Federal Firearms Serialization Is Sinful Tyranny
BY Herschel Smith
As you likely know, Justice Alito has given the federal government until Tuesday, or in other words, extended the stay on Judge’s Reed O’Conner’s vacatur of the new ATF rule to serialize incomplete lower receivers. Of course, we don’t know where this is all headed. The SCOTUS could remand this for decision consistent with Bruen, or sustain the vacatur for parties involved, or they have other options. Since this emergency appeal by the DOJ has been accepted by the SCOTUS, doing nothing is now not possible. They will do something, but we’ll have to wait until Tuesday to find out (or perhaps Wednesday).
Below, professor Mark Smith does a service by reviewing the history of firearms serialization in both the U.K and America. There is basically no history of serialization in America, and certainly no history of requiring firearms to be serialized at the time of our founding. In other words, there is no analogue law to which the DOJ and ATF can turn. It isn’t enough to say that firearms loaned to the militia by the government were serialized. That was for a different purpose, i.e., tracking government property. The ATF rule pertains to privately owned firearms.
Watch all of Mark Smith’s presentation. But before you get to that, remember that the founders toted long guns to school with them in order to hunt on the way to and from classes. Those were either purchased from a smith (with no serialization) or self-made (of course, with no serialization). The founders would have opposed such schema.
In 1 Samuel 13:19f, we read this.
Now no blacksmith could be found in all the land of Israel, because the Philistines said, “Otherwise the Hebrews will make swords or spears.” So all Israel went down to the Philistines, each to sharpen his plowshare, his mattock, his axe, and his hoe. The charge was two-thirds of a shekel for the plowshares, the mattocks, the forks, and the axes, and to fix the cattle goads.
This is considered by commentators to be a great evil. Matthew Henry comments, “See how politic the Philistines were when they had power; they not only prevented the people of Israel from making weapons of war, but obliged them to depend upon their enemies, even for instruments of husbandry. How impolitic Saul was, who did not, in the beginning of his reign, set himself to redress this. Want of true sense always accompanies want of grace. Sins which appear to us very little, have dangerous consequences. Miserable is a guilty, defenceless nation; much more those who are destitute of the whole armour of God.” In Jamieson, Fausset and Brown, we read this. “Now there was no smith found throughout … Israel—The country was in the lowest state of depression and degradation. The Philistines, after the great victory over the sons of Eli, had become the virtual masters of the land. Their policy in disarming the natives has been often followed in the East. For repairing any serious damage to their agricultural implements, they had to apply to the neighboring forts.” John Gill remarks “this they did to prevent their having arms, and the use of them, that they might not rebel against them, and fight with them, and overcome them; it was a piece of policy to keep them subject to them.”
Subjection of others is always the goal. As I’ve observed before, the desire to control others is the signal pathology of the wicked. Men who would become the almighty desire to steal the power and authority of the most high God to themselves, and the result is always tyranny. Those rulers are always fake, a ghost of righteousness, a phantom, unreal, a vapor in the wind. There is nothing righteous about tyrannical rulers, but the history of tyranny is dark. In the twentieth century, some 212,000,000 souls were lost at the hands of tyrannical governments across the globe.
The firearms serialization schema is sinful, and points to deeper problems of the soul among those who call for such control over other men. Control over other men never leads to righteous results.
Never compromise with this wickedness. Oppose it at every turn. Take names and hold grudges.