Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I have not been reticent in the past, about the uselessness of constitutions. After all, they don’t seem to do anything, nor to limit government at all. When you can’t even bring them up while arguing a court case, how worthless is that? Not only that; they seem to have little true legitimacy, as Lysander Spooner has pointed out.

It occurs to me though, in what seems to be coming in Virginia, that the “rebels” might actually find a use for the constitutions.

Now I should say that my prediction is, that Northam and the D’s in the legislature will back completely down. You cannot loot the peons any more, if they are in rebellion; and after all, plundering the productive classes is the reason government exists. Maybe Northam is stupid enough to forget that, but the national ruling class surely is not. I’m betting there is some serious arm twisting going on in the background right now, pushing Northam’s fools to knock it off.

But let’s just assume, for the sake of argument, that those in the ruling class have decided to go for broke on firearms—after all, ruling classes have a perfectly understandable antipathy for armed peons. Or maybe, as a few people have suggested, that the rulers actually want a shooting war, to “thin the herd”.

If this war turns hot, then how are the constitutions useful?

One of the things that may well happen, is that contracts will be put out on the most obnoxious of gun grabbing politicians, media “opinion-shapers” and judges, not to mention on Northam himself. When many people have been killed, their survivors are going to look for revenge.

However, revenge does not have a lot of respectability. It won’t convince the “muddled middle”, or the decent-but-uninformed, that the rebel cause is just. What will do so, though, is an appeal to the constitutions. Clearly the Virginia government will be in gross violation of the constitutions, no matter how many judges or lawyers work to convince us through legal chicanery, that they are not. And the more mayhem that occurs, the more clear this constitutional violation will become.

In informal courts, the evil, corrupt bastards will be charged with violations of the constitution, and with all the bad results of those violations. The ordinary people, and for that matter the bulk of the police (who are normally tasked with enforcing the legislature’s petty dictates), will cooperate. Police cooperation will be reinforced by their concerns about the targets on their backs, that their uniforms have morphed into. Scaffolds with hangman’s nooses, or other items such as the stocks (used for public detention and humiliation), will be constructed in the various town squares, complete with the inscription, “Constitutional Restoration Device”, or some such.

Soon, advocating disarmament of ordinary people (which is an act of war), will become quite unpopular, if not outright dangerous. Even the usual baloney-slicing harassment of gun owners will come to an end. All gun control laws will be wiped from the books.

And then the constitutions will have had a use, after all.