“We can either live in a paranoid politically correct world frantically trying not to offend the Hitlers and Mohammeds, and blaming their victims when they kill, or we can be free men and women who have chosen to take the power to defend our rights into our own hands.

While a thousand organizations use the Holocaust as a platform for speeches about tolerance, Children Of Jewish Holocaust Survivors [Jews Can Shoot] is conducting firearms training… Freedom is not defended with empty idealism easily perverted into appeasement of evil, but with the force of arms.”

Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish blog

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. Many could well have been avoided mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece... If a few hundred Jewish fighter in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.

Alex Kozinski, Chief Judge, Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
Silveira v. Lockyer, 2003

Habah l'hargecha hashkem l'hargo -- "If someone is coming to kill you, rise against him and kill him first."

Second Amendment

Law Enforcement Officers Are Part of “the People,” Not Above Them

by Doris Wise Montrose on December 28, 2023

“Amici reject the implied libel that the ordinary arms of American peace officers are the weapons of mass killers.”

Two weeks ago, I filed an amicus brief in U.S. District Court in Colorado, in Gates v. Polis, a case challenging the Colorado legislature’s 2013 ban on magazines over 15 rounds. The brief was on behalf of Sheriffs and law enforcement training organizations: the International Law Enforcement Educators and Trainers Association, the Colorado Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors Association, the Western States Sheriffs Association, 10 elected Colorado County Sheriffs, and the Independence Institute (where I work).

Some of the brief explains the practical mechanics of armed self-defense, and why bans on standard magazines do not impair mass shooters, but do endanger ordinary citizens, especially when attacked by multiple criminals. Another part of the brief shows that the key data created by some of the Colorado Attorney General’s expert witnesses is obviously false.

But in this post, I will focus on a more fundamental argument in the brief. The law enforcement amici reject the claim that arms universally recognized as appropriate for ordinary law enforcement officers should be banned for ordinary citizens. The claim is based on the pernicious idea that law enforcement officers are above the people, rather than part of the people. Here are some excerpts from the brief:

By David Kopel

Pre-Attack Behavior of Active Killers

GIBBON, GUNS AND GOVERNMENT

"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. 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. ... 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." — Silveira v Lockyer, (9th Cir. 2003) (Kozinski, J. dissenting.)