TREX TALK: The History of the Second Amendment

all right welcome back to t-rex talks we're gonna be talking about the second amendment specifically the history of the second amendment that's something that you guys have been asking about on some of my live streams um and because this is also a podcast i just want to remind you guys that you can look it up on itunes and stitcher and all the other podcasting things to find t-rex talks are a little bit easier to get that way last week's was not a very good podcast because lucas was showing stuff with the real camera with the night vision camera it was a much better video but this one will probably be a decent podcast and for those of you who are listening i am isaac because we always forget to introduce ourselves i'm david we always forget to introduce ourselves um thank you so much for watching we're going to be talking about the history behind the second amendment and part of the reason we're talking about is because of trends today yep legally speaking the trends uh related to the second amendment and the constitution are bad but practically speaking a lot of the trends that we're seeing related to the second amendment and what the second amendment is actually about um are good yeah it's quite good yeah it's i think a lot of americans and i've run into this so many times talking with people about gun rights going back um 15 years or so they have this feeling like oh no everything's getting worse and worse and worse and the that really is not accurate based on the america american experience of the last 15 years or so so you know in american history we have the second amendment start see where we're going to put my hand it starts somewhere over here and then it progresses along through history and then you come into the early 1900s 1930s and that's when you have the nfa get passed and control begins yeah gun control begins in earnest gun rights take a huge dive and there's a couple more of these over the years so you have this big downward trend and then it starts picking back up and going the other way and a lot of people don't know about this this turn where it starts going the other way especially if you're not old enough to remember things like the clinton assault weapons ban right and stuff like that the fact is today we're seeing amazing trends uh and i would say you don't even have to look back that far if you just look at gun sales this year the gun sales this year are amazing we've already sold more guns in 2020 than were sold in all of 2019 which was a record year yeah we're continually having record years for gun sales and 2020 is just an unbelievable record year and we'd be selling so many more guns right now uh if they were actually in stock right we'll never know how many people wanted to buy guns simply because there just weren't enough guns for them right when they went to the store yeah so i think the the clinton assault weapon ban the 94 weapon awb was the very low point of federal gun laws because it got passed and the next election cycle the democrats lost the house and they lost they had had it for a long time they lost it and they didn't get it back again for a long time and that was like it seems like that was a big message to democrats to back off at least at the federal level i think and i actually think that's the last time that we see democrats actually doing gun control successfully at the federal level at the federal level what democrats usually do is gun control at the state level and then they whine and complain and demand that republicans do gun control at the federal level right but then that doesn't really happen and so so we see this this crash at the bottom and it's turning around and coming back up ever since and it's actually really interesting because i was young at the time that that happened but i was watching firearms news with my dad and you know my dad used to do stuff for gun owners of america way back when and um so we were kind of i think a little more probably more clued into it than our peers at the time um and then coming into the early 2000s when you know in 2004 that gets repealed you know because it's sunset it was a 10-year bill it sunseted and suddenly all these new guns were available and then not that long after that obama is elected and obama i think is the guy that made the ar-15 the american rifle the greatest gun salesman ever lived until this year and specifically the greatest gun salesman of you know assault rifles um because he didn't just sell any old gun he sold evil assault weapons um it's because it was really interesting before obama there were you could get ar-15s and they were now these guns ar-15s with features i remember when i first was buying guns it was like this is a featureless ar-15 referring they still have those in some states in some states they do but you know they still were using that lane that lingo in early 2008 when i was first bought my first ar and um which made it kind of confusing for me a noob but it was very interesting because a lot of people were like oh this person he has an ar-15 you know you might go on a government list if you buy an ar-15 that was very much the vibe amongst the gun owners that i talked to you know regular people bought pump guns and wheel guns and maybe glocks but ars and aks were very different and actually i was just looking through my my old gun files of stuff that i'd saved over the years and i found this really funny um journalists guide nice if we could show it to you but that's a level of technological complexity we have in 2020 we can't do it it was a journalist's guide to firearms identification it said you know machine guns and assault rifles and it says it has a picture of an ak m16 a picture of an ak-47 um sorry a picture of an m16 and it says ak-47 and then uzis and every other gun possible those are all ak-47s yes and it's kind of interesting to look back and realize there was a time before the ar-15 was the boogeyman weapon of the uh it was the agency it was the ak-47 that guy dates to like 2013. so this is before the explosion of interest in the ar-15 and you know the kind of the rest is history i think the other thing that really changed the trend uh for the last 10 years or so has been youtube yes it's gone from people saying i'd rather not i want an ar-15 but i'd rather not buy one because line up on a list to i really should buy another air 15 so that i can put it on instagram yes well and it was so interesting i think what happened was people were like oh these are scary anti-government militia type weapons and then they they went on youtube and there's all these people posting videos on youtube of them doing cool stuff with them and enjoying them i guess it's normal i guess it's okay oh i think i would like to own one of those and so i think that youtube civilization is kind of ironic youtube and obama i think are largely responsible for the popularity of the ar15 and popularizing it yeah and yeah not just normalizing it but popularizing but so and now in 2020 uh a lot of the conversations that people were having before like why do you need a 30 round magazine and we're seeing giant riots where there's in excess of 30 people gathered together you're seeing people using firearms for defense you're hearing stories of police officers and 911 dispatch saying no police can come to your location you're on your own and that is why so many guns are being sold right now and that is why even democrats are buying guns apparently this is hard to quantify but apparently one in every nine democrats has bought a gun this year which is depending on who you ask either a super high or a super low number now the other thing that's happening this year you may not be aware of this there's also a presidential election going on really yeah it's it's 2020 couldn't get work any worse it's hard to imagine that this is happening because the media actually started to stop talking about joe biden for some reason but he's still actually running for president and the democrats the dnc and joe biden to a lesser extent and camel harris to a larger extent are really uh doubling down on gun control which is a fascinating thing to do at a time when even a lot of democrats are buying guns you know every every town is still running the figure 95 of americans want more gun control legislation that is not true in 2020 not even 90 percent of democrats want more gun control legislation what a percentage of democrats want is more guns more personally owned guns so this is obviously not a practical decision to push for more gun control it's not something that is based on what the voters want it's not something that's based on polling data it's not based on even the narrative that the police are too militarized and the police need less guns the same people who are pushing for more gun control are also saying that right now so obviously this push for more gun control is not practical voter-based it is actually an ideological thing that flies in the face of the second amendment on purpose yeah um so let's talk about that yeah well i just find it so interesting you know for for the last decade or 15 years or whatever the argument has always been you don't need guns you're not qualified to own guns that's what the police are for the police are there to take care of you and solve all those violence related problems and now the message of the democrat party has defund the police and then what and then and then and then someone takes guns away from you question mark it turns into this perfect pacifistic utopia like they're it's like yeah it's it's very confusing yeah what is humorous so what we want to talk about is this this idea there there are two prevailing ideas when it comes to this conversation and there's a phrase that is increasingly used and i think it's good that it's increasingly being used which is monopoly of violence or monopoly of force um official vocab guidelines say that violence is too forceful and force is too forceful so monopoly on violence is a phrase that basically says the state needs to maintain the monopoly on violence it's important that um the private citizens do not have that official vocab is monopoly on violence yes people trying to change it to monopoly on force are trying to get around what it actually is and what it actually means there's basically two ways you can do this either the state has a monopoly on violence or the people have a monopoly on violence or or maybe they share you know you could and like that's kind of what we've got going right now but so yeah so i'm not sure who actually has the upper hand and who is actually outgunned right but when push comes to shove one side is going to end up with a monopoly yeah violence so the founding fathers wanted the people to have the monopoly the statists want the government to have a monopoly and there's a whole trend arguing for the state having it so i stumbled across this term as an actual term i was doing some writing on gun gun rights and gun laws and stuff and i was just kind of reverse engineering the liberals mindset it's like why why do they care about flash hiders why do they care about bayonet lugs like i have never once heard of anyone getting bayoneted to death except in a wartime context using actual soldiers i think i heard of a pig getting bayoneted once in a pig hunt but that's about it so they were obsessed about features that have no bearing on crime and the only way i could i could extrapolate from what they were saying and doing was they must have a complete ideological and a self-conscious ideological opposition to people ever owning any kind of weapons and then i typed into google monopoly on violence or monopoly on force and bingo i popped up this thing and there's this guy called max weber in 1919 and he wrote an essay called politics as a vocation and he argues that the state has to maintain a monopoly on violence in order to be legitimate this is kind of the whole crux of their position if the state doesn't have monopoly then it's arguably not a legitimate state so this is what they've been pushing for and this is i think been what's been driving their thought process and so they freak out about weapons that was and that's clearly what it was like well hunting stuff might be okay if it only holds a couple rounds but anything that's a weapon must be forbidden and i'm going to mute my phone real quick yeah and that's something that often comes up when people are talking about air 15s when um many of the folks who have been pushing for more gun control they focus in on the ar-15 as a weapon of war a weapon of war has no place in our streets a weapon of war has no place in the hands of a private citizen a weapon of war is too hard to use uh it's called a bullpup because it knocks you wait a minute that was not that was somebody else that was something else but this this idea that weapons of war cannot be in the hands of private citizens because we specifically are trying to keep the monopoly of force in the hands of the state is a very powerful dominant idea and it is the literal opposite of what the second amendment is trying to accomplish right the second amendment's whole purpose is to prevent any infringement on the ownership of privately held weapons arms specifically means weapons not toys not plinking accessories not hunting equipment arms right the whole purpose of the second amendment is to keep the monopoly of violence or the monopoly of force we could call it that but keep the monopoly of the violence yeah and the ownership of weapons in the hands of the people so that they can protect themselves from the government and the main thing that we're going to talk about now that we can finally get around to it is 15 minutes in the fact of the matter is this idea does not start in america in 1776 well let's start with um the bill of rights yeah let's start with the definition so when we scroll back and we look at the bill of rights being ratified in um what was it 1791 1790 um go back to the 1828 english dictionary well yeah so i've got i just pulled up real quick webster's 1828 is the american dictionary the first one that was produced very iconic and it has a definition of arms and so our right and enshrined in the second amendment is the right to keep and bear arms and this keeps people keep trying to twist this into it being about sport but the word arms is defined as weapons of offense or armor for defense and protection of the body and if we scroll back like some might argue oh well that's a new definition that the americans came up with as a result of this war but if you go back another uh true it would still mean that the second amendment means arms yeah like well that's clearly what they meant yeah right but if you've got any if you scroll back to 1755 there was this guy named johnson and he wrote what some people consider me the first dictionary and he has an almost identical definition so it's kind of it would be erroneous to think well he defined it this way and he defined it this way but in the middle these people just went off and used this totally different definition so they were totally thinking arms and we can as an individual right further we can go back to the sizes of arms yeah 11.81 so so this is the really interesting thing so almost nobody has what i would argue you know i'll rephrase it it's rare for people to have what seems to be a completely new and original thought especially with large complicated stuff like government people are almost almost always building off of something they've seen before or experienced before whether that's in civil government or church government or business we tend to see things and go oh look here's how they solve that problem and then we copy yeah if ever you come across somebody who believes that he has a completely new and original idea what you are actually seeing is someone who is ignorant of history because there is nothing new under the sun yeah so so there was this idea that was kicking around and there was this idea that caused the american colonists to be incensed that the british government was trying to take their weapons and it was definitely weapons because they were organizing into militias and they were getting ready for a civil war basically a war against the crown and they were getting things like cannons and and uh other weapons of war and stockpiling ammunition and stock yeah and so they were doing all this stuff and then when the british came and actually tried to take it they saw this as going against their rights and that idea goes way far back through english history and i've tried to study this and it's um it's very interesting because basically what happens if i could summarize it in a very tight format every hundred years or so since england has been england sometimes less various kings have passed various laws regarding weapons and basically mandating or making compulsory weapons ownership so i'm going to pull up the size of arms 1181 and this is something that we see throughout europe i'll just zoom out a little bit yeah throughout europe the feudal system is something that is pretty decried nowadays as being um unfair and uh patriarchal and problematic amongst the woke folks and probably masculine usually was that's why the patriarchal thing but one of the things that's interesting about it is it has decentralized power structures even in areas where you have a king he is dependent upon the nobility and the nobility are dependent upon the guys under them to actually raise up an army very few people could afford to have a standing armor army they really depended upon the peasants to support the nobility to actually be combat ready and those peasants to also be some level of combat ready themselves yeah different countries do this different ways for example there's a long uh i was going to say glorious but that's the wrong word there's a long tradition of italian mercenaries who are kind of like there's some semi-professional soldiers not a standing army but not local guys yes um occasionally you see large empires that do have standing armies professional armies like the romans well but they didn't start there they didn't start there they go back further than that but throughout europe after the fall of rome you tend to see decentralized power structures and you tend to see in the countries that are more christianized value placed upon the life of the surf and the peasant responsibility placed on the serf and the peasant there's actually a consent of the governed thing that happens and so when you look at um it's it's easier to see this in britain than anywhere else for several reasons one uh we can mostly read the history we can mostly read the history because it's english we don't actually speak any other languages personally even when you go back a pretty pretty long way it's it's a lot more accessible than german history or chinese history or something like that and being an island they managed to avoid some of the worst trends that were sweeping through the continent and so you end up with a very interesting british tradition of the common man actually being a free man and actually taking part in the national defense of his country and uh what's your favorite battle um i think think yeah well it's it's it's as well there's several okay so what's your favorite battle that never happened i was setting you up so this this is kind of a big premise for us tied into why we do what we do at t-rex so um running mead is one of my favorite battles because it's a battle that never happened there was a tyrannical king he was opposed by force and that force was so overwhelming that he was forced to capitulate without even fighting and that force was not a foreign enemy that force was his direct underlings his direct underlings that he demanded do things his way and they actually stood up and said we're not going to tax the people we're not going to do all this stuff that you demand right we're actually going to stand up and oppose you yeah force of arms and uh rather than fighting he actually stood down the battle never happened right he signed the magna carta very famous the pope canceled it he was later forced to sign it again i believe um let's not get too complicated but basically there's some problems with it but but there were basic there's a really fundamental premise there which is you know what in english history the king is not the unlimited sovereign that can do whatever he wants there are limits that are placed on him and he is forced to to submit to the broader um will of the people in england and this this concept is carried on throughout english history where you have things like the english civil war where the king is ultimately tried for treason and stuff like this um but we're kind of you kind of touched on an interesting thing which is the kind of the military structure idea yes and one of the reasons that we see well so one of the reasons that we see this in in england specifically is there are a few key events that completely change the culture and the magna carta is one of them not just because it is a important legal document that they have to stick to but also this idea that the lesser magistrate somebody who has an office but is lower than the king can actually step up to the king and say no you have exceeded your limits you're actually breaking the law we're actually going to pull you back underneath the law and i'm going to interpose myself between you and your subjects who you are mistreating and stop you that idea becomes part of british culture and you actually see it pop up again and again and so when you see the colonists in america deciding that they're going to push back against george iii it isn't this new crazy idea that comes out of nowhere right it is actually one of the most british things that the colonists ever did they're doing exactly what the british did against james the first and charles ii um they didn't think they were doing a brand new thing they thought it was just what we do episode six yeah you know the continuing saga of british free men well steven like what was patrick henry's quote um caesar had his brutus charles the first had his cromwell and george the third and they're like trees and jerusalem like can learn from their example because that's what they were thinking there's this idea where a tyrant is opposed and and deposed um so that the lawful order can continue um yeah in many ways there's we often kind of rejig things by saying like britain is this thing and the americans want to do something new and break away and chart a new course and in some ways america was or the american colonists when they founded america they were more in keeping with british common law and british tradition of free men and armed citizenry than where british britain was headed yeah britain was headed in a different direction a more problematic direction and england was trying to drag america with it the american colonists and they actually were being more consistent than uh than parliament was so that is something that i think is a very important principle to talk about and to get across because it's so easy to just say oh they did a new thing they tried a thing that's ever been tried yeah the the water for american independence is pretty amazing and the way that america was consolidated and founded uh was pretty amazing but all of those ideas came before them they were taking some of the best lessons of history the best lessons that had been figured out over generations and tried to apply those and so the second amendment doesn't come out of a vacuum it comes out of christendom particularly but more british the british brand of that specifically it's it's leaning very heavily on very specific british traditions and very specific british laws and then you can go back and you can look at the documents that they wrote after the bill of rights the various militia acts and militia laws and the way that they activated and utilized militias and you can actually learn a lot more what they had in mind when they talk about the second amendment it's not a weird anomaly it's not a weird new experiment it's not something that is obsolete and we can put it back on the shelf now because it obviously didn't work out right uh it's not something that's just a couple hundred years old it's something that is a very old concept thousands of years old and let's um yeah so let's talk through some of that so if we rewind to the late 1700s the weird anomaly at that time was basically the birth of the professional military system where you have people whose career is military service and you have a very large military apparatus that is under the control of a centralized government and they have this exclusive control over this asset um that concept in recent history was really popularized um by the germans well the prussians and charles no um who was it charles no sorry uh frederick the great uh his dad um frederick william i think wilhelm probably wilhelm he had this idea of creating this country with this massive military with basically compulsory military service for everyone um and he he started crafting this centralized monolithic military system and it hadn't really existed before this so this is like the 1720s yeah even in the roman times when there were gigantic roman armies there was still separation there's there's still this idea that you never let the army come back to rome he never let the army inside of rome the army is very separate from rome itself yeah but then he was wanting to build he was creating this thing and it was very interesting what he did he he um he went a lot of interesting directions but like he would he would intentionally wear just a regular german military offers officers um tunic and clothing to communicate to his people i am part of the military i'm just like you we all serve the state concepts like this so he started building this military and he started making it more professional and he ultimately handed that off to his son frederick the great and frederick the great then went and trashed basically all of europe and he took their his military system that his dad had given him and he took on the traditional military systems of a lot of these other countries which was more decentralized more distributed um more like these are people that they farm regularly but then they can be brought in to conduct you know perform military services yeah basically a levy system um and he trashed everybody and so in the 1750s 1760s it suddenly started to become very very popular for european countries to dump their old system and go to this prussian style system and this is part of why when the british officers come over to america and they see the militias they are constantly mocking them they're like oh they just they're so out outdated so old-fashioned they can't do a thing because they had just seen this happen in europe where you know like at the battle of loytheon um frederick the great had ten thousand men and he took on forty thousand and he cleaned their clocks because his men were more disciplined so they come over here and they see this old-fashioned thing that the americans are still trying to do and they they laugh at them and they don't take them seriously at all at first well no repeatedly yeah so leading it's actually really it's really really interesting because you see them in their in their writings mocking them just like oh if i draw my sword halfway up they'll all run away you know stuff like this and then lexington and concord happens and they have like a week of oh my goodness this is not what we thought and then they go right back into it and they expect to just walk all over the americans and it keeps not happening the way they expect it to happen then things like bunker hill happen and they discover wow these guys have the resolve and the discipline to hold a position in the face of overwhelming numbers and mow down our guys without batting an eyelid and it takes everything we've got to take the hill and so what we see is a lesson i want to go back to sure the prussian style army this idea that europe got on the bandwagon the prussian bandwagon basically saying that oh obviously a giant powerful centralized standing army owned entirely by the state that obeys orders without question is clearly the superior military force we will switch to that because there's literally no downside well there are some downsides there's some massive downsides like tyranny yeah um but the idea was we'll risk the tyranny because we're the ones in charge and we won't be tyrants we'll just be in charge and we'll be in charge of a giant powerful military and that sounds like a fantastic plan and and this idea was that um that you mentioned that militias were an old-fashioned concept that could not stand in the face of centralized status force is something that is very interesting because everybody buys into it and it gets tested in a big way in the united states before they're the united states and the america and america the colonists they're watching this this transformation happen on the continent and then the war happens and they test their malicious system and they discover pure militia has weaknesses you need in wartime you need to centralize more um you need a command structure yeah and you need more training and you need to close up your equipment gaps and stuff um but they're they continue to be horrified by what they see because there's stuff like the prussian mercenaries that come over um the deal the british crown made with hesse castle was oh you rent a soldier so those mercenaries were not coming over on their own volition as individual mercenaries they were rented by the british government from that prussian prince and basically these guys didn't get the money their their government boss got the money and he got extra money if one of them died basically it was like you break it you buy it policy and the americans were seeing all this and they were horrified that these you know germans were being treated this way and so that's why a ton of prussians were deserted and then smuggled smuggled westward by the colonists and they never went back so the desertion rates were huge um i actually know someone that's a direct descendant of some of those left behind german soldiers because the americans saw these people to a certain degree as victims of a tyrannical government that needed to be helped as well yeah and the same way that they were pushing back against the tyranny of george iii they could see the tyranny of other continental powers and yeah so so the downsides of the giant powerful status system that nobody control can control because they have the monopoly on force uh is apparent even as they're fighting against it and i think it becomes more apparent in the 20th century yeah but as as the war concludes as they win their freedom as they go about creating a new country or whatever you want to call it um they were discussing these same ideas and what do we do how do we do our national defense and in their writings it's very clear that almost all of them just abominate the idea of a centralized government system in fact they even go a little bit militia crazy if i can use that term like they experimented with a militia navy where like rather than build warships with 40 guns on it let's build a bunch of one gun ships and basically we'll have volunteers that rush to the boats if the you know enemy fleet is coming it's not like a volunteer firefighting system but for naval combat which is kind of weird which would work better with surface-to-surface missiles than with guns yes actually it's kind of ironic some of these concepts they were playing with actually work far better in the 21st century than they did at that time yeah as as weapon systems have become more powerful you can actually um decentralize more but um with most systems not all so they they saw this they were horrified they wanted to go in the exact opposite direction they wanted an incredibly powerful people and this is the argument you know when they're going through the ratification conventions and they're discussing well what is this what's going to happen if we all uh you know form into this united states of america thing um what how do we know this thing isn't going to become a giant tyrannical monster that's going to you know consume everything and so i'm trying to find some quotes here i'm just pulling up um some stuff here they were talking about this and explaining to the individual states this is what the second amendment means oh it you are supposed to have more enough power that the federal government could never possibly come close to taking any of your liberties because even if it could possibly raise up a standing army you would so far outclass it that you you know we couldn't touch you with a 10-foot pole yeah so patrick henry when virginia is ratifying their constitution in 1778 he says guard with jealous attention the public liberty suspect everyone who approaches that jewel unfortunately nothing will preserve it but downright force so this is a very important thing so they're ratifying this document but what patrick henry is saying is this document won't actually do anything it is just a piece of paper you have to preserve the ideas in this paper by upholding them by remembering them by obeying them and also ultimately you will need downright force to preserve your rights whenever you give up that force you are ruined the great object is that every man be armed everyone who is able might have a gun so this is a very important thing and it's not long after that there are folks in england who are learning from this um so blackstone is uh here's another good one here's you just lost my black oh i'm sorry i got another good oh so blackstone is very a very important uh person writing commentaries in the laws of england and he follows up with this exact same idea the right of self-defense is the first law in nature in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible which by the way is something that the uk is doing right now they took away your right to defend yourself with a gun then they took away your right to defend yourself with a knife now you're not allowed to defend yourself with your fists or your feet you're only allowed to jump up and down uh run away you cannot even defend yourself which is actually part of the reason i think that uh kyle rittenhouse has such a heavy duty um series of uh convictions coming his way if well if the prosecution has their way yeah they're not prosecuting him for all of the little infractions it is a self-defense case and it would be a precedent against self-defense and it just so happens in my opinion my my reading of this is he made the mistake of defending himself against people who were politically correct when he was very politically incorrect so this is a great opportunity to sway a jury to slap him with what would be a terrible precedent against self-defense and this is something that is tied inextricably to this armed citizenry being able to defend themselves that idea continues up to defending themselves against tyrannical governments so one of the total side note one of the really interesting things about kyle rittenhouse is he's the age of your common school shooter right he used an ar-15 the weapon of the school shooter they're not really freaking out about the ar-15 though they're totally vilifying him as an individual right or am i missing that's mostly him yeah yeah yeah the solution is not ban ars interestingly enough in this case maybe it's because he went up against people with guns but yeah the fact that people who were attacking him with guns means guns are not really a part of the conversation it's just this white supremacy thing that he had going on yeah he's yeah obviously that's what it was uh but yeah so so this the concept of self-defense against illegal threats from individuals or illegal threats from illegal governments they are the same moral argument and so taking those away at one end of the spectrum requires that eventually you take them away at the other end of the spectrum that's where a lot of countries are in europe right now and that's why this conversation is happening even though people in america are buying guns like crazy because they want to protect themselves that's why gun sales in 2020 are happening self-defense even though that is happening there is a strong push from people who are running for office right now to take guns away from people well i think i think it's not just that they want to protect themselves i think it goes back even deeper than that which is they have a they're losing trust in the government you know there's the government makes a couple uh implicit promises like we will protect you we will take care of you we will provide the security that you need to live your life and as 2020 has unfolded that that whole promise is is breaking apart very quickly and people are losing trust in that system yeah and so if the government fails to protect me clearly that's going to have to devolve on someone else yeah i'm the only thing left and so i think that that's what's going on here and the uh american colonists they were totally not on board with this idea of the government providing all this security and protection they needed to provide it themselves and that's why they advocated for a militia-based military system a decentralized military where you did not use the federal government or the central government to maintain a large standing army and they were very fearful of standing armies they had extensive debates about this but the really interesting thing is um for some reason this never really gets brought up but um there's a bunch of arguments for explaining how the founders were thinking you can look at what they did at lexington concord you can look at um dictionary definitions you can look at english common law history where they have all these laws mandating weapons ownership oh yeah we never actually talked about the size of arms so the size of arms is interesting because well there's several but let's start with the yeah the 1181 there's also an awesomely named one called the statute of winchester but it's in 1285 before winchesters were a thing so so i think that's a i think that's a fluke um it's kind of awesome though but basically it's a great call forward to sean of the dead but carry on foreshadowing foreshadowing so um you can actually look this up on wikipedia and they have the text um but basically what it does is it is it goes through and some of the points i would not look to um but the first few points like points one through four uh are things like if you have if you're a knight you need to have a shirt of mail a helmet a shield and a lance and and if you have nights under you you'll have as many shirts of mail helmets shields and lances as you have these nights and then every free man who possesses chattels or rents in the value of 16 marks she'll have a shirt of mail a helmet a shield and a lance and then if you only have property worth 10 marks you have a hallberg an iron cap and a lance and then if you don't even have that much property if you're just a burgess you have a gambeson an iron cap and a lance so they yeah which is just basically which is basically sorry which is basically just padded cloth armor it is body armor it is surprisingly effective body armor yeah but it's not metal body it's not the fancy stuff it's the stuff it's the stuff that regular people can buy so this is really interesting because and this is not that unique in military history to have this idea that like oh wealthy people we're going to mandate that wealthy people have gear here and then if you're poorer you'll have gear down here and then if you're even poorer still you only need to have this much gear but you do still have to have gear this kind of system um was really normal and this is kind of what actually the roman well this is what rome had before the roman empire the word for the professionals yeah so the word legion actually basically means levy and a levy is there's a portion of the population that are eligible for military service and what you do is when a war comes up you call that levy they come forward they assemble themselves for military service they go do their war and then they come back and they go back to their normal jobs and in rome you had to be a roman citizen of a certain class you had to own a certain amount of land and then then you were as i understand it required to own weapons because you were in this pool and what happened was rome as a as a city-state had this system and then in one of their wars with carthage they lost really badly and a ton of the people that were actually eligible for military service died simultaneous with that there was a basically a system of land reforms where more and more of the farms were getting bought up by fewer and fewer people and so the pool of people they could actually draw from shrunk radically and so i think it was in i think it's called the marian reforms in about 250 bc they reformed the military system they said you know what let's do it differently let's have a professional standing army where we have guys with 25 years in the service when they sign up and ooh cool feature if you're not a roman citizen you can sign up and at the end of it you will be a roman citizen and yeah what so it created this standing army that they had on tap at any time they wanted it also created the basis for the book starship troopers carry on but basically from that point on is when rome went from being a city-state and i could be wrong on some of this so this is not gospel truth this is my understanding having not studied this extensively but basically that's when the roman empire took off because now they had this apparatus that they could go fight here fight here and then this is also when they went from having one legion to having multiple legions it was not one group of people that was a levy that was called on and they went to war and went back to their regular lives they had these professional armies and they had multiple of them and they would get bored and they'd need stuff to do and then julius caesar would be like take him out i'm just kidding yeah like i oh i know what would increase my uh standing in the empire i'll go and commit genocide against these wandering peoples i'll go kill off a half million of them and be like they were attacking i had to do it now i'm a hero of the empire and so this is the kind of stuff that would happen um with standing armies and there was stuff like this that the american colonists were looking at and as to this idea of creating a standing military so they do stuff like um they go back much more towards this old model which is not not an old english model it's a it's an old almost all of history model um military history model and they say individuals have these right these um it's not so much a right as it is a duty a responsibility to be prepared to defend the country which means having weapons equipment but it also means practice so in 1363 there are archery laws yeah in england so that you have to practice your archery on sundays and on holidays if you're not working you have time to train so practice combat so i need to actually go and pull the laws i need i need to find a way to actually get the original source documents but my understanding is based on the research i have done done so far is you you know almost everybody's heard about these horrible puritanical kings that for bad soccer on sunday and because they hate fun because they hate fun no because the phrase i've read and i need to confirm it by actually seeing the actual law was it was time that was better spent for preparation for war that was their idea like oh no you shouldn't be playing soccer on sunday that's your day to get ready to fight yes and so the big tradition was sunday rolls around you do your church thing then you go to the butts and you practice with your longbow because longbow practice takes up a lot of time um to get really good and and proficient yeah what's the saying to to build a longbowman you start with his grandfather if you want to train a longbowman you start with his grandfather and this was you know this was the thing so this is another diversity reference um there's these people like in age of empires where it's like oh the english have a special ability and that's longbows and i've seen people ask well why didn't other countries have longboats it's like well it's not primarily a technological thing in fact the longbow was such a big deal in england that england got basically deforested of yew trees and they imported so they started from other countries well they made it a tariff like oh if you want to import goods into a into england you have to bring some used staves along with that cargo and so that was a thing where you know if you wanted to import you had to get these and so europe got about half deforested of you trees before gunpowder was invented yes and england would plant yew trees traditionally in church yards so that in a crisis they would actually have a backup supply so they could make some bows but this was a major thing you know they and they had laws where you had to train you had to be in possession of a bow um you had to supply your son with a bow correct to his size starting age seven seven yeah that was the 15-13 law and then at age i think 14 he was responsible to provide his own bow and do his own training but the father so they they have all this stuff laid out and it's not so much for um i don't think it was really so much for for self defense at all like they actually yeah they're bad it's very hard to defend yourself with yeah but like it was interesting like they would they would mandate the ranges and there was a minimum range you could train at and i think it was like 200 yards i can't remember so it was very interesting they were trying to build an apparatus for going to war this is why no other country really did the longbow thing because it was a sociological structure that had to be created it was a cultural and sustained yeah and then you find people like i think it was the reformer the puritan cranmer or ridley i can't remember which one of those two latimer they they were burned at the stake but one of them wrote about how horrible it was that gunpowder had been invented because this thing that he did with his dad which was go out and practice longbow and be in the field and use your body and exercise now they didn't have to do because of gunpowder they could just go dice in the towns and that's interesting it was it's actually really kind of humorous to read but he's he's actually one of the few people that wrote about the process of shooting a lot of people talk about like oh the puritans anti-fighting no no he was anti-gunpowder because he loved shooting bad guys with longbows so much the idea of private citizens he wanted well trained with longbows wanted to do all of his arguments yeah he wanted to go all legolas that's what he wanted for robin hood yeah so um but it's really interesting because historians um so much of this stuff gets gets lost over time and the questions were like what was the draw strength on a longbow if you have a longbow that's that you know 150 pounds 175 pounds what is the mechanism for drawing it you know it's going to require different um body movements than drawing a 50 pound of bow i think i need to throw in a third shadowversity reference here okay go ahead that was it okay okay so uh so these are the kinds of questions that are brought up but when we look at english history we see them dealing with a lot of these issues and and making it compulsory and interestingly switzerland went a very different route and their iconic weapon is the um crossbow which is kind of similar to uh the longbow but it has totally different capabilities it's it's a short range a shorter range shorter range but phenomenally uh powerful against armor but it has a super slow reload time so the only way to really use it is if you have a lot of people so it's a very defensive strong weapon if you have um fortifications and stuff and a lot of people to use them but they had a similar model in that they had an armed citizenry and the cantons required people to be capable with crossbows for the purpose of national defense and local defense because they had a decentralized government structure as well as a decentralized defense structure well and switzerland is really interesting because they still have that system where basically you turn i think it's 18 and you have i want to say it's one or two years of military service but when you're out so like in israel they have this this was not that uncommon a thing you have mandatory service but in israel when you're out you leave your guns behind and you can't have guns anymore um but in switzerland when you're out you take your gun with you and you're eligible for service for basically until you're like 55 and then when you're out out you have the option of buying your gun and keeping it with you or in some cases you're giving the gun like if you're an officer and it's your sidearm so um so they've kept this system going and it apparently worked really well for them because in world war one nobody messed with them in world war ii nobody messed with them yeah they've just continued doing this thing where you know maybe if you're a small country and you have powerful neighbors there's no way to maintain a standing army big enough to fend them off but maybe if every single man in the country is trained and ready to fight maybe that works and that's been their experience yeah the benefit of attacking switzerland highly outweighed by the cost of attacking switzerland so like and this was true not just in world war ii times but prior to that this has been the system going back and the founders knew that i think the main the main thing that we're trying to talk about here is this idea which modern historians and and modern um democratic presidential candidates try to try to pitch that is uh the second amendment is a failed american experiment to some weird old slave owners thought would be a good idea because of i don't know some misguided hatred of other people the patriarchy probably probably is in fact a time-honored tradition with a great historical track record and uh the founders were incredibly well-read uh historically and when they write about these things they're referring to historical events and they're referring to historical documents that we can go back and we can find and we can read they're referring to historical events that are that are recorded and laid down they're not in modern textbooks yeah but um they definitely happened and they're in old history books and there are source documents that describe their source documents that describe a lot of these events and the laws that were on the books are still here and more recent legal scholars like blackstone talked about them and talked about the importance of them so so this idea that the second amendment was a failed experiment that appeared in america and only in america and caused school shootings and there's never been any there's never been anything like it elsewhere in history is just ridiculous what we actually see throughout history is the armed citizenry model where the people of the country maintain that monopoly of violence there is less tyranny there is less genocide there is less temptation for the state to do things that it shouldn't do to its own citizens or to other citizens you actually see more freedom you actually see more prosperity you actually see more peace and so that is that is something that it's undeniable when you look at the history and it's undeniable that the founders knew that and they were making these decisions very carefully and in a very informed way yeah when they wrote the second amendment there's kind of this idea like oh well if we centralize power there'll be no rogue low-level people doing their thing and getting into trouble and killing people do you know how many bureaucrats we have at the moment and when you look at the last couple hundred years the number of wars has just gone through the roof and um the number of people killed by their own governments is more astronomical more through the roof um you know it's interesting when i was doing a bunch of study on um henry v and the battle of agincourt you know you think well he's a king he's you know got all this power like not really he had this legal claim to a chunk of france and so he wanted to go fight this war but before he could go fight the war he had to travel around england and basically um win the support yeah and in a lot of cases it was like yes you nobleman i will i will hire some of your people if they will come um oh i have to hawk my personal um stuff to you know have a um basically reserve money set aside to make sure they will get paid even if i don't come back so like that's what he had to do he had to achieve you know get buy-in from these people and you know get them to participate in his war he couldn't just say like that's it i'm done with these french people we're going to war these other people had a significant say in the matter yes and like we don't have that with our current military system mm-hmm um yeah gigantic prussian state model does not require that the king have his people on board with him right a gigantic military machine that the prussian model requires is kind of a blind obedience model from a professional soldier class that are largely separate from civilians and civilian life and and even take pride in not being politically concerned you know like um i think petraeus was you know stated in one meeting that he was proud that he doesn't he doesn't vote that's how far he takes this thing you know he's a soldier and he take does the orders of the civil government but he does not get involved in politics um i think that was petraeus i could be wrong but this is an idea that that's present and um and it has it has led to a lot of bad stuff i would argue um a lot of wars that really did not need to be fought um whereas you know when you have when you have to go like if it was if we had a decentralized military and someone in america wanted to go to war they would have to convince me that i needed to go to that war that that was really a compelling danger to my family and my and my business and whatever else and if they couldn't convince me i would really not be incentivized to go at all yeah um yeah that's it's it's very fascinating to think about the ramifications of this idea to take so much of the power of the state and put it back in the hands of the people really limits the ability of the state to do things that it shouldn't do and obviously the counter argument is it limits the ability of the state to do things that it could do but it puts that power back in the hands of the people the people can still decide to do things that they should do right um and this is something that again this conflict this idea this discussion of who should have the monopoly on violence is not new it's not something that's new to this current generation or this current political uh election this presidential election this year and it's not gonna be settled this year it's not gonna be settled this year and it's not even new to um the american founders this is something that goes way way way back there are tons of things that have been tried tons of historical experiments that we can look to and it's something that we at t rex obviously feel very strongly about the need to preserve freedom for people is to re really to preserve the responsibility of people people really need to be willing to take these responsibilities on themselves in order to preserve these rights and the good news is that in 2020 there's tons of people who are seeing that they are ultimately the ones who are responsible to protect their families and their neighborhoods and they're getting the equipment the best equipment that they can find to protect themselves and to protect others the bad news is that we're probably not equipping people with the ideological understanding that they really need yeah they have a deep fundamental or a subconscious understanding that no one is coming to save them hopefully people will really start to think through yeah the ramifications of that hopefully the guns we were talking today were like you know what guns are like a gateway drug they're a gateway drug to liberty yes people start realizing you know hey i'm responsible for stuff myself yes you know one of the first things a person should be strongly impressed with when they pick up a gun is personal responsibility i can pull that trigger and bad stuff can happen and it will be my fault these are the kinds of ideas that are impressed very quickly and very powerfully by guns so i'm hoping that these new democratic gun owners will be impressed by these ideas and they'll start thinking about personal responsibility liberty and they'll take these ideas through and the good news is that can't speak for everyone but there are a lot of uh more conservative more republican folks that have bought guns simply as a statement uh or as a way to just kind of hedge the market because they knew they were going to be scarce and owning the guns and thinking about them in a practical tangible way actually did cause them to think through the heart issues and do the research and consider the ramifications of the rights and responsibilities that are attached to them yeah they kind of stopped being sheep yeah yeah so i'm personally so i've been studying military history for about 20 something years now off and on as a you know more than a casual basis but certainly not a professional basis i'm an amateur but i'm pretty excited by what's been happening in the american gun industry with the numbers of people flocking in and buying guns and with the increased acceptance of you know private ownership of things like this and things like this things like this and i'm hopeful that all three holes it will provoke a return to a different idea about how militaries should be set up and how governments should be structured and what powers governments should have and should not have um because for me the thing that really drove me to appreciate this has been the um the incredible history of genocide that we saw in the last hundred years or so um the common denominator through so many of the genocides was the regular people had been completely disarmed and so i'm really hoping that as we see this shift towards more people having guns yes there will be some um mass shootings and stuff to go along with it yeah but people who don't have character get guns something this bad stuff happens yeah and and this is why when we talk about gun ownership we're not saying that everybody should have guns we are saying the government is not the institution to limit gun ownership right there are actually people that should not have guns that's not the government's job it's not the job yeah so my great hope is that we will see a great reduction in the number of genocides that happen in the next hundred years um and regrettably there will be places where you know they have no guns like china and we will probably continue to see genocides and places like that um we're probably gonna get banned from me just saying that but hey you know maybe we can save it by pointing out that you can go see mulan on disney plus right now it was made with the assistance of the chinese government and uh i'm sure that ever happens there and the chinese police are just doing a bang-up job in hong kong right just getting along with the people like a house on fire that's what i'm told there's also you know other stuff we could say about mulan but we're probably not allowed yes so so this is this is a big thing that motivates me this is a big thing why i'm interested and so passionate about trx arms because holsters are like a little business card for freedom what we're saying is carry a gun so you can protect yourself and others and then once people are on board with that hopefully that idea that has been that had been planted in their minds will grow and will expand and they'll they'll they'll go from that to more things and they'll start questioning government and control over other things you can grow a tree of liberty in the blood of tyrants but you can also grow a tree of liberty by reading about people that have come before learning the lessons that they learned and the things that they were willing to fight and die for and my hope is if enough people will try to grow a tree of liberty just by owning guns and taking responsibility and stuff like that we will never need to shed a bunch of blood in order to secure that liberty kind of like um magna carta runny mead no battle that never happened the battle never happened because they were ready they were able to oppose a tyrant they were able to secure their rights so that's that's our big hope um some people might accuse us of being war mongers for having all this stuff and selling holsters and stuff but we're actually peacemongers we're actually yeah we're peacemongers trying to do a really good job at peacemongering yeah seek peace through superior firepower yep and being ready yeah being ready is a huge deal i hadn't really thought about that before but the whole reason that the battle of running me didn't happen was because people are ready to fight on the right side being ready to fight on the right side there's also a biblical we should do this in a different life because we're out of time there's also a biblical trend that a lot of these ideas are based on in first samuel 13 you can read about how the philistines had invaded israel and they had taken away all of the weapons obviously they didn't have guns back then they took away all the weapons and they even made it illegal to be a blacksmith because a blacksmith could make guns blacksmiths can make guns but just not at that time in history um and so uh israel was in a really terrible position of having to fight an enemy when they couldn't even make their own weapons yeah they were ready to resist evil but they didn't have the tools until later be ready to resist evil and also get the tools yup that is something that is incredibly important um for us to be thinking about yeah and uh we should probably wrap this up thank you so much for watching if you're on youtube listening if you're on the podcast go to the trx arms newsletter and also or the trx website and sign up for our newsletter yep because we're doing a lot of cool stuff on there and after uh that uyghur chinese genocide reference we might not be on youtube much longer you never know right because talk about freedom is dangerous not free yes so thank you so much for watching we will see you next week about this time if we're still here we'll see

Channel: T.REX ARMS

Views: 45,373

Rating: 4.9418554 out of 5

Keywords: T.Rex Arms, tactical gear, resiliency, Second Amendment, bill of rights, monopoly of force, monopoly of violence, armed citizenry, Magna Carta, Treaty of Winchester, Assizes of Arms, resistance to tyranny, doctrine of interposition, lesser magistrate, Isaac Botkin, David Botkin

Id: iGxHdE2j-5g

Length: 63min 17sec (3797 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020