Raising the Marginal Cost of Tyranny

The folks of Samizdata have an interesting post called Raising the Marginal Cost of Tyranny, which riffs off of my recent Zimbabwe piece to advance an idea even bigger than "The Right to Bear Arms: It's Not Just for Americans Any More™"

In that article, I mentioned Secretary of State Rice's experiences as a little girl in Alabama. Here are a couple more URLs about the U.S. civil rights era that speak powerfully to the idea of raising the marginal cost of tyranny.

We'll start with the story of civil rights leader Robert F. Williams:

"Luther Hodges ... was the governor of South Carolina at the time. We appealed to him. He took sides with the Klan.... Then we appealed to President Eisenhower but we never received a reply to our telegrams. There was no response at all from Washington.

So we started arming ourselves. I wrote to the National Rifle Association in Washington which encourages veterans to keep in shape to defend their native land and asked for a chapter, which I got."

This was in 1957. Monroe, North Carolina. The NRA granted him a chapter without hesitation or question. And this was a man who would not crawl, or be anything other than a man:

"In a year we had sixty members. We had bought some guns, too, in stores, and later a church in the North raised money for us and we got better rifles. The Klan discovered we were arming and guarding our community. In the summer of 1957 they made one big attempt to stop us. An armed motorcade attacked Dr. Perry's house, which is situated on the outskirts of the colored community. We shot it out with the Klan and repelled their attack and the Klan didn't have any more stomach for this type of fight. They stopped raiding our community."

Blogger David Hardy notes that there were no fatalities, on either side. He adds:

"BTW, (1)that's by no means the only time Williams and his friends had to use firearms to defend themselves, and (2) there was no sense calling the police, since two police cars were in the Klan cavalcade!"

Against thug militias, even those that included trained police officers, guns ARE effective. Sudan's Janjaweed are similar: a thug militia with some al-Qaeda. Zimbabwe, same deal. Rwanda was the personification of thug militias.

Communities given the tools can and will defend themselves against armed predators, even armed and organized ones. After all, it's a lot less fun to go our for a little murder and rape if there's a chance you might not be coming back. Sitting in very real Gulags, Solzhenitsyn et. al. had very similar thoughts:

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people..."

To close, I'll add this personal experience anecdote from ESR:

"While researching this column, I contacted Don Kates, a civil rights attorney who went to North Carolina in 1963 to participate in the movement. I asked if he ever carried a gun during those days and he responded with a list of a half-dozen that were always within reach. Kates also suggested that I read a letter written by an old friend of his from those days, John R. Salter, Jr., who is now Professor Emeritus at the University of North Dakota. Here are two brief quotes:

"In the early 1960's, I taught at Tougaloo College, a black school in Jackson, Mississippi. I was a member of the statewide board of the NAACP and was Chairman of the Jackson Movement. No one knows what kind of massive racist retaliation would have been directed at grass-roots black people had the black community not had a healthy measure of firearms within it."

Raising the marginal cost of tyranny. Guns are definitely part of the equation, yet the idea itself is bigger still.

Raising the marginal cost of tyranny. Think about it - then let us count the ways.