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Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.
Sir George Tucker, Blackstone’s Commentaries, 1803
One can hardly argue with the centuries old observation of Sir George Tucker set down in the first American edition of Blackstone's Commentaries on the law. An unarmed populace is subject to brutality and repression from a tyrannical government. The picture of an unarmed youth shot by basij in Iran speaks a thousand words on the topic.
Iran required gun owners to register their weapons in the late 1970's and then banned gun ownership, as opposition to the Shah coallesced. Iran's theocracy has kept that ban in place. As we watch the people in Iran, disarmed, fall to the predations of armed thugs and riot police of the theocracy, I wonder if we should not be arguing that the right to keep and bear arms should pursued as an international human right.
It is the most repressive regimes that seek to ban private ownership of weapons - and the UN. This from Janet Ellen Levy writing in the American Thinker two years ago:
In the international arena, the United Nations is at the forefront of a global movement to limit worldwide gun production and eliminate private firearms ownership. Total disarmament of civilian populations is the U.N. goal. For the past five years, the United Nations has convened an annual, international gun control summit to discuss strategies to forestall the "proliferation of small arms and light weapons." Participating countries have included Iran, China, Algeria, Nigeria and Bangladesh, among others, as well as anti-firearms, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which have pressured governments worldwide to eliminate civilian gun ownership.
The images of today from Iran should hammer home why the more repressive the government, the more the push on their part to disarm their populace. And it should equally hammer home the stark need for people to have an absolute right to own weapons. As James Madison famously said "People should not be afraid of their government. Government should be afraid of their people." It seems to me that "human rights" begins and ends with that observation.
