The following is personal commentary, and does not reflect any position of THR.
This article is conjecture along the lines of, "how could the government hem in a gunowner's plausible deniability to block off passive noncompliance?"
The thing is, from the very first premise,
Suppose, for the sake of argument, the government bans all civilian possession of firearms at the end of this month.
All bets would be off, and the time for passive noncompliance would be entirely past.
In that scenario, the .gov would be acting in defiance of the 2nd, which was part of the bill of rights, which was a condition of ratification of the constitution.
Blatantly taking down the 2nd in such a way would invalidate the whole constitution, and that would mark the official end of the Republic.
The .gov would have one, and precisely one chance to set it aright, and that would be a swift overturning of such legislation by the supreme court.
The NRA and other groups would immediately file for a writ of non enforcement while the thing was under judicial review, putting a pause on the whole thing, and gunowners would hold their breath while everything was in play, which would include a pretty vast PR campaign for for and against us.
At the end of the day, if SCOTUS either actively or passively refused to overturn, it would be, quite frankly and regretably, time for us to make an explicit, concious decision as to whether what Ben Franklin described as "a Republic, if you can keep it" is worth actively fighting to keep.
Randy Barnett asks and answers the question, "What criterion is needed such that a written Constitution forms a duty of conscience to obey it?"
He offers a books worth of answer, but the short form of it is that such a constitution must offer a fair, inclusive and participatory process for the creation of laws, that it must cleanly deliniate what powers government has and hasn't, and that it must protect certain minimum rights, even if they are of minorities, or if the right is unpopular.
History and the wisdom of the founders has shown us that the right of arms is far, far too dangerous to delegate exclusively unto ANY government of any form. Therefore, I hold that an American constitution that did not include protections for citizen's right of arms, (or even worse, specifically denied the citizens the right of arms) would fail that test.
Other nations are entirely on their own in this matter, I personally choose not to include their deficiencies into my scope of responsibility.
