HALBROOK’S “THE RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS” IS MORE THAN A SCHOLARLY TREATISE, IT SERVES AS A WARNING: A NATION PRESERVED OR A NATION EXTINCT

By Roger J. Katz, Co-Founder
Arbalest Group, LLC

Many Americans know Stephen Halbrook as a foremost legal expert on the Nation’s Second Amendment. It is a designation richly deserved, and his latest book, “The Right To Bear Arms,” couldn’t come at a more opportune and pressing time in our Nation’s history as the American people find themselves, at this moment, at a most perilous crossroads.

The central theme of Halbrook’s comprehensive, well-researched book is that the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution is the linchpin of a free Constitutional Republic and of a sovereign people.

Since the exercise of the “Right to Bear Arms” is the foundation for a free Constitutional Republic and a sovereign people, then the only reasonable inference to be drawn from a reading of “The Right To Bear Arms,” is that our Nation cannot continue to exist as a free Constitutional Republic with an American people as the sole and ultimate ruler of their Government, absent robust exercise of the right codified in the Second Amendment.

Exercise of the Right to Bear Arms is, then, not merely useful to the preservation of the Nation as a free Constitutional Republic and to an American people as the Nation’s sole sovereign, it is intrinsic to and therefore essential to the maintenance of both. Halbrook knows this, and his book is a forceful voice in the assent of this point.

Those forces intent on destroying a free Republic and a sovereign people know this too. That’s why they seek unabashedly and with single-minded, cold, callous intent to remove the Right from the Nation’s lexicon; to eradicate the Right from the U.S. Constitution; to erase the Right to Bear Arms from Americans’ ancestral memory.

This isn’t mere supposition. It is fact. It is part and parcel of an elaborate, diabolically conceived, meticulously crafted, and assiduously implemented campaign of those elements dead set on destroying American society as it presently exists and a free Republic as the Constitution mandates. This concerted campaign of destruction is being carried out by seditious actors both inside Government and outside it. In the desire to achieve their goal, they are deliberately fomenting discord and dissension among the American people. They may talk about unifying Americans. They intend the opposite.

Through a massive and unprecedented campaign of psychological conditioning and manipulation of Americans’ thought processes, mass confusion ensues. That is their intention. That is the hoped-for result. And, if they are successful, hysteria and mass psychosis will result. That will lead inevitably, inexorably to societal discord and upheaval, complete societal collapse, and thence to the dismantling, dismemberment, and dissolution of a free Constitutional Republic.

Media propagandists are relying on intellectual naivety to warp, subvert, and corrupt the innate moral goodness of Americans, filling their minds with bankrupt political and social ideologies of Collectivism, Multiculturalism, and Moral Relativism, with the aim of creating in the American psyche, a marked disdain for, and even abject hatred and abhorrence of the Nation’s rich cultural history, heritage, and Judeo-Christian ethic.

It is in this frame of heightened acuity to the imminent danger facing the Nation and its people, that Halbrook’s book, “The Right to Bear Arms,” takes on added importance.

Halbrook captures well the imminent peril that besets the Country through the words that comprise the subtitle of his book. He poses the question:

“A Constitutional Right of the People or a Privilege of the Ruling Class?” The question, although merely rhetorical to Americans who cherish the Right, would be considered pertinent to those who don’t cherish it.

Framing the subtitle of the book as a question rather than as an exclamatory sentence is no accident or mere afterthought.

By posing the subtitle as a question Halbrook tells Americans they have an important—indeed, crucial—choice to make today, just as the framers of the Constitution had a crucial choice to make almost 250 years ago, when, after having emerged victorious after a hard-fought war for independence from tyranny, they found themselves faced with a new, similarly arduous task: hammering out the form of the central Government of the new Nation—the form of the U.S. Government—a “Federal” Government that would not eventually transform into a hideous, rapacious tyrant like the one they fought gallantly and ferociously against, and, surprisingly, to both their British adversary and other nations, to their foe’s embarrassing, ignominious, and thorough defeat.

The answer to the question, to whom does the Right to Bear Arms apply, was clear enough to the founders, but it was the import of the question that lay at the heart as to why the Right was etched in the Constitution. The framers of the Constitution had to acknowledge that the sanctity and well-being of a free Constitutional Republic and the sovereignty of the American people would rest, ultimately, less in the checks and balances, placed in the Articles of the U.S. Constitution, demarcating the distinct and limited roles of each of Three co-equal Branches, and more, much more, in the incorporation of the “Right to Bear Arms” in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights.

And therein rests the singular importance of Halbrook’s latest book, “The Right To Bear Arms.” The main title of the book serves not only as an apt, brief descriptor of the nature of the content of the book, but operates as the raison d’être for the author’s expenditure of significant time and effort to write it.

Halbrook’s book is  well-researched, thorough, and yet markedly readable and it serves as a cohesive, coherent, and comprehensive, response to those academicians, news and media groups, members of Congress, bureaucrats, and Billionaire funded, organized, “grassroots” organizations desirous of forsaking a free Constitutional Republic, in favor of a form of Government that serves what the founders of the Republic sought fervently to avoid: the interests of privileged, wealthy aristocrats, a few “elite.” Such an idea was anathema to the founders, as Halbrook makes plain.

The “Right of the people to Bear Arms” is inextricably tied to the fate of the Country.

The question pertaining to whom that Right belongs that might seem rhetorical to Americans in the past, and that would seem so to tens of millions of Americans alive today, as well, who hold dear to the sacred and natural Right of the People to Bear Arms, is perceived, though, as a legitimate question to many millions more Americans: those millions who, unfortunately, have fallen prey to the endless stream and chatter of media propaganda.

Those brainwashed Americans view the Right to Bear Arms as a thing archaic; old-hat; anachronistic; something that may have been meaningful to Americans living in a bygone era of our Nation’s history, perhaps, but a “Right” that has no relevance today; a “Right,” indeed, that should be thought of merely as a mere privilege at best; something to be taken as detrimental to the kind of America the destroyers of a free Republic wish to bring about if such “Right” were continued to be exercised en mass.

It is to this group of Americans, especially, that Halbrook’s book, “The Right To Bear Arms,” should be required reading, quite apart from lawyers, jurists, and legal scholars; professors of American history, military history, sociology, anthropology, and political science; and those lay members of the public who do cherish the Right to Bear Arms, and who would obviously be most drawn to Halbrook’s new book.

Lest there be any mistake, Halbrook makes clear at the outset to whom the inviolate Right to Bear Arms belongs. He writes,

“The Second Amendment refers to ‘the right of the people.’ And who are “the people?” The term ‘people,’ was defined as ‘persons’ in general . . . and the people was defined as ‘the commonalty,’ as distinct from men of rank. . . .”

The Right to Bear Arms, as understood by the framers of the Constitution, belongs, then, to the common people. It is not a thing to be enjoyed by and was never conceived by the framers of the Constitution, as a thing accruing to the benefit of a privileged few.

The underlying theme of the book is thus directed to the commendable task of staking a reasonable, rational claim in whom this “Right to Bear Arms” belongs when legions of naysayers that control the Nation’s many airwaves, newspapers, periodicals, and social media organizations and enterprises, today, say otherwise.

But Halbrook also makes the pertinent point that the“Right to Bear Arms” always existed in the commonalty. It isn’t something arising only through ratification of the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment codifies the Right to Bear Arms. It isn’t the progenitor of it. The Right precedes the embodiment of it in the Second Amendment.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution understood that the “Right to Bear Arms” is a PREEXISTING RIGHT of the commoner. It was never perceived as a thing “invented” by the framers. Halbrook makes this point explicitly, cogently. “‘The right of the people’ is significant. The term ‘right’ expresses a preexisting right, not a new right invented for the Bill of Rights. To declare that ‘the right’ to do or be free of something shall not be abridged, infringed, or violated presupposes that the right already exits.”

But what is one to make of the dependent “militia” clause? Halbrook addresses that question as well, and, cogently and succinctly, lays to rest, any residual notion that some scholars may have, concerning the meaning of the “militia” clause as it appears in the Second Amendment. 

Halbrook states,

“If keeping and bearing arms was a ‘right’ only of the militia when in actual service, the Framers certainly would have so stated. It would have been odd when guaranteeing ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms,’ had the Framers really meant ‘the right of the militia to keep and bear arms when authorized and activated by government.”

Halbrook’s explanation might serve, inter alia, as a tacit and not so subtle remonstration directed to a remark by retired Associate Justice John Paul Stevens who had called at one point in time for outright repeal of the Second Amendment, knowing full well the plain meaning of it. Stevens has also suggested, in the alternative, that the language of the Second Amendment should be modified. In his book, “Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution,” the retired Associate Justice suggests altering the Second Amendment to read, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms when serving in the militia shall not be infringed.”

The Framers would be aghast at the audaciousness of anyone, let alone a retired jurist, who would suggest tampering with the “Right to Bear Arms” and who would do so blatantly, shamelessly, who would dare deny to the people—the commonalty—the Right that properly belongs to them, only; that exists inherently in them; and must remain always with them; to be exercised by them, in their individual capacity, without prior restraint, constraint, or condition. In fact, Stevens’ suggested modification of the Second Amendment would simply reduce it to a nullity. This is something Stevens knows full well, and that is no doubt his intent in calling for a modification of it, in lieu of outright de jure repeal of it. De jure or De Facto repeal of the Second Amendment doesn’t matter to him. He just wants to be done with it, as he fears an armed citizenry no less so than the privileged ruling elite whom he represents and whom Stevens knows can never successfully corral and thereby restrain and contain the commonalty in whom true sovereignty truly belongs and in whom the founders meant for sovereignty over Nation, alone, to remain.

Much of Halbrook’s book details the history behind the Right and serves as an interesting backdrop to the imperative for it. The book makes for a fascinating read that brings us to the present day with the seminal Heller and McDonald case holdings that Halbrook also addresses.

At the end of the book, as one contemplates the captivating, indisputable facts detailed in it, one comes to an understanding of why the Right to Bear Arms must belong to the commonalty and must never be wielded by a privileged few.

If Americans allow the rhetoric of today to cloud their judgment, this Country will truly devolve into a tyranny of the aristocratic elite, even if that fact is masked in the emotionally charged, false, even ridiculous, rhetoric of the claimed need to repair the damage done to a “racially oppressed victim class” by a so-called “white privileged racial oppressor.”

Such is the purport behind the Marxist derived “critical race theory” that the secretive powerful, privileged ruling class has induced a seditious media to thrust into the public domain and onto the psyche of Americans, and such is the purport behind The New York Times’ fictional “1619 Project” that has insinuated itself into school curricula across the Nation. It is all a hoax. It is all an elaborate, fanciful fabrication, but it is one carefully cultivated and perpetuated through a dutiful, obsequious media and Congress, permeating throughout society, and lavishly funded by that very secretive, inordinately powerful and wealthy “privileged ruling class” that the founders were most concerned about. And it is this dangerous “privileged ruling class,” the ruling aristocratic elite, that Halbrook informs the reader of, and it is this “privileged ruling class,” against whom the American commonalty must forever be wary. 

The aim of this “privileged ruling class” is not to unshackle a purported “victim race” but rather to shackle and subjugate the American commonalty in totality, a seeming black oppressed and a seeming white oppressor alike. The founders would have seen through the subterfuge. Their descendants would do well to see through the subterfuge, too.

Americans, the Nation’s commonalty, must remain true to their heritage or face perpetual subjugation and stagnation; and that will happen if they fall for deceptive, emotionally charged fallacious rhetoric. The Right to Bear Arms must remain, sanctified and inviolate, a preexisting, essential Right inhering within the essence of the commonalty, a thing not be reserved to, preserved by and enjoyed by nor meant to be reserved to, and preserved by and enjoyed by a privileged few elite, who would then convert the Right to Bear Arms into a mechanism of oppression and repression, a mechanism to be turned on the American commonalty to secure the blind obedience of, dominance over, and obeisance from that very commonalty. And therein lies tyranny, regained.

To prevent this, the commonalty MUST INSIST on its PREEXISTENT innate Right to Bear Arms. It will lose everything the founders have bequeathed to it, and everything Americans have since fought and died for, to keep, if they don’t insist on their preexistent Right to Bear Arms, endowed to them by the Loving, All-Powerful, All-knowing, and Morally Perfect Divine Creator.

It is either this or that: To Keep the Right or Lose The Right for all time. It is THE ONE or it is THE OTHER. It is NOT BOTH nor can it be NEITHER. And there can be no compromise on this, no half measure. IT IS ALL OR NOTHING AT ALL.

One sees this clearly enough, and clearly laid out, upon a reading of “The Right To Bear Arms.”

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Copyright © 2021 Roger J Katz (Towne Criour), Stephen L. D’Andrilli (Publius) All Rights Reserved.