Judge On Right To Shoot Tyrants, Not Deer

Judge Andrew Napolitano's op-ed piece in The Washington Times is extraordinary and worth reading -- well reasoned and grounded in principles of the law, the Constitution and our hallowed natural rights. Here's an excerpt:

To assure that no government would infringe the natural rights of anyone here, the Founders incorporated Jefferson's thesis underlying the Declaration into the Constitution and, with respect to self-defense, into the Second Amendment. As recently as two years ago, the Supreme Court recognized this when it held that the right to keep and bear arms in one’s home is a pre-political individual right that only sovereign Americans can surrender and that the government cannot take from us, absent our individual waiver.
There have been practical historical reasons for the near universal historical acceptance of the individual possession of this right. The dictators and monsters of the 20th century — from Stalin to Hitler, from Castro to Pol Pot, from Mao to Assad — have disarmed their people. Only because some of those people resisted the disarming were all eventually enabled to fight the dictators for freedom. Sometimes they lost. Sometimes they won.
The principal reason the colonists won the American Revolution is that they possessed weapons equivalent in power and precision to those of the British government. If the colonists had been limited to crossbows that they had registered with the king's government in London, while the British troops used gunpowder when they fought us here, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson would have been captured and hanged.
We also defeated the king's soldiers because they didn’t know who among us was armed, because there was no requirement of a permission slip from the government in order to exercise the right to self-defense.

Click here to read the entire column.

BTW: The first shots of the American revolution were fired to protect the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms.