To talk about the Oregon crisis, we need to get a few obvious truths out there for the record. So in case you were wondering:

1. There is no good reason for Americans to brandish weapons while protesting government conduct. Perhaps in the days of Jim Crow, abused blacks denied the vote might have been justified in arming themselves before protesting — however, it would have backfired horribly, as racist whites joined biased authorities to put down what they would have called a “revolt.” Once blacks did have the vote, there was no excuse for the Black Panthers (or student protesters such as former Attorney General Eric Holder)  to vaunt their guns and provoke police. There is no need for enfranchised white Americans to do so today in Oregon. As Ted Cruz said, they should stand down immediately, before overzealous law enforcement steps in and someone gets hurt.
2. It is absolutely crucial that Americans retain their Second Amendment right to bear arms. This is precisely as a safeguard against the government creating situations where popular revolt would be justified — and might be a patriotic duty, as it was for America’s Founders. Those founders wrote gun rights into the Bill of Rights, second only to freedom of speech and freedom of church, with a keen eye to instances of tyranny which their ancestors had endured in England. The Second Amendment was virtually lifted from the English 1689 Bill of Rights, which was passed after the English overthrew their last Stuart king, who envied the French king’s absolute monarchy.
3. We’re still on our first Constitution, thank you very much. We haven’t needed to use our privately-held weapons in any revolutions since 1783. Meanwhile, nations that didn’t value an armed, free citizenry with inalienable rights went through regime after regime, from tyranny to anarchy then back again. … (There’s an old joke about a Frenchman going into a British library and asking to see his country’s constitution, and the librarian sniffing back at him, “I’m sorry, monsieur, but we do not stock periodical literature.”) France, Austria, Germany, Spain, Italy, Hungary — most nations of non-English-speaking Europe, except for the well-armed citizens of Switzerland — have seen a dizzying array of regimes rise to power and fall again. Does that tell us something about the practical value of Anglo-American liberties?
4. Those same basic liberties are deeply frustrating to policy wonks with utopian schemes for remaking society. That is why the gravest threats to our rights typically come from our unaccountable courts, or federal bureaucrats. In the Oregon case, there seems to have been a perfect storm of abuses on the part of both, at the expense of one farming family, whose land stood in the way of expanding the federal fiefdoms that eat up much of America’s West. Read David French’s account of the appalling behavior of appointed judges, prosecutors, and environmental enforcers in the Oregon case, to understand why some Oregonians felt that they needed to stage their own Boston Tea Party. These unelected officials are the same kind of progressives, with the same haughty disdain for traditional American liberties, that seize the bank accounts of Christian bakers, and are threatening citizens of New York City who won’t play along with the “transgender” charade with $250,000 fines.
5. Leftists with power want to take those basic liberties away, for good “progressive” reasons. And if we slacken our vigilance for even an instant, they will. We have just seen the extent of President Obama’s intended executive gun-grab. In the past he has shown his contempt for the First Amendment, allowing his State Department to remove “free exercise of religion” from citizenship exams, and his Solicitor General to stand before the U.S. Supreme Court and threaten orthodox Christian churches and schools with tax bankruptcy. That wasn’t a slip of the tongue; it was a trial balloon.

Next time, I will show how the New York Times is floating an attack zeppelin of its own — whose target is not gun rights or church rights, but the very concept of property rights — and give the reader the weapons needed to send it the way of the Hindenburg.

This article has been updated.