THE RIGHT OF DEFENSE

Why the Citizen’s Right to Resist Unlawful Government Force

Is Constitutional, Pre-Constitutional, and Not Negated

by the System That Manufactures the Conditions for Its Exercise

A Constitutional, Statutory, and Evidentiary Analysis

Robert Bryant Starnes

d/b/a Outlaw Livin’

The Outlaw Armory

Rowan County, North Carolina

February 2026

Companion document to:

THE OATH: A Tripartite Constitutional Analysis

THE BOND: A Map of Every Surety Obligation in Rowan County

THE CITIZEN’S MANUAL OF ARMS

“The right to self-defense is the first law of nature.”

— St. George Tucker, Blackstone’s Commentaries (1803)

PREFATORY STATEMENT

This document poses a single question: Does a citizen of the United States have the constitutional right to defend against unlawful physical force by a government officer?

The answer is yes. Constitutionally, pre-constitutionally, and under the common law that predates both.

The right is grounded in the Second Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the common law of self-defense recognized from Blackstone forward, and the natural law principles embedded in the Declaration of Independence. The Supreme Court of the United States recognized this right explicitly in Bad Elk v. United States, 177 U.S. 529 (1900), reversing a murder conviction where a citizen resisted an unlawful arrest with lethal force. The Court held that an officer acting without lawful authority “stands in the position of a wrongdoer” and may be resisted.

The complication is this: the system has erected a statutory and doctrinal framework that punishes the citizen for exercising the right. The majority of American jurisdictions, following the Model Penal Code’s 1962 recommendation, have adopted some version of a “submit now, litigate later” doctrine that requires citizens to comply with unlawful force and seek remedy after the fact. North Carolina’s resisting officers statute, N.C. Gen. Stat. § 14-223, is so broadly drafted that its practical application criminalizes resistance to both lawful and unlawful government force.

The gap between the right and its exercise is the subject of this document.

But this document does something no other treatment of the subject has done. It proves that the system itself manufactures the conditions for unlawful battery by government officers—through hiring practices that screen out higher-intelligence applicants, training regimes that condition obedience to authority over constitutional fidelity, and institutional structures that produce officers who are the least equipped to recognize the constitutional line they are crossing and the most confident that they have not crossed it. The system then demands that the citizen submit to the predictable output of this manufactured incompetence.

That demand is the constitutional violation. The “submit now, litigate later” framework presupposes a competent legal actor on the government’s side of the encounter. The system’s own practices destroy that presupposition. And when the presupposition fails, the framework collapses—because you cannot demand submission to an authority that the system itself has engineered to exceed its authority.

Three judicial philosophies test this argument: Scalia’s originalism, Ginsburg’s rights jurisprudence, and Adams’s founding principles. If all three sign—as they did in THE OATH—the argument is not ideological. It is structural. It reaches bedrock.

I. THE CONSTITUTIONAL FOUNDATION

Three textual provisions establish the right of defense against unlawful government force. They are not alternative theories. They are reinforcing layers of the same structural protection.

A. The Second Amendment

“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.”

The Second Amendment is the textual codification of the right to resist unlawful government force. Not hunting. Not sport. Not home defense against burglars. The Framers had just finished using armed force against government officers who abandoned their obligations to the governed. They wrote the right into the second position in the Bill of Rights because they understood—from personal experience—that a government unchecked by the capacity of the People to resist it would inevitably become the thing they had just defeated.

In District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), Justice Scalia, writing for the majority, confirmed both dimensions of the right. The first is the individual right to armed self-defense—operative without reference to militia service. The second is the structural purpose acknowledged in Scalia’s historical analysis: the Framers included the Second Amendment as a safeguard against governmental tyranny. Scalia wrote that the right “was valued not only as a means of resisting combatants but also combating combatants.” He surveyed the historical record and acknowledged that the right to arms existed, in part, as “a check against tyranny.”

McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010), incorporated the right against the states through the Fourteenth Amendment. New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), established that the government must justify any regulation of the right by demonstrating consistency with the historical tradition of firearm regulation at the founding.

The Second Amendment is the right of defense against unlawful government force—from the individual encounter to the structural crisis. What varies is the scale. What does not vary is the right.

B. The Fourth Amendment

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.”

An unlawful arrest is an unreasonable seizure of the person. Unlawful battery by a government officer is an unreasonable seizure of the body. The Fourth Amendment does not say “the right of the people to be secure in their persons unless a badge is present.” The text is absolute in its prohibition: “shall not be violated.”

The Supreme Court established the controlling standard for evaluating government force in Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386 (1989). All claims of excessive force by law enforcement officers are analyzed under the Fourth Amendment’s “objective reasonableness” standard. The standard is objective—it asks whether a reasonable officer in the same circumstances would have used the same force. The officer’s subjective belief that the force was justified is irrelevant. The officer’s training is irrelevant. The officer’s department policy is irrelevant. The standard is constitutional, not departmental.

Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985), held that the use of deadly force to prevent the escape of a non-dangerous fleeing suspect violates the Fourth Amendment. The Court established that the government’s interest in effective law enforcement does not justify the use of force that is constitutionally unreasonable. The officer’s authority to use force is bounded by the Constitution, not by the officer’s subjective assessment of necessity.

When the force crosses the constitutional line—when it becomes objectively unreasonable—it is no longer an exercise of governmental authority. It is an assault. The Fourth Amendment guarantees the citizen’s security against that assault. A guarantee without a remedy is not a guarantee. It is a decoration.

C. The Common Law Right of Self-Defense

The right to defend against unlawful government force predates the Constitution. It predates the Republic. It is rooted in the natural law tradition that Blackstone codified and that the Framers incorporated into the constitutional design.

Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769) recognized self-defense as a natural right—one that existed prior to any government and could not be surrendered to any government. St. George Tucker, in his 1803 American edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries, wrote: “The right to self-defense is the first law of nature.” Tucker understood the right as both personal and political—the right of the individual to defend against unlawful physical force, and the right of the People to defend against unlawful institutional force.

The Supreme Court confirmed this right in Bad Elk v. United States, 177 U.S. 529 (1900). The facts: three police officers attempted to arrest John Bad Elk, a fellow officer, under verbal orders only. No formal charge had been made. No warrant had been issued. Bad Elk refused to comply. The officers attempted to take him by force. Bad Elk shot and killed one of them. He was convicted of murder.

The Supreme Court reversed. The Court held that the trial court “clearly erred in charging that the policemen had the right to arrest the plaintiff in error and to use such force as was necessary to accomplish the arrest, and that the plaintiff in error had no right to resist it.” The Court stated the common law rule: where an officer attempts an arrest without lawful authority, and the citizen resists, and the officer is killed in the course of that resistance, the offense is reduced from murder to manslaughter—or, depending on the facts, no offense at all.

Bad Elk has never been overruled by the Supreme Court. It remains technically good law at the federal level. What has happened is that the majority of state jurisdictions have legislatively or judicially abolished the right it recognized—not because the right ceased to exist, but because the system found the right inconvenient. The distinction between “abolished by principle” and “abolished by convenience” is the entire subject of Section III of this document.

Plummer v. State, 136 Ind. 306 (1893), stated the rule with characteristic directness: a citizen may resist an unlawful arrest to the point of taking the arresting officer’s life if necessary. The principle recognized in Plummer was the same principle applied in Bad Elk: the officer acting without lawful authority is a wrongdoer, and the citizen’s right of self-defense against a wrongdoer is not extinguished by the wrongdoer’s badge.

II. THE TRIPARTITE ANALYSIS — SCALIA, GINSBURG, ADAMS

THE OATH established the three-framework test. The same test applies here. The argument must be textualist enough for Scalia, rights-protective enough for Ginsburg, and foundationally sound enough for Adams. If all three sign, the conclusion is structural, not ideological.

Scalia: The Text Controls

The Second Amendment says “shall not be infringed.” The Fourth Amendment says “shall not be violated.” Under Scalia’s originalist methodology, “shall” is mandatory. Lexecon Inc. v. Milberg Weiss, 523 U.S. 26, 35 (1998): “The mandatory ‘shall’ … normally creates an obligation impervious to judicial discretion.”

The right to arms existed at the founding precisely as a check against unlawful government force. Scalia confirmed this in Heller. The Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable seizures is mandatory. The common law right of self-defense existed at the founding and was incorporated into the constitutional design. State statutes that abolish the right to resist unlawful force contradict the text of both amendments. Under Scalia’s framework, the text controls. State statutes cannot override constitutional text. Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803).

Ginsburg: Who Is Harmed?

The citizen. Subjected to criminal violence by the entity with the monopoly on force. The “submit now, litigate later” framework transfers one hundred percent of the risk to the victim and zero percent to the perpetrator. This is the definition of unequal protection.

The framework protects the powerful: the badge, the weapon, the institutional presumption of credibility, the qualified immunity doctrine, the prosecutorial apparatus that charges the citizen who defended himself while declining to charge the officer who committed the battery. It punishes the powerless: the citizen who exercised a constitutional right and is now a criminal defendant.

Ginsburg’s jurisprudence consistently argued that when the system produces asymmetric outcomes—when one class of persons bears all the risk and another bears none—equal protection demands correction. The “submit now, litigate later” doctrine is asymmetric by design. The citizen submits to unlawful force. The officer faces no immediate consequence. The citizen files a lawsuit. The officer invokes qualified immunity. The citizen’s case is dismissed. The officer is still employed. The asymmetry is the system.

Adams: The Social Contract Does Not Include a Submission Clause

The social contract does not include a clause requiring submission to criminal violence by the People’s own agents. Adams wrote the intellectual framework from which the Constitution was constructed. The Declaration of Independence states that when government becomes destructive of the ends for which it was established, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it.” That right begins at the individual encounter.

An agent who batters the principal has terminated the agency relationship by his own act. Under the Restatement (Third) of Agency § 8.01, an agent has a fiduciary duty to act loyally for the principal’s benefit. An officer who commits unlawful battery has not acted loyally for the People’s benefit. The officer has breached the fiduciary duty. The oath is breached. The bond is breached. The agency is terminated. And a person whose agency is terminated is not an officer. He is a wrongdoer wearing a uniform.

Adams’s framework does not require the citizen to submit to violence from a faithless agent. The citizen’s right of self-defense is pre-constitutional—it existed before the government, before the badge, before the bond. The Declaration’s right to “alter or abolish” begins at the individual encounter level: the citizen’s body, the citizen’s liberty, the citizen’s right to be secure in his person.

All three sign: The citizen’s right to defend against unlawful government force is constitutional (Second and Fourth Amendments), pre-constitutional (natural law, common law, Declaration of Independence), and recognized by the Supreme Court (Bad Elk, Heller, Graham). The text requires it (Scalia). The vulnerable demand it (Ginsburg). The founding design mandates it (Adams).

III. THE INVERSION — HOW THE RIGHT WAS ABOLISHED BY CONVENIENCE

The right exists. The question is what happened to it.

In 1962, the American Law Institute published the Model Penal Code, which recommended eliminating the common law right to resist unlawful arrest. The rationale was twofold: first, that alternative remedies existed (civil suits, criminal complaints against officers); second, that resistance would likely result in greater injury to the citizen without preventing the arrest. By 2012, only fourteen states still permitted a citizen to resist an unlawful arrest. The majority adopted the Model Penal Code’s framework: submit now, litigate later.

North Carolina: The Ambiguous Middle Ground

North Carolina occupies an instructive position. The state’s own Supreme Court, in State v. Mobley, 240 N.C. 476 (1954), affirmed the common law right to resist unlawful arrest. The court stated: “It is axiomatic that every person has the right to resist an unlawful arrest. In such case the person attempting the arrest stands in the position of a wrongdoer and may be resisted by the use of force, as in self-defense.”

That holding has never been explicitly overruled by the North Carolina Supreme Court. Mobley remains cited by North Carolina appellate courts as recently as 2009 in State v. Sinclair, where the Court of Appeals reaffirmed that the right to resist unlawful arrest exists, subject to proportionality.

Yet the practical reality is that N.C. Gen. Stat. § 14-223—the resisting officers statute—is drafted so broadly that it effectively criminalizes any resistance to any officer performing any duty. The statute reads: “If any person shall willfully and unlawfully resist, delay or obstruct a public officer in discharging or attempting to discharge a duty of his office, he shall be guilty of a Class 2 misdemeanor.” The word “unlawfully” theoretically preserves the Mobley right—resistance to an unlawful arrest is, by definition, not “unlawful” resistance. But in practice, the citizen who physically resists any officer will be charged, will be prosecuted, and will bear the burden of proving the arrest was unlawful at trial. The officer who committed the unlawful arrest will face no parallel charge.

This is the inversion. The Mobley right exists on paper. The § 14-223 reality exists in handcuffs.

The Constitutional Problem with “Submit Now, Litigate Later”

The “submit now, litigate later” doctrine rests on a critical assumption: that the citizen has meaningful access to legal remedy after the encounter. That assumption is false for the following reasons:

First, qualified immunity. The doctrine, developed judicially rather than legislatively, shields officers from civil liability unless their conduct violated “clearly established” statutory or constitutional rights. In practice, this means the officer who commits an objectively unreasonable use of force is protected unless a prior court case with virtually identical facts has already found the conduct unconstitutional. The burden is on the citizen to identify the precedent. The officer benefits from the absence of precedent. The doctrine creates a one-way ratchet: each new form of unlawful force is protected the first time it occurs because no prior case exists, and the dismissal on qualified immunity grounds prevents the precedent from ever being created.

Second, prosecutorial discretion. As documented in THE BOND, Rowan County District Attorney Brandy Cook has prosecuted zero law enforcement officers for on-duty misconduct in approximately sixteen years. This is not an anomaly. This is a pattern replicated in jurisdictions across the country. The citizen who is battered by an officer and seeks criminal accountability will discover that the prosecutor exercises discretion exclusively downward. The officer’s criminal complaint against the citizen who resisted will be prosecuted. The citizen’s criminal complaint against the officer who committed the battery will not.

Third, the economic asymmetry. The officer’s legal defense is funded by the municipality’s insurance carrier. The citizen’s legal offense is funded by the citizen. The cost of bringing a § 1983 civil rights action—even when the conduct is clearly unconstitutional—is prohibitive for the vast majority of citizens. The system’s promise of “litigate later” is a promise it has structured to be economically impossible to keep.

When the alternative remedies that justify “submit now, litigate later” are demonstrated to be illusory—blocked by qualified immunity, refused by prosecutors, priced out of reach—the doctrine loses its constitutional justification. A right without a remedy is not a right. Marbury v. Madison: “The very essence of civil liberty certainly consists in the right of every individual to claim the protection of the laws, whenever he receives an injury.”

The courts were wrong about Plessy. They were wrong about Dred Scott. They were wrong about Korematsu. “The courts say so” has never been equivalent to “the law requires it.” The abolition of the right to resist unlawful force was a policy choice, not a constitutional requirement. The Model Penal Code is not the Constitution. The convenience of the state is not the liberty of the citizen.

IV. THE MANUFACTURED CONDITIONS — WHY THE SYSTEM’S OWN PRACTICES DESTROY ITS OWN ARGUMENT

This is the section that distinguishes this document from every other treatment of the right to resist. The argument is not merely that the right exists and has been improperly abolished. The argument is that the system manufactures the conditions for unlawful battery by government officers—through hiring, training, and institutional design—and then demands that the citizen submit to the predictable output of that manufacture.

Three convergent lines of evidence establish this.

A. The Milgram Experiment: Obedience to Authority Overrides Moral Judgment

In 1963, Stanley Milgram published the results of his obedience experiments at Yale University. Participants were instructed by an authority figure to administer what they believed were increasingly severe electric shocks to another person. Sixty-five percent of participants administered the maximum 450-volt shock—a level they believed could be lethal—despite the other person’s screaming, pleading, and eventual silence.

Milgram, Stanley. “Behavioral Study of Obedience.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67, no. 4 (1963): 371–378.

In 2009, Jerry Burger published a partial replication at Santa Clara University. The replication was halted at 150 volts for ethical reasons, but the results were statistically comparable: seventy percent of participants continued to the 150-volt threshold, compared to 82.5 percent in Milgram’s equivalent condition. The difference was not statistically significant. Burger concluded that Milgram’s findings were not era-bound.

Burger, Jerry M. “Replicating Milgram: Would People Still Obey Today?” American Psychologist 64, no. 1 (2009): 1–11.

The relevance to policing is structural. Law enforcement officers are trained in command compliance, chain of command, and institutional loyalty. The authority structure of a police department is designed to produce obedience. The Milgram finding is that obedience to authority overrides individual moral judgment in the majority of human subjects—not the weak, not the stupid, not the morally deficient, but the majority. The officer committing unlawful battery may not recognize it as unlawful—because the authority structure told him it was justified. The department told him the force was within policy. The sergeant told him to effect the arrest. The training told him to control the subject. Each instruction was an escalating command from a perceived authority.

The Fourth Amendment standard is objective (Graham v. Connor). The officer’s conditioned response to authority is irrelevant to that standard. But the system that conditioned the response is very relevant to the question of whether the citizen should be required to submit to it.

B. The Dunning-Kruger Effect: The Least Competent Are the Most Confident

In 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger published research demonstrating that individuals with the least competence in a given domain consistently overestimate their ability. The effect is not merely ignorance. It is meta-cognitive failure: the same skills required to recognize competence are the skills the incompetent person lacks. The least capable are therefore the most confident in their capability.

Dunning, David, and Justin Kruger. “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77, no. 6 (1999): 1121–1134.

Applied to policing: the officer with insufficient training in constitutional law and use-of-force boundaries is the most confident that his force is justified—and the most wrong. The officer who has never read Graham v. Connor is the officer most likely to violate Graham v. Connor. The officer who cannot articulate the objective reasonableness standard is the officer most likely to apply unreasonable force while believing it reasonable.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is not a character flaw. It is a structural feature of inadequate training. And inadequate training is a feature of the system, not an aberration within it. The average American police officer receives approximately 672 hours of academy training. The average barber receives approximately 1,300 hours. The average licensed plumber receives approximately 8,000 to 10,000 hours of combined classroom and on-the-job training. The system trains its armed agents of the state for fewer hours than it trains the people who cut hair.

C. The IQ Ceiling: Institutional Selection for the Dunning-Kruger Effect

In Jordan v. City of New London, 2000 U.S. App. LEXIS 22195 (2d Cir. 2000), the Second Circuit upheld a police department’s refusal to hire an applicant because his cognitive ability score was too high. Robert Jordan scored a 33 on the Wonderlic Personnel Test—the equivalent of an IQ of approximately 125. New London’s police department only interviewed candidates who scored between 20 and 27. The stated rationale: higher-scoring applicants would become bored with the work and leave, creating turnover costs.

The Second Circuit applied rational basis review and found the policy did not violate the Equal Protection Clause, reasoning that it did not matter whether the city’s belief was correct—only whether it was “rational.” The court did not address the Fourth Amendment implications of institutionally selecting for lower cognitive ability in officers authorized to make split-second constitutional judgments about the use of force.

The practical effect: the hiring practice screens out the applicants most likely to recognize constitutional boundaries and retains the applicants least likely to see them. The officer excluded from the applicant pool—the one with the IQ of 125—is the officer most likely to recognize the line between lawful and unlawful force. The officer retained in the pool—the one the department selected for—is the officer least likely to recognize it.

This is not inference. This is institutional design. The system does not accidentally hire officers who are less likely to recognize constitutional violations. It selects for them. By policy. Upheld by a federal court.

D. The Convergence: How These Three Findings Destroy the System’s Argument

Stack the three findings:

Select for compliance. Hire officers in a cognitive range that correlates with lower capacity for independent constitutional reasoning (Jordan IQ ceiling).

Train for obedience. Condition those officers in command-compliance structures that override individual moral and legal judgment in the majority of subjects (Milgram).

Produce officers who don’t know what they don’t know. The combination of lower cognitive selection and obedience conditioning produces officers who are the least equipped to recognize the constitutional line and the most confident they have not crossed it (Dunning-Kruger).

Then hand them weapons. Hand them qualified immunity. Hand them the institutional presumption of credibility. Hand them a prosecutor who will charge the citizen and decline to charge the officer.

And require the citizen to submit.

The assumption underlying “submit now, litigate later” is that the officer is a competent legal actor—that the force being applied is more likely lawful than not, and that the citizen’s remedy lies in the courts rather than in the encounter. That assumption is structurally false, and the system manufactured the falsity through its own hiring practices, its own training regimes, and its own institutional design. The system cannot demand submission to an output it engineered to be defective.

V. THE OATH-BOND CONVERGENCE

This section connects THE RIGHT OF DEFENSE to its companion documents: THE OATH and THE BOND.

THE OATH proved that the constitutional oath creates a binding fiduciary obligation between government officers and the People. Breach of the oath vitiates the authority of the officer. The officer who breaches the oath is acting ultra vires—beyond the scope of delegated authority.

THE BOND proved that every officer in Rowan County holds office under a surety bond guaranteeing the faithful performance of duties. Any person injured by the officer’s neglect, misconduct, or misbehavior may institute suit against the officer and the sureties on the bond (N.C. Gen. Stat. § 58-76-5).

When the officer commits unlawful battery:

The oath is breached. A Fourth Amendment violation is a violation of the officer’s duty to “support and defend the Constitution.” The officer swore to support the document that prohibits unreasonable seizures. The officer committed an unreasonable seizure. The oath is breached by the officer’s own act.

The bond is breached. Unlawful battery is not “faithful execution of office.” The bond conditions require faithful performance. The performance was criminal. The bond is breached. The surety is liable.

The authority is extinguished. Under the analysis in THE OATH, an officer who breaches the constitutional oath has forfeited the constitutional basis for authority. The officer is acting ultra vires. Acts beyond authority carry no legal force.

The Mobley framework—and the “submit now, litigate later” doctrine generally—presupposes that the officer is acting within the scope of lawful authority. The presupposition has been destroyed by the officer’s own act. The officer who commits unlawful battery is not exercising governmental authority. He is committing a crime while wearing a costume. The citizen’s right of self-defense against a criminal is not altered by the criminal’s clothing.

VI. THE PRACTICAL REALITY — AND THE GAP

This is where the document maintains above-reproach honesty.

The legal right exists. The constitutional foundation is sound. The common law recognized it. The Supreme Court confirmed it. Three independent judicial philosophies converge on it.

The practical protection does not exist.

The citizen who exercises the right to resist unlawful government force will, in the vast majority of jurisdictions, be arrested. The citizen will be charged with resisting arrest, assault on an officer, or both. The citizen will be prosecuted. The officer who committed the underlying battery will not be charged. The system will close ranks around its agent and direct its full prosecutorial apparatus against the citizen who had the legal right to resist.

This document does not pretend otherwise. The Outlaw Armory does not deal in fantasy. The gap between the legal right and its practical exercise is real, it is wide, and it is maintained by the same institutional structures that manufactured the conditions for the unlawful battery in the first place.

What this document provides is the constitutional, statutory, and evidentiary foundation to challenge that reality—in court, in the bond system, and in the public record. The challenge does not require the citizen to win every case. It requires the citizen to file every case. Because every filing creates a record. Every record is discoverable. Every discoverable record is evidence. And the accumulation of evidence is how systems change.

VII. THE ORDER OF OPERATIONS — WHAT TO DO

If you are subjected to unlawful force by a government officer, the following operational sequence applies. This is not legal advice. This is the constitutional framework mapped to practical action.

First: Document everything. Record the encounter or identify witnesses. If you cannot record, note the time, location, badge numbers, patrol car numbers, and every detail you can retain. Your phone is evidence. Cloud-backed recording is evidence that cannot be seized and destroyed.

Second: If arrested, invoke your rights. Fifth Amendment silence. Sixth Amendment counsel. Nothing else. Do not explain. Do not argue. Do not narrate the constitutional basis for your resistance to the officer. Say: “I am invoking my right to remain silent and my right to an attorney.” Then stop talking. Every word after that is a weapon they will use against you.

Third: File the bond claim. N.C. Gen. Stat. § 58-76-5 authorizes any person injured by the misconduct of an officer to institute suit against the officer and the sureties on the official bond. Unlawful battery is misconduct. The claim is commercial, not constitutional—it does not require the officer’s consent, does not invoke prosecutorial discretion, and is not blocked by qualified immunity. The surety company underwrote the officer’s faithful performance. The performance was not faithful. The surety is liable.

Fourth: File the § 1983 claim. 42 U.S.C. § 1983 provides a federal cause of action against any person who, under color of state law, deprives another of constitutional rights. A Fourth Amendment violation under color of law is a § 1983 claim. File it.

Fifth: File the criminal complaint. Battery is a crime regardless of who commits it. File the complaint with the local police department. File it with the district attorney’s office. File it with the State Bureau of Investigation. Document who received it, when they received it, and what they did with it.

Sixth: Document the declination. When the district attorney declines to prosecute the officer—and the district attorney will decline—document the declination. The declination is not a loss. It is evidence. Evidence of the same pattern documented in THE BOND: selective prosecutorial direction exercised exclusively downward. Evidence of the institutional capture that the Armory exists to expose.

Seventh: Publish everything. The record is the weapon. Every filing, every response, every denial, every silence is documented and published. The system’s response to these questions—asked through its own statutory and constitutional mechanisms—becomes the evidence of what the system is willing to defend.

IX. CONCLUSION

The right of self-defense against unlawful government force is constitutional, pre-constitutional, and grounded in the natural law that predates every institution that claims authority over the citizen.

The Second Amendment codifies it. The Fourth Amendment prohibits the violation it defends against. The common law recognized it from Blackstone forward. The Supreme Court confirmed it in Bad Elk. Three independent judicial philosophies converge on it.

The system that manufactures the conditions for unlawful battery—through cognitive screening that selects for lower constitutional awareness, training regimes that condition obedience over judgment, and institutional structures that produce officers who cannot recognize the line they are crossing—cannot then demand the citizen submit to the predictable output of that manufacture.

The gap between the right and its exercise is real. This document does not deny it. This document provides the constitutional, statutory, and evidentiary architecture to close it—one filing, one bond claim, one record at a time.

The Outlaw Armory does not call for violence. It calls for documentation. It calls for the exhaustion of every legal mechanism the system provides. And it calls for the publication of every response—every compliance, every refusal, every silence—so that the record speaks for itself.

The tools are in your hands. The Manual of Arms catalogs them. THE OATH proves the obligation. THE BOND maps the liability. This document proves the right.

Use them.

Robert Bryant Starnes

d/b/a Outlaw Livin’

Citizen of the United States

Rowan County, North Carolina

February 2026

Show up. File. Ask questions. Document the silence. Vote.

AUTHORITIES CITED

Constitutional Provisions

Second Amendment to the United States Constitution

Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution

Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution

Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution

Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution (Equal Protection; Incorporation)

Declaration of Independence (1776)

Federal Statutes

42 U.S.C. § 1983 (Civil Rights — Deprivation Under Color of Law)

N.C. Gen. Stat. § 14-223 (Resisting Officers)

N.C. Gen. Stat. § 58-72-10 (Official Bonds)

N.C. Gen. Stat. § 58-76-5 (Liability on Official Bonds)

Supreme Court Decisions

Bad Elk v. United States, 177 U.S. 529 (1900)

District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008)

Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386 (1989)

Lexecon Inc. v. Milberg Weiss Bershad Hynes & Lerach, 523 U.S. 26 (1998)

Marbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803)

McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010)

New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022)

Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985)

Federal Circuit Decisions

Jordan v. City of New London, 2000 U.S. App. LEXIS 22195 (2d Cir. 2000)

State Court Decisions

Plummer v. State, 136 Ind. 306 (1893)

State v. Mobley, 240 N.C. 476 (1954)

Historical and Legal Sources

Blackstone, William. Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769)

Tucker, St. George. Blackstone’s Commentaries: With Notes of Reference (1803)

Adams, John. Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765)

Model Penal Code, American Law Institute (1962)

Restatement (Third) of Agency §§ 1.01, 8.01 (American Law Institute)

Scientific Sources

Milgram, Stanley. “Behavioral Study of Obedience.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67, no. 4 (1963): 371–378.

Burger, Jerry M. “Replicating Milgram: Would People Still Obey Today?” American Psychologist 64, no. 1 (2009): 1–11.

Dunning, David, and Justin Kruger. “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77, no. 6 (1999): 1121–1134.

Cross-Reference Documents — The Outlaw Armory

THE OATH: A Tripartite Constitutional Analysis (February 2026)

THE BOND: A Map of Every Surety Obligation in Rowan County (February 2026)

THE CITIZEN’S MANUAL OF ARMS (February 2026)

THE INDICTMENT: Salisbury PD & Rowan County Sheriff’s Office (February 2026)

THE BADGE: National Policing Statistics (February 2026)