US 2nd Amendment Under Assault, Freedom Firearms Guns Defense

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A Distributed Capacity for Violence: A Brief History of Weapons
Technology and Political Power

https://ammo.com/articles/distributed-capacity-for-violence

https://ammo.com/articles/us-constitution-interactive
https://ammo.com/articles/founding-fathers-quotes-second-amendment-guns-keep-and-bear-arms
https://ammo.com/articles/founding-fathers-quotes
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-history-of-rome/id261654474
https://ammo.com/articles/parents-guide-to-us-constitution
https://ammo.com/articles/atomic-bomb-history-how-america-came-to-possess-use-nuclear-weapons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shifa_pharmaceutical_factory
https://ammo.com/articles/police-militarization-weapons-of-war-darpa-surveillance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helots
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M4_Sherman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Springfield_Model_1861
https://www.army-technology.com/projects/raytheon-xos-2-exoskeleton-us/
https://ammo.com/articles/asymmetrical-warfare-4gw-americas-domestic-viet-cong
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_first_use
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/04/cramer-the-pandemic-led-to-a-great-wealth-transfer.html
https://ammo.com/articles/war-on-suburbs-how-hud-housing-policies-became-weapon-for-social-change


The Constitution contains a powerful set of ideals and a wise system
of governance, based on a deep reading of classical and medieval
history as well as Renaissance philosophy. However, none of this
matters if no system of force is in place to keep and defend the
Constitution.

Ultimately, this what the 2nd Amendment is about: A distributed
capacity for violence guaranteed to private citizens so that they may
serve as a check and balance on the power of the state.

America’s Founding Fathers understood an uncomfortable truth: Behind
every law is the implicit threat of force, and behind every vote is
the implicit threat of rebellion. Such a bargain is what holds a free
society together. And no society with a wide power imbalance remains
free for very long.

This truth was predicated upon the Founders classical education and
their deep understanding of the power dynamics underpinning the
systems of governance during the Roman Republic and Ancient Athens.
The Roman Republic in particular influenced their views. Why? Because
it provided not simply a template for government, but a historical
warning about what can happen to a republic if precautions are not
taken to ensure its survival.

Thus the Constitution intentionally contained concepts like separation
of powers and a system of checks and balances. These concepts were
predicated upon a core truth, as eloquently stated by Thomas Jefferson
in the Declaration of Independence: ‘Governments are instituted among
men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.’”

If you picture political power as a pyramid, the intention of the
Founders was clear: The individual was paramount, having natural
rights, and the individual would then delegate a portion of his or her
political power to the state - hence, the state governed with the
individual’s consent.

This delegation took place in stages in order to maintain as much
decentralization as possible: First, the individual would delegate a
portion of their political power to the municipality level. Then the
municipal government would delegate a portion of its power to the
county level. Then the counties would delegate a portion of their
power to the state level. And ultimately the states would delegate a
portion of their power to the federal level.

This delegation is best reflected in the Bill of Rights’ 10th
Amendment to the Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the United
States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are
reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Underpinning all of this tiered, sequential delegation was an
uncomfortable, yet necessary, truth: That the individual must retain
an implied threat of force against the state, and that this threat
must be credible, in order to stop the state from deviating beyond the
consent given to it or otherwise overrun the individual’s natural
rights - what we’d refer to nowadays as a “power grab.”

But what happens when the state’s power grows so vast that individuals
cannot resist it whatsoever? That they cannot provide a credible,
implied threat of force to counterbalance state power because the
state’s weapons have become so devastating? When the state no longer
has the consent of the governed, and instead has intimidated the
governed into submission?

This is a look at political power and how it has changed as weapons
technology has advanced, from Ancient Athens and their virtuous
citizen-hopline-freeholder, through the Middle Ages and armored
knights, up to our modern weapons of war such as drones and atomic
weapons. The concurrent centralization of power, finance, and the
capacity to commit meaningful violence is no accident.

But how and why did this happen? And is there any way that we can play
the tape backward to regain what we have lost?
A Centralized Capacity for Violence

A Distributed Capacity for Violence 1When people talk about the atom
bomb as a trump card for home-grown revolution, they're really talking
about the centralized capacity for violence.

The bomb could be anything as it is simply a stand-in for the average
man's recognition of the American military's phenomenally powerful
weapons; weapons in a totally different class than even a fully
automatic battle rifle or rudimentary ballistics like TNT.

Atomic weapons are measured in kilotons of TNT – the best our brains
can capture the awe and might of the bomb.

It's a small example, but cuts to the heart of centralized capacity
for violence: The increased ability of smaller and smaller groups of
men to do greater and greater amounts of damage. In the case of the
atomic bomb, the ability of a single man to wipe out millions with the
push of a button. This capacity is not limited to just the bomb.

The military is smaller and thus relies on a lighter, more agile, and
efficient infantry than it once did. Only one or two men are needed to
wipe a city from a map. Compare with an infantry platoon of 27 men. As
bombs became bigger, military technology became much more accurate and
capable of hitting one specific thing (say, a Sudanese aspirin factory
versus a small, neutral village).

America's nuclear arsenal is the apotheosis of centralized force,
giving a single man the ability to kill everyone on earth many times
over.

But it is not hyperbole to say our current military technologies are
Godlike, even disregarding the bomb. Entire regions can be wiped from
the map at the push of a button, and it only takes one man to push
that button. Compare with the mounted cavalry of old.

Not to belabor the point, but the term "bomb" fails to capture the
magnitude of what a bomb can do. The atomic bomb is like dropping a
small sun onto a city. It is ghastly and terrifying, and may mark
man's first true foray into "secrets man was not meant to know."

In addition to being more precise, violence is much easier to
distribute from afar. For context, during the Second World War, carpet
bombing was developed because it was so hard to get a single bomb to
hit anything, even when you were just a few thousand feet from the
target. Now someone on the other side of the planet can send a missile
into a cave and navigate the tunnels inside.

This happens at the micro-level as well. Think about the small-town
sheriff who, for some reason, has a battle-ready tank. On one level,
it's laughable, the militarization of the police reduced to its most
ridiculous cliche. But on another, perhaps more important level, it's
a demonstration of the centralization of capacity to commit force at
the local level. The average police department is equipped like a
small infantry squad with light tank support.

A well-armed home has a handful of long arms and pistols, with
precious little training in things like small squad tactics. Our
personal fortresses are anything but secure against the state.
Distributed Violence and Power in Ancient Greece

A Distributed Capacity for Violence 2We think of Ancient Greece as a
democracy, and indeed, it was, but its democratic polities were far
from egalitarian. Its democratic society was made possible by the
hoplite system.

The hoplite was the basic infantry soldier of ancient Athens and other
Greek city states. To be a hoplite meant to supply one's own arms. To
supply one's own arms was only possible for free landholders. Full
citizenship was accorded only to men with a full set of gear. Men with
only partially complete sets held lower rank, in the military and in
society in general.

Hoplites made ancient Greek democracy possible.

Indeed, there is great wisdom to how the Greeks granted citizenship:
the benefits of citizenry imply a responsibility to defend the polity.
Those incapable of putting up a meaningful fight against invaders (or
in the case of Sparta, constant helot rebellions) did not enjoy the
full fruits of Greek citizenship.

Ancient Greece was a far more equitable society than its
contemporaries because the citizenry were landed men with skin in the
game. They couldn't simply take off for the nearest convenient city.
They defended their democratic society -- and their land -- with their
lives.

Decision-making included everyone who was going to fight. No one man
held much power relative to others except for his ability to command
larger groups of men through legitimately earned leadership and
authority.

This isn't an endorsement of turning America into Starship Troopers,
but we should contrast the capacity of the Greek hoplites to commit
meaningful violence against the rulers and their neighbors against the
feudal system of serfs, lords and mounted cavalry emerged in the
fallout after the collapse of the Roman Empire.

We tend to think of medieval lords as holding power due to accidents
of birth, but they held civilization together while Rome fell. Their
titles, such as duke and marquis, were military titles, implying a
duty of military service to their lord and the king. The difference
between these medieval lords and the free hoplites of classical
antiquity is that the medieval world allowed much smaller groups of
men to commit far greater levels of violence. This centralized
capacity for violence.

Serfs were drafted, oftentimes reluctantly, when additional forces
were needed, mostly for the pure weight of the meat. The medieval
world had many peasant rebellions but peasants were, to put it
bluntly, useless against men in armor on horseback with crossbows,
lances, and strong martial culture.

The average Athenian didn't have the means for a full hoplite spread,
and thus full military service and citizenship. Still, men with only
partial kit could do quite a lot, militarily. Thus their input was
needed for democratic consensus. But the middle ages saw a greater
contraction of the martial caste, due to revolutionary developments in
weapons technology.

It took only the humble stirrup to radically alter the distribution of
military power in Europe. Previously, men on horseback were simply
mounted infantry, not true cavalry. They dismounted to fight. Now they
no longer had to. They could attack at speed on horseback, allowing
for heavier armor to be worn and heavier weapons to be used.

Fewer men could do more with less. A partial suit of armor and a short
sword was worthless against true cavalry armed with broadswords,
lances, and crossbows – the Sherman tanks of their day. This
revolution in military technology meant that the more democratic
society of ancient Greece and the Roman Republic were now impossible.

Far more wealth was needed to obtain a meaningful capacity to commit
violence. The smaller group of men with the means to purchase such
were also able to commit far greater levels of violence with far fewer
numbers.

You are here.
Modern Revolutions in Distributed Violence

A Distributed Capacity for Violence 3It's important to note that the
centralization of capacity for violence is predicated on the accuracy
of weapons. Old school ballistics weren't the most accurate thing in
the world. Two armies could stand on either side of a field, shooting
all day. Any kill shots they got were entirely coincidental because
muskets weren't that accurate, hence the need for large formations of
men.

Then something changed: Rifling. Gunsmiths learned that by putting
grooves inside of a barrel, the accuracy of a weapon dramatically
increased. The American Civil War was a bloodbath in part due to the
development of the Springfield Model 1861. While wildly inaccurate by
modern standards, it was revolutionary at the time in terms of
converting the implied threat of violence into a very real promise of
death.

The nobility hated firearms because one didn't need to learn how to
use a broadsword to knock off a king. All one had to do was get close
enough, point, and shoot. The ability to commit meaningful violence
moved from the exclusive province of the military caste to anyone who
could get their hands on a gun.

When bombs were developed, they followed a similar trajectory in terms
of destructive power. Even as late as World War II, bombs were so
inaccurate that German intelligence couldn't figure out what the
British were trying to blow up. Carpet bombing was developed as a way
to offset this inaccuracy, an aerial counterpart to the mass
formations of pre-rifling musketeer troop formations.

The Springfield 1861 wasn't the end of firearms development. Nor were
the first rudimentary aerial bombs the end of heavy ballistic
development. Everyone knows about the arms race with regard to atomic
weaponry. Less known is the development of conventional bombs that can
actually hit their targets with reliable accuracy. Guided-missile
systems were to heavy ballistics what rifling was to long arms.

Between 1967 and 1973, guided-missile systems were developed and
proved to be orders of magnitude more accurate in hitting their
targets. The clunky, inaccurate bombs requiring a score of men to
deploy were replaced with precise systems requiring only one or two
men.

It's often said that during the Great War it took 10,000 rounds to
kill a single man. Now one or two missiles could obliterate entire
sections of a city. Ten thousand to one are some pretty long odds, but
two to one or one to one odds are a virtual certainty. Guided-missile
systems don't kill a single man like the apocryphal 10,000 rounds,
they can flatten a military compound, city block, or an entire city.
While significantly more expensive, their efficacy makes them a
cost-effective investment for the military-industrial complex.

One simple example demonstrates the dramatic increase in the ability
of the state to commit violence. Remember how we said British bombs
were so useless that the Germans couldn't even identify the intended
target? 50 years later during Desert Storm in 1991, a cruise missile
fired from a ship could enter a building through a specific window on
a specific floor and hit a specific target inside that building,
changing direction at the will of the operator.

This is important because the state is violence.

A Distributed Capacity for Violence 4At the end of the day, the state
is a means of coercion. Coercion relies upon the meaningful threat of
violence. With the advent of advanced weapons systems, this threat of
violence has been transformed from a mostly idle threat requiring a
massive investment of human capital to a near certainty of death.

Conversely, the democratic process provides a means for the populace
to express their dissatisfaction with the state. This is an implied
threat of revolution, however, now the state has weaponry that can hit
you where you live in a single shot while leaving every last building
around you standing. The masses have, at best, only long arms at their
disposal.

This is a power imbalance that cannot be ignored.

The promise of real violence trumps the empty threat of revolution.
It's certainly true that the United States military has been defeated
by much smaller and more poorly equipped forces.

However, none of these small, primarily guerrilla forces – the
Vietcong, the Taliban, or similar – presented the threat to American
hegemony that a restive domestic population would if roused to
rebellion.

This massive power imbalance is not the end of the story, as such
situations have arisen in the past.

Consider the citizen-soldier of ancient Greece, whose broad forms
endured until the end of Rome. This gave way to the aforementioned
mounted knight, who had armor, lances, crossbows, and longswords – the
advanced weapons systems of the time. They could run roughshod over
peasant populations armed with little more than farm tools. In turn,
the mounted knight was dethroned by the development of gunpowder,
which dramatically leveled the playing field.

It is no coincidence that the development of gunpowder and effective
firearms coincided, roughly speaking, with the rise of the democratic
republic. No longer could the nobility simply say "let them eat cake."
Ignoring popular sentiment came with serious consequences.

What technology will mankind develop that will level the playing field today?

It's hard to say, but futuristic developments like powered armor,
cyberwarfare, and fourth generational warfare provide a glimpse as to
how technology can be leveraged to put a thumb on the scale and bring
the capacity to commit meaningful violence back into balance.

Until the pendulum swings back, however, the disparity in the ability
to commit meaningful violence is a problem for human freedom that
cannot be ignored. Guerrilla insurrections against the American empire
in far-flung Third World provinces simply are not comparable to an
uprising in the imperial core -- the American homeland.
Will America Strike Its Own Citizens?

A Distributed Capacity for Violence 5America has a long history of not
using the atomic bomb so we often forget that America is the only
country to have actually used them. So why hasn't America used them in
so long and would they use them again?

America has never had a "no first strike" policy and remains ambiguous
about what situations would cause it to use nuclear weapons. It's
difficult, but not impossible, to imagine an American first strike
during the Cold War, but it is far more difficult to imagine today.
Who would America nuke?

How about Des Moines? Or Morgantown? Or Dallas? Americans are in a
precarious position with regard to their own government. America has
an empire, but the empire hates the Americans – largely using them as
tax serfs to fund failed social programs at home and failed wars of
choice overseas. If anything, the American people are an obstacle to
the aims of the American Empire.

The American citizenry is one thing most of the rest of the world
isn't: A threat to the American empire. The massive reaction by
globalist elites to Donald Trump shows just how particularly
thin-skinned they are about peasant rebellions at home. And constant
attacks on Second Amendment have failed to disarm the American middle
class.

It is instructive to compare the United States to Australia and Canada
in the time of COVID: The latter two are among the most repressive
medical regimes in the world. America remains relatively free. The
capacity for meaningful force, ownership of the reigns of power, and
ownership of capital remains more distributed here – and our rulers
know it. They know there is only so far they can go.

But maybe the global elites don't need such stern measures against
American citizens. The story of 2020 was largely that of concentrated
attacks on the American middle class in the form of COVID lockdowns
and riots aimed at immiserating and terrorizing them. COVID lockdowns
attacked small businesses and "non-essential" workers in one of the
biggest wealth transfers in human history. The riots likewise
terrorized average Americans into a state of shock and silence.

The foot soldiers of the elites can do anything they want to you.
Raising your hand against them, however, comes with extreme
consequences. This is another example of the centralization of force,
not using the military or armaments, but economic leverage and an
asymmetrical application of the courts -- anarchy for them, tyranny
for you.

And who needs nukes when you're ruling over a nation of renter-class
serfs? The elites wouldn't need anything approaching nuclear weapons
to keep in line a population who own nothing and are totally reliant
upon government handouts. This is the aim of the attacks on small
businesses and the War on the Suburbs.

Perhaps the model for the future is not the totalitarian regimes of
the 20th Century, but the feudal estates of the middle ages – now
armed with intrusive surveillance technologies and Godlike military
hardware.

Remember: The Constitution means nothing without the means to protect
and defend it.

Regardless, until the scales are rebalanced, America will look less
and less like the democratic republic we were all raised in over the
years. The Founders simply did not design their system for a mass of
effectively unarmed debt peons. The system is ripe for the taking by
anyone with enough political will.

The problem of a highly centralized capacity to commit meaningful
violence is structural. There are no clear solutions. A revolution in
military technology is needed to rebalance the scales. In the
meantime, however, each man can do his part to carve out a small
fortress in defense of liberty, keeping the flame of liberty alive in
our homes and our communities.

There are alternatives to this kind of serfdom, however, that don't
require waiting for the development of power armor or another leveling
development in military technology. Above all, it is important to make
oneself as antifragile as possible which means accumulating valuable
skills, having multiple revenue streams, and, above all, hoping for
the best while preparing for the worst.

Such moves towards greater resiliency in the face of overwhelming
state military power and centralized force do not just protect you and
yours. They provide a small, but important bulwark against tyranny,
reasserting the implied threat of rebellion.

Unfortunately, an American Renaissance is reliant upon a dramatic
shift in military technology rendering all current advanced weapons
technology moot. No single man or even group of men can simply will
such a situation into being.

The price of liberty, as is often said, is eternal vigilance. We need
this kind of vigilance more than ever. Objective forces of economic
reality and military innovation mean freedom in America and the West
is hanging off the precipice. While we can never simply "play the tape
backward," we can move through our current state of centralization to
a new decentralization, appropriate for our own time and place.