The INDIVIDUAL Right
to Keep and Bear Arms - IT'S YOUR DUTY!
Marion Pritchard - She
shot a Nazi to save Jewish Children. The
officer stood at the door. It was 2 o'clock in the morning, and he was
hunting for Jews. Someone must have tipped him off to the three Jewish
children sheltered in the home of Marion Pritchard. He entered the living
room, his back to the bedroom where the youngsters were sleeping.
Pritchard's gut told her he would send them to a concentration camp.
Within two minutes, she'd decided what to do. She reached up to a shelf
and felt for the revolver given to her for emergencies. "It was him
or the kids, so I shot him," she says, unflinching. "It was a
moment of excitement. I did it! I did it! The kids are safe! Then it was,
what do I do with the body?" The related article appears
below (which can be located at numerous locations on the internet).
Comment: This historical
event shows the underlying meaning of the Second
Amendment. Armed citizens must be able to defend against tyrants and
oppressors. Self defense is your God given right. Marion
Pritchard stood up for what was right, and used the force of arms to
defend self and others against tyranny. Consider the following discussion
as it relates to the above, then read the news article about Marion
Pritchard..
Silveira
v. Lockyer - Dissent by Kozinski, states in part:
" ...a core value protected by the Second Amendment for
"the people" was "the Right of the people to alter or
abolish"48 tyrannical government, as
they had done a decade before. ...
As Blackstone describes the "natural right" of an Englishman
to keep and bear arms, the arms are for personal defense as well as
resistance to tyranny. The two are not always separable. After the Civil
War, southern states began passing "Black Codes," designed to
limit the freedom of blacks as much as possible.50 The
"Black Codes" often contained restrictions on firearm ownership
and possession.51 The codes sometimes
made it a crime for whites even to loan guns to blacks.52
A substantial part of the debate in Congress on the Fourteenth
Amendment was its necessity to enable blacks to protect themselves from
White terrorism and tyranny in the South.53 Private
terrorist organizations, such as the Ku Klux Klan, were abetted by
southern state governments’ refusal to protect black citizens, and the
violence of such groups could only be realistically resisted with private
firearms. When the state itself abets organized terrorism, the right of
the people to keep and bear arms against a tyrant becomes inseparable from
the right to self-defense.... (emphasis added)...
the law establishes with the utmost clarity that the militia is
precisely what the panel says it is not, an "amorphous body of the
people as a whole."
Among the acts of the crown seen as oppressions to be prevented from
ever happening again were the Militia Acts of 1757 through 1763
authorizing British officials "to seize and remove the arms" of
colonial militias when they thought it necessary to the peace of the
kingdom.69 The American Revolution was
triggered when General Gage ordered troops to march from Boston to
Lexington and Concord to do just that.70
...The one thing that is absolute is that the Second Amendment
guarantees a personal and individual right to keep and bear arms, and
prohibits government from disarming the people
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to
the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms
shall not be infringed. Second Amendment,
U.S. Constitution
ARTICLE ABOUT PRITCHARD
By Samantha Levine
Like the angel of death, the Dutch police officer stood at
the door. It was 2 o'clock in the morning, and he was hunting
for Jews. Someone must have tipped him off to the three Jewish
children sheltered in the home of Marion Pritchard. He entered
the living room, his back to the bedroom where the youngsters
were sleeping. Pritchard's gut told her he would send them to a
concentration camp. Within two minutes, she'd decided what to
do. She reached up to a shelf and felt for the revolver given to
her for emergencies. "It was him or the kids, so I shot
him," she says, unflinching. "It was a moment of
excitement. I did it! I did it! The kids are safe! Then it was,
what do I do with the body?"
During World War II, the Nazis murdered millions of Jews,
Gypsies, homosexuals, and others. But thousands of ordinary
folks risked their own lives to help the intended victims.
Marion Pritchard was one of the rescuers, concealing a Jewish
family for nearly three years.
"It was never a question," says Pritchard, now 80
and a practicing psychoanalyst who lives in Vershire, Vt.
"For somebody's life, how could you not?"
The straightforward woman with the clipped Dutch accent is
puzzled by those who don't understand her conviction that
hesitating in the face of evil is equal to siding with the
enemy. Her brows knit together, she crosses her arms and asks,
"What if nobody had done anything?"
"To my father, justice was everything," Pritchard
says of her dad, a judge. "Not law and order, but
justice." His philosophy shaped her idyllic girlhood in
Amsterdam."I was never spanked, never hit," Pritchard
says. "I got all my questions answered. When you are
brought up that way, with complete love, respect, and
understanding, that is how you try to treat people when you grow
up."
When the Dutch government shocked its people by capitulating
to the Nazis five days after the Germans invaded in May 1940,
Pritchard remained true to her family's values. She aimed to
"do whatever I could to get in the way of the Nazis."
So when her supervisor asked her and her classmates at social
work school to temporarily shelter Jewish children targeted for
concentration camps Pritchard agreed. Despite the possibility of
prison, or worse, she took a boy into her parents' home.
One morning in the spring of 1942, Pritchard watched Nazis
load sobbing Jewish children into trucks. When they didn't move
fast enough, the Nazis grabbed an arm or leg and threw them in.
"I was so shocked I found myself in tears," Pritchard
says. "Then I saw two women coming down the street to try
to stop them, and the Germans threw them into the trucks, too. I
stood frozen on my bicycle. When I saw that, I knew my rescue
work was more important than anything else I might be
doing." She was 22.
That summer, a friend in the Dutch resistance movement
secured empty servants' quarters in a rural village as a refuge
for a Jewish family. Pritchard volunteered to live with and care
for them.
"Jews in hiding couldn't be visible," she explains
with a hint of annoyance when asked her rationale. "They
couldn't just go to the store. So I stayed with them. It was the
right thing to do." The Polak family–Fred and his
children, 4-year-old Lex, 2-year-old Tom, and newborn
Erica–stayed with her until the war ended in 1945. (The mother
was separated from the family but reunited with them after the
war.) There was nowhere to hide other than a tiny compartment
under the living room, so Fred spent each day upstairs in a
nurse's house across the street and worked on his doctoral
dissertation. The children, who passed for gentiles, could play
in the yard. Though many of the neighbors knew what she was
doing, they were "good Dutchmen, anti-Nazi, and rescuers in
their own way," Pritchard says. They sneaked her milk and
vegetables to supplement her meager rations. Pritchard struggled
to keep house while finding havens for other Jews.
By the time the war ended, the Nazis had murdered
approximately 110,000 of the Netherlands' 140,000 Jews.
Pritchard had helped find hiding places or transport to safe
houses for more than 150. "I tried," she says,
"but many were only saved temporarily."
Pritchard was an exemplary rescuer because she chose to risk
her life when she saw Jewish children being hauled away, says
Malka Drucker, who coauthored Rescuers: Portraits of Moral
Courage in the Holocaust. "She was frozen in fear and
indecision, so she decided to become a rescuer."
For all her bravery, Pritchard is haunted by that night she
shot the policeman. She was fortunate local authorities did not
pursue the missing man–hatred for Nazis and Dutch turncoats
seethed in the village. And she was extremely lucky that friends
and supporters disposed of the body. Karel
Poons, a gay Jew who
was her former ballet teacher, risked his life to sneak out
after curfew and persuade the baker to take the body in his
horse-drawn cart to the undertaker, who stashed it in an
occupied coffin slated for burial. Still, Pritchard feared being
found out. "I had to go on, to stay strong for the
family," she says. "I wish it hadn't been necessary.
But it was the better of two evils."
© 2001 U.S.News
& World Report Inc. All rights reserved. 8-18-2001
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