The American Revolutionary War was triggered the morning of April 19, 1775, when General Thomas Gage sent a column of Regulars and Royal Marines to Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, on a gun control raid. Their mission was to seize muskets, musket balls, powder, cannon and other militia supplies amassed by Colonials along with two patriot leaders, John Hancock and Sam Adams, who they intended to give a “fair trial” and a fair hanging.

The Colonials had their noses bloodied in a one-sided in engagement on Lexington Green, but the tide turned later that morning at Concord Bridge, where the relentless aimed fire of Colonials cut the British officers to shreds in just two minutes. The rest, as they say, is history (and if you are interested in the history of that day, you will find nothing better than Paul Revere’s Ride, written by Brandeis University’s Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Hackett Fisher).

The Second Amendment was enshrined second only to the rights of freedom of speech, assembly and religion by the Founders because they knew from a long view of the history preceding them that a free republic would remain free for only as long as people had the right to freely make their own decisions, and retained the power to keep others from taking their rights by force.

From the very beginning, the federal government itself was the primary target in the bullseye of the creators of the Second Amendment, and it is obvious to see why. They had just fought and won their liberty in part of a long and bloody world war (yes, the American Revolution triggered the first worldwide war, with American allies France, Spain, and Belgium joining battle against the British in North America, the Caribbean, Europe, Africa, and India). They viewed centralized government as a necessary evil, and saw a large standing military as a threat not just from their own experiences at the hand of the British military, but because they were educated men who grasp what led to the fall of nations dating back to Greece and Rome.

Modern liberal academia, unfortunately, is crippled by an incredible and intentional myopia, where the long view of history and the human condition is suppressed in order to push a “progressive” political orthodoxy (“common core”  is the direct an intentional result of this perversion of education and is no accident, but that is a conversation for another publication).

That intentional ignorance leads to reasonably intelligent people learning buzzwords instead of logic, and ingesting propaganda instead of spurring debate or learning from the mistakes of even the recent past.

It is this sort of sabotage of “higher education” that has left us with views such as these.

Texas A&M University Law Professor Mary Margaret “Meg” Penrose spoke as part of a panel discussion on tragedy and gun control. Penrose cited several high-profile shootings including the Newtown murders and a 2011 shooting in Arizona, which left six people dead and U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords critically wounded. She said she was shocked that the country has not yet reached a threshold for gun violence

Penrose asked the audience, a room packed full of lawyers and law school students, how many of them felt the legislative and judicial responses to gun violence have been effective. Not a single hand went up.

“I think I’m in agreement with you and, unfortunately, drastic times require drastic measures,” she said. “… I think the Second Amendment is misunderstood and I think it’s time today, in our drastic measures, to repeal and replace that Second Amendment.”

It is sadly, pathetically obvious that Penrose does not grasp the true history of the United States, nor the reason the Founders knew the Second Amendment to be so vital to the security of the people.

She has no long term historical understanding of what happens to a citizenry when the monopoly of force belongs only to the government, with no countering force available to the people.

The Armenian Genocide in Turkey.

The Holocaust.

Stalin’s purges.

Mao’s “Great Leap Forward.”

Pol Pot’s killing fields.

The Rwandan genocide.

Democides—the slaughtering of people by their own governments—claimed more than 262 million lives in the 20th century alone.

In each and every instance, disarming the civilian population through harsh gun control laws was a necessary prerequisite to committing democide. 

People surrendering arms to government does not save lives. It never has. It instead raises the numbers slaughtered by all-powerful governments who no longer have any reason to need to negotiate and reason with populations, when they can simply grab more power and dispatch dissidents by the use of force.

A people that wishes to remain free will never relinquish their preexisting rights to defend themselves from both criminals and the ever-corrupting power of unfettered government.

As an academic, Professor Penrose is free to talk about attempting to repeal the Second Amendment. That is her First Amendment right to freely speak her mind.

I hope she and her fellow travelers realize, however, that any attempt to seriously push for such a repeal will trigger a full scale civil war that will likely lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, will topple the existing federal government, and likely reset our government back to the much, much smaller and much more limited federal government similar to what our Founders envisioned.

While estimates of American gun owners vary, we can safely assume that there are 100 million of them at this present time, and only a minority of them would comply with an order to turn in their arms.

And who would oppose them? Who would attempt to enforce the disarmament of America? Ivory tower academics? Radical university communists that preach revolutionary ideas, but who can’t operate a revolver? Obamacare navigators?

The American military and most police swear allegiance to the Constitution, not any particular government or President, and America’s most elite military units have already told this government where they would stand if the government attempts an assault on the Second Amendment.

Fortunately, statist law professors are merely talking hypothetical situations. They aren’t dumb enough to actually force such an assault on the Constitution.

Not if they hope to survive.