THE MILITIA - George Mason & others

[LIBERATOR]

"I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a
few public officials." — George Mason, in Debates in Virginia
Convention on Ratification of the Constitution, Elliot, Vol. 3, June
16, 1788

"The militia, when properly formed, are in fact the people
themselves, ... all men capable of bearing arms;..."— "Letters
from the Federal Farmer to the Republic", 1788 (either Richard Henry
Lee or Melancton Smith).

"Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that
we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom? Congress shall
have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords, and every other
terrible implement of the soldier, are the birth-right of an American
... The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the
federal or state governments, but where I trust in God it will ever
remain, in the hands of the People."
— Tench Coxe, 1788.

"How we burned in the prison camps later thinking: What would things
have been like if every police operative, when he went out at night to
make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive? If
during periods of mass arrests 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 to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush
of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever was at
hand? The organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of
officers and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed
machine would have ground to a halt."
— Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize winner and author of The
Gulag Archipelago, who spent 11 years in Soviet concentration camps.

If we are ready to violate the Constitution, will the people submit to
our unauthorized acts? Sir, they ought not to submit; they would
deserve the chains that our measures are forging for them, if they did
not resist.
— Edward Livingston

Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
— Mao Zedong, Nov. 6, 1938, Selected Works, Vol. 2