‘Progressive’ Icon’s View Refutes Modern ‘Monopoly Of Violence’ Advocates

USA –-(Ammoland.com)- “The concept of a ‘monopoly on force’ might sound foreign or even frightening to Americans that take great pride in our revolutionary beginnings,” Coalition to Stop Gun Violence Executive Director Josh Horwitz wrote in a Huffington Post citizen disarmament advocacy piece, “but it is the fundamental organizing principle of any political entity, including the United States.”

Coalition to Stop Gun Violence
Coalition to Stop Gun Violence

“To back up this assertion,” I explained in a GUNS Magazine Rights Watch column, “he cites, ‘German political economist and sociologist Max Weber.’”

“What he doesn’t cite,” I elaborated, “is Weber’s support for approving Article 48 into the Weimar constitution, establishing “emergency powers” to bypass Reichstag consent, and allowing Adolf Hitler’s rise to unchallenged power. Not to mention the attainment of a ‘monopoly of force,’ although Weber preferred the term ‘violence.’”

It’s no surprise someone representing an organization that changed its name from “The National Coalition to Ban Handguns” in order to mask its true intent would keep that bit of crucial information from his readers—after all, he must have boxes of books on the subject nobody’s buying or reading that he needs to unload.  But those who agree with Horwitz’s historically insupportable, and frankly, loopy conclusion, that the freest and safest citizens are those who cede their primal rights to an all-powerful state monopoly, might be interested to learn that one of the “founding fathers” of modern “progressivism” came to the exact opposite conclusion.

I speak of “Robin Hood of the Law” Louis Brandeis, an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court nominated to the high court by Woodrow Wilson, and a leading proponent of “progressive” causes in his day.

From The Volokh Conspiracy, author and attorney Dave Kopel shares an exchange between Brandeis and the United Kingdom’s Ambassador to the United States:

Brandeis told Sir Ronald “that it was wholly contrary to any conception of civil rights with which I was familiar, through study of the Anglo-Saxon institutions and the American experience, that when a government found itself unable to afford protection, citizens should not be permitted to protect themselves.” The English did not protect the Jews, nor allow the Jews to arm themselves against the Arab threat.

Kopel cites another quote, referencing The Brandeis Guide to the Modern World by Alfred Lief, and which you can find ( in context)  for yourself in The Words of Justice Brandeis by Solomon Goldman:

It is not good for us that we should ever lose the fighting quality, the stamina, and the courage to battle for what we want when we are convinced that we are entitled to it, and other means fail. There is something better than peace, and that is peace that is won by struggle. We shall have lost something vital and beyond price on the day when the State denies us the right to resort to force in defense of a just cause.

That’s true progressive thought, in its own way reminiscent of Adams (Sam), Henry and Jefferson, not the historically invalidated regressive claptrap ceding all power to a strongman hawked by Horwitz and his failed colony of hive dwellers.


About David Codrea:
David Codrea is a long-time gun rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He is a field editor for GUNS Magazine, and a blogger at The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance. Read more at www.DavidCodrea.com.

David Codrea