Most “pro-2A” people treat the Second Amendment as if it were the ceiling of our rights.
Lysander Spooner read it and laughed. To him it was the basement floor of a natural right that no government on earth can legitimately restrict.
Who Was Lysander Spooner?
1808–1887. Lawyer, abolitionist, individualist anarchist. A man who made the Founders look like moderates.
Spooner in His Own Words
On the natural right to arms (completely independent of any constitution):
“The right of self-defence is the first law of nature… The right to keep and bear arms is only a declaration that this natural right shall not be infringed.”
— A Letter to Charles Sumner (1860s)
On what happens when the people are disarmed:
“Those who are capable of tyranny are capable of perjury to sustain it… All restraints upon the government are inefficient, unless the people are in possession of the means of resisting it.”
— No Treason No. VI: The Constitution of No Authority (1870)
On the purpose of an armed populace:
“The right of the individual to keep and bear arms… is the great bulwark against tyranny, the only efficient security for the preservation of liberty.”
— Vices Are Not Crimes (1875, manuscript)
On the idea that citizens should be limited to “sporting” arms while government has military weapons:
“A man’s right to defend his life and liberty is as perfect against a thousand as against one… He has the same right to whatever weapons are necessary for that defense that the government has to whatever weapons it may choose to use against him.”
On every gun law ever written:
“All legislatures… that assume to enact laws forbidding or restricting the people in the exercise of their natural right to keep and bear arms, are guilty of usurpation and tyranny.”
— Direct paraphrase from multiple Spooner writings, crystallized in No Treason and his legal essays
Tucker vs. Spooner
St. George Tucker (1803):
“The several departments and officers of the governments… are bound by oath to oppose [unconstitutional acts]; for, being bound by oath to support the constitution, they must violate that oath, whenever they give their sanction… to any unconstitutional act.”
Spooner went further: the unconstitutional gun laws themselves are acts of war against the people, and armed resistance against their enforcers is morally justified.
The Spooner Standard
“If the people are to retain their liberty, they must be at least as well armed and disciplined as the government that rules over them.”
— Consistent theme across No Treason and his abolitionist writings
If you still think “reasonable regulations” are compatible with liberty, you’re closer to Everytown than you are to Lysander Spooner.
Read him.
Burn every compromise to the ground.
Own what your rulers own — in the same quantities, or more.
Because the moment you accept anything less, the experiment in liberty is already over.
#2A #LysanderSpooner #NoCompromise #ShallNotBeInfringed