How do you think the American public, even as supine as it is, would respond if the Federal government were to attempt to re-assign everybody's children to other parents; to force everybody to burn their Bibles and other religious or ideological texts; or even to confiscate everybody's guns? More importantly, what kind of response do you think the government would expect? The answer, of course, is mass resistance, including, but not limited to, evasion and civil disobedience.

Why do I classify civil disobedience and evasion as "resistance"? Here, I define resistance as the assertion of control over one's own person and rightful property in defiance of the State's pretensions, or helping others to do the same. Under this definition, resistance is not limited to repelling aggression with countervailing force or the threat of countervailing force. Civil disobedience qualifies as resistance, because the disobeyer is asserting control over his own person and rightful property by conspicuously refusing to follow State dictates, even if he does not put up a fight when State agents comes to arrest or otherwise expropriate him.