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. See Kleinfeld Dissent at 578-579. 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.
My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed — where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.
That is a very powerful statement because it is true on all points.
1. Governments that pervert free and fair elections.
2. Governments who silence opposition and protest
3. Courts without courage
4. An executive that won’t enforce laws
When these fail, there are two options: run or fight.
“My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history.”
With all due respect to his otherwise outstanding opinion, the Left have NOT forgotten these ‘bitter lessons of history’ (Poland, Cambodia, etc.), but rather they are using the fact that they were able to kill millions in the past to set up the US for the same end-game.