us unopposed.