Letter to the United Nations

by David Rostcheck
[email protected]

Originally published on this site July 10, 2001

Dear Ambassador Meerburg,

I am writing from America to discuss the UN's 'Small Arms Destruction Day' and the attendant conference on 'Light Weapons'. I understand you have received many other letters from my countrymen, but I wanted to write to explain more clearly why Americans are horrified that such a thing could ever take place, let alone be spoken of in a positive context on American soil. Your published remarks indicate confusion over the American response, and while your confusion is probably disingenuous, I thought I would take
your remarks at face value and explain why Americans are so resistant to your conference's 'sensible' aims.

I have been to Europe, and particularly to the Netherlands. In many ways, your country has a truly pleasant society, and I saw some things that stand in refreshing contrast to problems in America. For example, sexual expression and the use of recreational drugs are tolerated and your society operates smoothly, while in America our leaders rail against the supposed menace of such things and thus justify enormous violations of our civil rights, such as the War on Drugs. However, at the same time, as I traveled through Europe I was continually reminded how the European peoples do not enjoy nor understand the American concepts of civil rights. Laws such as
those criminalizing criticism of EU ministers' policies would never be tolerated in America. We enjoy a right of political criticism and free speech, a right that will protect me when you turn this 'strongly worded' letter over to your 'security agents' for review, as you have with other recent letters. Our people distrust our government, and we regard this distrust as healthy.

In America, the state does not grant civil rights to its citizens, the citizens reserve their natural rights to themselves and grant limited powers to the state. Your system of government is designed to be sensible and moderate, and it will function well in that capacity until, of course, it eventually destroys you itself or fails to protect you from destruction from without. But our system of government is designed to survive severe corruption, to limit the damage government can inflict on its citizens, and to insure the practical ability of the citizenry to demolish and replace it when it has become too corrupt to be controlled. Our government was designed by brilliant men who were powerful scholars of government, history, and human nature. They understood the great cycles of history and learned the natural tendencies of government towards tyranny. These men stared at history with an unblinking eye and steeled themselves against the folly of unrealistic optimism (such as that which plunged Europe into its last few wars). They carefully designed a system of checks and balances to limit government power. One of those checks and balances is the right that the people's private arms be secure from government regulation or infringement. In America, the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is a fundamental civil right, enumerated with freedom of speech and trial by jury. To function properly, our system of government requires a population equipped with privately owned military-style arms - what you would classify as 'small arms' with 'no purpose'. You would submit these arms to 'reasonable measures' such as state registration, which stand in opposition to the fundamental concepts of
American government - that the state's rapacious power be restrained by an unfettered, armed citizenry willing to defend their liberty with force.

In my travels through Europe, I found my greatest surprise to be how little world history the European people knew. As an American, I expected my education would prove narrow compared with the broader European perspective. In reality, I found the reverse to be true. Amidst buildings older than my country, I found the European people to have little concept of history's cycle, of the patterns of growth and decay, folly and failure, that swing like a great pendulum counting the ages of your land and all other lands. Not two generations have passed since your government was crushed beneath the Nazi advance, an army of tyranny that sprang forth from nothing in less than a decade. The diplomats of that day considered their world a modern world, evolved well beyond the horrors of the Great War. We remember well their foolish optimism and misplaced trust. There was great fervor behind disarmament then, and talk of the 'modern world', and enactment of 'sensible registration schemes'. But soon the registered bank accounts were seized, the registered people burnt to ash by the millions. When the Nazis came your people, easily conquered, resisted with grim resentment the tyrant's boot on your neck, but your country was lost, your treasury looted and shipped away (never to return), your bicycles confiscated, your movement controlled. The arms in the control of your government troops did not protect you then, and they will not protect you any better the next time around. Your country was returned to you by foreign hands, and had the Allied troops not left their homes to fight for other men's freedom, your continent would remain lost today.

But not too far from you, your Swiss neighbors survived unscathed, protected by a militia composed of their entire population, with military weapons stored in every house, that made their invasion too costly to be worthwhile. They modeled their militia on the American model, much as we previously modeled parts of our Federal government on the Swiss system. Their system serves them well today, and I hear no breathless talk from the Swiss about the glorious 'new' idea of banning small arms to reduce 'death and injury'. The Swiss remember what you do not. German youth grow up knowing nothing whatsoever about World War II; the subject is "verbotten". Within the last few years America had to once again dispatch troops to Europe, insistently dragging reluctant European nations forth to quench a genocidal war burning right in the heart of the European continent, which all of Europe wanted to simply ignore. We led NATO forces to do what the UN could not or would not do. How can you possibly bring forth your grand new schemes for world regulation while even the most basic cycles of history remain outside your grasp? While you toss off idealistic concepts like 'conflict zones' and 'trafficking in small arms', does it never occur to your people that not long ago your country was a 'conflict zone' and the arms we smuggled to your registers were part of that 'illegal arms trade'? Perhaps you should put yourself in the place of the villager in Africa - or in Kosovo. How far away are you, really, from that place? Perhaps in between proposing your brave new legislation you might take a short trip to visit the laboratory of history that is burning near your home. Perhaps shortly thereafter you will understand more of the motivation behind 'trafficking in light weapons'.

Very sincerely yours,

David Rostcheck
Boston, Massachusetts
United States of America

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