Having spent some time going over my files to see if I had touched on this subject before, I found that I had not touched upon it except by inclusion in my several books on the history of money. This will not be an article of interest for everybody, but I think it is such a timely topic and one that is currently so poorly covered in the media, that I am unable to hold my tongue any longer.

What I want to share here is not really so much my own insight as it is rather the result of exposure to some rather profound thinking on the subject of the right to keep and bear arms that was written by Carroll Quigley, and published by The Mac Macmillan Company, back in 1966,… for a little while at least.

At the time I was working with a private research company that had the good fortune to interview Professor Quigley at a time when Mac Macmillan had destroyed the original printing plates for the original publication, leaving Professor Quigley in the unfortunate position of not being paid for his rather monumental work then being counterfeited by some publishing company in Communist China. Since the time of that interview, President Bill Clinton has proudly acknowledged Professor Quigley to be his well respected mentor while at Georgetown University.

All this is just to provide a little known introduction of Professor Quigley’s fine research work on the subject of the private ownership of weapons.

The major point of Professor Quigley was that periods of human history dominated by periods when private weapons are the best that can be had, Swords, and the Kentucky rifles as a couple of notable examples. These have been periods marked by the expansion of human individual liberty at the expense of big central governments.

By the time WWII came along technology had changed things quite a bit, but enough human history had been experienced by then to make the point. Today we are left in a quibbling conversation having its focus on the capacity of how many bullets can be allowed in a single clip, and how many clips might be allowed for private ownership.

At risk of losing a very important point that Professor Quigley had discovered, I thought this might be a last chance to make the point that Governments are the biggest threat to human life for every citizenship that has ever managed to survive living under big government. And large clips may still have some advantage to keeping the playing field as level as possible, while paper ballots are once again being replaced by murderous weapons of mass destruction know matter whose entitlements they are being used to enforce.

“Tragedy and Hope.” Quigley, Carroll. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1966
….A history of the world in our time.

Love!