Four percent: A Lesson

The Only Difference Between an Assault Weapon and  Politics is the Size of the Magazine.

by Jay Elliott

All the past and present attempts to disarm the American people, in the end, have only one reason and that reason is to remove the ability to defend and resist the aggression of others. Principally as addressed in our Founding Documents the specific aggression of government.

But government is of course nothing but an aggregate of individuals so the difference is merely one of scale and in this difference lies the confusion.

Leaving aside the hunting canard, there are only two reasons to own a weapon. The first is to defend oneself, one’s loved ones and one’s property from the aggression of another. The second is to initiate aggression on a neighbor with the objective of forcing the will of the aggressor upon the victim.

That is it. The qualitative difference here is the line between self-defense and murder and between slavery and freedom.

What has been obscured over the last century is the distinction between the individual and the collective. The collective, in the form of any group, be it governmental, religious or some other newly defined subset of humanity has been lifted above the individual and given special privilege. This is to the advantage of the oligarchy that sits atop said group and this advantage is pressed by convincing individuals that sacrifice for the collective is noble and good. Collectivism in its myriad manifestations controls America today. From the left to the right, collectivist groups battle for control of the Political Assault Weapon. No one wants to disarm Washington, they all want to be the group with their finger on the trigger.

If sacrifice is noble and good, then it follows that opposition to the sacrifice is common and evil and therefore should be opposed to any extent necessary and we are back to the difference between defending aggression and initiating it.

Aggression must be defined now. It is more than physical threat, it includes all manner of coercion from a knife in a dark alley to fraud (MF Global) and confiscatory taxation.

What are the tools of aggression? Weapons of course. You can’t aggress against another unless you can threaten and the more powerful the weapon, the greater the threat.

If I have an “assault rifle” I am a threat, if I stand with ten thousand friends armed the same way, I am a bigger threat. Bigger is better when it comes to aggression, always. In the back alley it is a gun, in government it is politics, the ability to legislate a collective will upon all the people.

No society is freer than the individuals in it. Any culture that seeks to impose restrictions on the individual destroys the creativity of all its members to the degree that the individual is bound by the will of the collective. Merely compare the astounding innovations of the post Civil War nineteenth century America to our hide-bound bureaucracy of today.

It has been said that there are two kinds of people in the world, those that want to be left alone and those that won’t leave you alone. It is illuminating to look at this proposition in light of Pareto’s Law which states that nature breaks things down into an 80-20 rule.  This applies across all manner of situations and observations. In the restaurant business, 80% of the profit comes from 20% of the menu. 80% of personnel trouble comes from 20% of the workforce, 20% of taxpayers pay 80% of taxes and so on and so forth. If you want to move a group dynamic, you need 20% to get the 80% to move your way.

What is interesting is the 80/20 rule itself is subject to the 80/20 rule and 20% of 20% is 4%.  So 4% is the “magic number” to get things going.

Who goes into politics really? It is the people that won’t let you alone. For whatever reason, greed to altruism, they won’t let you alone to be free and to live in a society that is free. So the top 4% of the people that won’t leave you alone is all it takes in government to create all the trouble.

Politics is the collectivists’ assault weapon and the magazine is the politician. Unlike an AR or an AK magazine, a politician can be fired continually until it malfunctions at which time it is discarded and a new one rammed into place.

Government at all levels is now moving through the theater that is America firing at will while We the People either cheer from the stage in a collectivist euphoria or cower in the aisles praying the shooter passes us by.

“The issue which has swept down the centuries . . . And which will have to be fought sooner or later . . . is the people versus the banks.” – Lord Acton ( 1834-1902)