A free man is formidable, a free man with a gun is downright deadly

From The Brussels Journal:

A quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? [...] The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if... We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation. [...] We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.

Yes! Absolutely true.

The Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising proved that even a relatively small number of people who are willing to take up arms and fight can bring even a mighty army to a standstill. What would have happened if all of the peoples in the Nazi occupied lands had shown the same resolve and courage?

What would have happened in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina if the criminal thugs, who happened to be wearing badges, who went from house to house stealing the firearms of private citizens had been dispatched by those citizens. I have a friend who has spent most of his adult life in law enforcement who thinks that is exactly what should have happened. Kill them and throw their bodies in the river and defy the other cops to prove who pulled the trigger.

A free person cannot be oppressed. He can be killed, but he will not be oppressed. If that free man is joined by other free men and women who are likewise unwilling to be oppressed, and to die, but take as many of the jackbooted thugs with him/her as possible the tyrant will find he has a very tough row to hoe.