The Handgun Essay

I was very recently made aware of the essay excerpted below.  The person who brought it to my attention is currently commanding troops in Iraq, which reinforces my faith in the calibre of soldier we have employed there.

But forget the psychological and political for a moment, and consider just the numbers. To paraphrase the Senator, "A million pistols here, a million rifles there, pretty soon you're talking serious firepower." No one, repeat, no one, will conquer America, from within or without, until its citizenry is disarmed. We remain, as a British officer had reason to complain at the start of our Revolution, "a people numerous and armed."

The Second Amendment is a political issue today only because of the military reality that underlies it. Politicians who fear the people seek to disarm them. People who fear their government's intentions refuse to be disarmed.

The Founders understood this.

So, too, does every tyrant who ever lived.

Liberty-loving Americans forget it at their peril.

Until they do, American gunowners in the aggregate represent a strategic military fact and an impediment to foreign tyranny. They also represent the greatest political challenge to home-grown would-be tyrants. If the people cannot be forcibly disarmed against their will, then they must be persuaded to give up their arms voluntarily. This is the siren song of "gun control," which is to say "government control of all firearms," although few self-respecting gun-grabbers are quite so bold as to phrase it so honestly.

There wasn't a date affixed to the byline, but there were clues sufficient to place the pennage in the late 1990's, and I didn't sense the location I'd been referred to was the original housing.  So, I googled the author and found him residing in a blog called, Sipsey Street Irregulars, and his email address.  I couldn't find, on Sipsey Street, any reference to the Handgun essay, so I wrote to the email address listed to ask for its whereabouts.  Mr. Mike Vanderboegh kindly directed me to his 10-Years-After recapped & edited version located at Western Rifle Shooters blog.  Read A Handgun Against An Army.

In the forum where I read the link to the original Handgun, one commenter who claimed to be a US Veteran asserted that the author's historical accuracy was sketchy, and proposed that no civilians with conventional weaponry could ever hope to win out over a real army.

I wrote to him that I heard this fellow General Cornwallis felt pretty much the same way before meeting up with the Overmountain Men at the battles of King's Mountain and Cowpens.

That was pretty much the end of his presumed historical authority.