Clayton Cramer wrote: "But with perhaps 40% of the population armed, such confiscation would be very, very difficult to do. The sheer scale of it would preclude doing it even over the course of a year, and if 1 out of 50 gun owners resisted, the government would probably run out of police officers or soldiers willing to engage in such actions "
I think Cramer and I have different views of how confiscation would occur. We have seen it accomplished in several other countries --in both Nazi Germany and in democracies like Great Britain and Australia. It is not a sudden gun grab -- rather , it is a gradual , creeping process in which the government makes incremental demands. Each demand progressively reduces the people's ability to resist but is crouched as a reasonable request --or at least one calculated to be a sufficiently small advance that the bulk of the people will not rise up in protest.
Mel Tappan once gave the analogy of a frog tossed in a pot of water. If the water is boiling hot, the frog will immediately leap out. If the water is tepid, the frog will remain. If a fire is lit under the pot and the temperature is gradually raised, the frog will remain until overcome by the heat.
As a case example, look at how the news was censored after Sept 11 to give a very misleading depiction of what caused that attack. Look at how the voter opinions have been manipulated. So much so that the White House can now make an unconstitutional assertion -- that it may arrest an American citizen , try him before a military tribunal, and execute him -- and that claim is accepted without serious protest from the population or from the bar. (Before someone mentions Ex Parte Quirin , note that I consider that ruling to be as indefensible and unconstitutional as the Dred Scott decision.)
Cramer assumes that the population as a whole will resist because it will receive full and objective information. I submit that news media ownership has become so concentrated that major censorship and manipulation of public opinion is both easy and commonplace.
I think that scholars of constitutional law should discern "Founders intent" not by simply trying to discover what commentary has survived . I think scholars should try to accomplish what the Founders did -- look at the lessons of history, look at the patterns of social forces in the present , and craft a Constitution which will sustain a free republic -- using the tools of political science such as Polybius's checks and balances -- and taking into account forces within the national economy. The Constitution is an intricate mechanism --like a Rolex watch movement --which is running more and more out of time at 213 years after it's creation. The Second Amendment is at the core of that mechanism.
Don Williams
