You've read my words that the second amendment wasn't written for us. This is because not only do our fundamental human rights predate the Constitution, but it is also not we who need to be reminded of our rights: we know them. It is government who needs to be reminded. 2A was not written for the citizen, it was written for government. The words of art shall not have legal meaning and are clear enough. They . . . ought to be, that is.
Most gun owners will say that gun control interferes with our rights to self-defense, and that gun bans leave people defenseless. Yes, they do. Gun owners talk about the civil right of the second amendment, and how we fight tyranny, but how exactly? Will it be with shoot-outs with our own troops?
Gun control is a morbid cruelty only a Marxist could impose on other families, other fathers and mothers, other children. It's time Americans realized that gun control is that: where power comes only at the expense of lives when it did not come from the electorate.
Personal Independence is superior to any law or policy activists can conceive in their wildest dreams of safety, social justice, or social engineering. Personal independence is superior in legal authority to anything conceived by the mind of the state for safety. The bluff is when the state promises one thing in order to obtain cooperation, and then carries out another. This then paves the way for other takings. This is becoming a highly visible pattern and practice now.
The real purpose of the second amendment then, has always been to show that the presence of the armed citizen is more effective in fighting crime than the absentee policy of the state after disarming a citizen and that the state's substitutes are not necessary. This makes various state-insisted alternative crime fighting programs worthless. Be effective at fighting crime as a homogeneous citizenry in spirit and lethal force --- as a very obvious safeguard --- and there is no need for silly programs which promise to fight crime better.
Of course, I am not talking about crime detection, interdiction, forensic science, and the administration of justice: I am talking about how you fight crime while it is trying to fight you. If you fight crime, you meet it before it can complete its violent acts. You do not find violence, it finds you, and when it finds you, violence is not fought by chasing it later, violence is fought by facing it then and there. Remember that it's not always necessarily the crime that really gets to you, it's the violence.
But we are still talking about self-defense, John; what about that other part, the real purpose of the second amendment?
Let me be more blunt than I have been: safer streets will not come with gun bans; safer streets will come back only with armed citizens in every neighborhood. The concept is not one of designated persons, but of everyone who has the right to choose. The uncertainty of who is armed is a most successful deterrent to violent crime. Deter violent crime and you don't need the excessive largess of government programs of all stripes which we are now suffering nationwide.
Today, many Americans fear their government more than they fear thugs who commit violent acts. This is no accident. Many citizens play the odds that crime will not touch them, but with funding problems and early release of criminals, conditions are worsening. Violence will soon grow, and streets will be unsafer.
The important thing to understand is that safer streets are a reflection of self-governance, a healthy self-governance, where the people rule in wisdom and authority and are not subject to the state's idea of things. Safer streets is a product of self-rule, not government rule.
And this means more than safe streets: it means safer assets, safer property rights, safer futures. The armed citizen does not secure safer streets only by fighting violence face to face; it doesn't end there: that's only the beginning: The armed citizen secures safer streets by showing how unneeded so many costly coercive programs are, programs which claim to be necessary and, frankly, are not as long as citizens do the job only they can do. Government cannot do this job better than the citizen, because absentee policy cannot do the job of the target of crime.
This is inspiring as 2010 approaches. You can really run on a platform of smaller government when you recognize that the citizen does better the things that government has been promising to do and has done lousy. Believe me, you can probably get elected on a platform of liberty in drastically repealing whole swaths of gun laws.
In my Safer Streets Newsletter, I wrote about how the repeal of Political Correctness could turn the nation around quickly. In my book Safe Streets, I show how crime can be turned around in a single night. The repeal of all gun laws could be one of several powerful issues a candidate can emphasize on a liberty platform. The Republicans have hesitated far too long to reverse these, and their unwillingness may give rise to an entirely new party. If guns are unseemly to candidates, then they don't know anything about liberty, and that could explain a lot.
Can you imagine Sarah Palin running on a liberty platform which supports the repeal of all gun laws and the repeal of Political Correctness as harassments of our independence and as impediments to our prosperity?
Can you imagine how free Americans can be once again if both of these alone were repealed?
One could say that this isn't your father's self defense of the nation, oh, but it is: it is your father's self-defense and defense of the nation, and his father's and his father's. It is the due process and safeguards of the Founding Fathers.
They knew that the sovereignty of the citizen would be challenged more by our public servants than by any other entity in the world. They knew.
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Safer streets are a product of self-rule. Buy Safe Streets In The Nationwide Concealed Carry of Handguns available in Hardcover from your favorite bookseller and online as an e-book for immediate download.
Comments
"Gun owners talk about the civil right of the second amendment, and how we fight tyranny, but how exactly? Will it be with shoot-outs with our own troops?"
Ask most America gun owners if they would sign up and pledge their "lives, fortunes and sacred honor" to fight domestic tyrrany and I doubt you would find many takers. Ask them under what circumstances they would open fire on their own government's troops and for most the answer would be "never".
The sad fact is that that very reluctance and the perception of it in Washington makes the day more likely when such actions become necessary. The flip side of that same coin is that an ever emboldened, ever encroaching Federal Government pushes more gun owners to a "yes" answer. As long as government's perception is that Americans will rebel to protect the constitution, the need to do so is less likely.
230 years ago our ancestors were pushed into answering "yes" to both questions. Their actions and lessons for us are clear.
I understand, DDS. Sometimes I think that the feds are trying to provoke gunnies, but that we're too self-restrained and too into due process to fall for that trap. we're the models of law and order while they get away with murder. I know what you mean.
But what if some new candidates knew they had a constituency just waiting to support them in the repeal of gun laws and PC abuses?
The result would be safer streets, safer assets, safer property, safer futures. Why? Because in a nation of self-rule, the rest would take care of itself.
This is the purpose of gun control and thought control: to eliminate self-rule by punishment such that citizens fear their government more than they fear crime.
Unfortunately, the USA has largely become a nation of self-indugent children, who may lack the maturity to make self rule work. Can you imagine either party being able to nominate, much less elect a candidate who would say "Ask not what your country can do for you! Ask what you can do for your country!". That America is gone, dead from neglect more than anything else. Hopefully a new America can come about that has those values without being born amid eight years of war that our ancestors saw from 1775 through 1783.
On a brighter note. Gallup polling shows Obama approval at 47% and Palin at 46%. Been a while since America had a president who could dress out a moose. I believe it was Teddy Roosevelt.
Don't want to hog the discussion, but on the subject of gun owners' self restraint, I believe one of the founders had that one figured out as well.
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security."
That's Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, in the part well after "we hold these truths to be self evident".
Too bad most of today's Americans never read that part, or any of the rest of it for that matter.
"But what if some new candidates knew they had a constituency just waiting to support them in the repeal of gun laws and PC abuses?" -Longenecker.
Let me answer this is a roundabout way, it will be enlightening I think. I will start with a question.
What one thing did all these men have in common other than that they were male and met violence, Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, George Wallace, and perhaps Ronald Reagan and Robert Kennedy? Those last two are not as clear cut as the prior listed men.
Give up? Let's see, not all of them were killed, not all of them were from even the same century, they certainly had divergent political and social views, they weren't even all the same race. But there is one thing they all had in common, to a man.
Now, do you give up?
It's simple really. They all had the political or popular power to make change come about in our society and change the way things were done. Whether for good or ill in each case is a [cont]
[cont] discussion for another time, but does it seem likely that so many incidents of violence against people with the power to change our society over a course of more than 100 years were all coincidental?
Right ON, DDS [below]! But we already know this. SO. The million dollar question is, then: what to do to get people off their rears. But alas, the answer is: Nothing. Nothing at all! These "sheeple" you speak-of have existed as long as man. And will always. America, my friend, is gone. Bow to O' with the rest.
But answer my question, Guys: what if candidates were discouraged becvause they saw no constituency for them? What if they could be encouraged if they did see a constituency just waiting to elect them?
This is where we either sit another one out, or we call the tune and lead. I vote for calling the tune. We make ourselves known.
1. We tell them what we want: repeal all gun laws and PC as part of a liberty platform. 2. We support the candidates who will run on these planks. 3. We get out the vote and we get out and vote. 4. We write, speak and such in support of these candidates in al venues, including talkradio.
The key is to support people who don't run because they see no support for them. I believe that if we blog and speak enough, people who might not have thought of running will in fact run. They need to know it won't be a waste of time.
Phil wrote:
"The million dollar question is, then: what to do to get people off their rears."
Well, we could persuade them all to go to an appleseed shoot. Just about the most fun you can cram into two days. Not going to happen, but we can always hope.
www.applseedinfo.org
I think David Kopel summed it up rather well at the link below.
tinyurl.com/ygbuo2e
"If every family in the world owned a good-quality rifle and an ample supply of ammunition, genocide would be greatly reduced, and perhaps eliminated. Not all countries with severe gun controls perpetrate genocide; but no genocidal governments allow any but the most politically reliable segments of the population to own guns. Because every government which in the last hundred years which has engaged in genocide has first disarmed its victim population, there is reason to believe that those governments see a relationship between gun control and the maintenance of the government’s murderous power."
Some still don't quite see the connection, so permit me to expound a little. If every family had a gun, then any attempt by government to disarm people would be viewed as a "choking canary in a coal mine".
Great read Mr. Longenecker, Seems you know just how to stir the pot! And I say this in a good manner. Take for instance DDS. Well now, I've been scanning the comments of many a blog to finally hear a very interesting comment. We are only fooling ourselves in thinking this socialist take over will just pass us by. Marxism,socialism,fascism define only one thing here in America. All are Anti American ideas of society and Gov't. When it is truly time to save America, I for one will fight to die to save it. Just ask my wife, my Sons and my friends.
It's not that they will try and take the guns -- they have in the recent past and been emboldened by what they discovered. They can get away with it.
My core message is that when a citizenry is armed -- and when the non-gun owners realize how they benefit from this -- then the entire community or state or country then has a safeguard which cannot be replaced, and only bad faith officials would even try to replace this safeguard.
This is how we know that officials today are not on the same goals we are but different methods: they have different goals incompatible with liberty. Or our economy. Or environment Or anything else they claim to be needed for.
The armed citizen is living proof how unneeded government really is on so many issues.
Phil wrote:
"The million dollar question is, then: what to do to get people off their rears."
Well, we could persuade them all to go to an appleseed shoot. Just about the most fun you can cram into two days. Not going to happen, but we can always hope.
www.applseedinfo.org
Please excuse the "double post". I refreshed the browser window and IE decided to refresh the post as well. Got to love those boys from Redmond, WA.
Recently, Obama's Communications Czar, Anita Dunn, said in a speach you might have seen that one of her favorite political philosophers was Mao Zedong. (Mao Tse Tung for those of you who remember when the capital of China was Peking). Interesting that one of Obama's closest aides drew inspiration from someone who was responsible for the deaths of 60 million of his own people, but that's another story. I don't remember which line from Mao's "Little Red Book" Ms. Dunn quoted, but here's my favorite:
"Political power grows from the barrel of a gun."
The Chairman may have been a colossal butcher but he obviously had some smarts going.
I'm not sure why, but Ms. Dunn is now Obama's "former" Communications Czar. Couldn't have anything to do with Glenn Beck running the YouTube clip of her quoting The Chairman, could it?
It took em some doing to hunt this old article down, but I wanted to share it with folks who may not have seen it. It looks at gun control from an Native American viewpoint. David A. Yeagly wrote this in a column in FrontPageMagazine.com on 1/26/2001.
A YEAR AGO, I had a religious experience. No, I didn't speak in tongues. I didn't see an apparition of Mary. And even though I'm Comanche Indian, I didn't commune with my ancestors or hear the eagles talk. All I did was watch a TV infomercial produced by the National Rifle Association (NRA).
There I was, sitting in my easy chair, eating chicken soup and watching television. Suddenly, I saw an immense pile of guns, thousands of them, being bulldozed into a metal crusher.
The narrator explained. These weapons had been confiscated from law-abiding citizens, and were being destroyed. The government had first required the people to register their firearms, and promised that no confiscation would ever occur. (more)"
More of David. A Yeagly's column:
"Then the government broke its promise.
According to the voice-over, this happened in Australia, England, and Canada. The United States was next in line. On the screen appeared distraught gun owners, one after another. "They said they would never do this, but they did it! Don't let this happen to you!" they warned Americans.
We Comanches don't usually admit to being scared. But I was terrified. I had a sense that I was losing America (and, as an Indian, it wouldn't be the first time).
...
So why does the government keep pushing gun control?
The warrior in me knows. He who takes my bow is not my friend. He who takes away my ability to defend myself is my enemy.
If the government takes our guns, it's not because they are trying to help us. It's because they are trying to control us."
(more)
The last part of my excerpts of David A. Yeagly's column, I urge you to read the full version. A different and very interesting perspective.
"Americans nowadays seem to be forgetting what it means to be a warrior. They don't value preparedness. They think the government will always be there to defend them from enemies and criminals.
But that's not the Indian way. That's not the way of a man.
I'm glad the NRA is out there spreading this message. It has earned this Indian's blessing for helping to keep the warrior spirit alive."
MOLON LABE!!!! Spread the word.
Good article, John. And thanks for helping us advertise the Second Amendment March. I appreciate it.
Keep fighting!
Skip
Now that CO2 is a pollutant and the EPA bypassed Congress regulating it, it is only a matter of time lead will also be "regulated" for ammo as a pollutant.
Get the picture...no ammo....no bang.
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