Posted on 04/01/2018 7:03:10 AM PDT by Kaslin
The anti-gun movement has held out the falsehood that they are not coming after people’s guns as a central core of their effort to hide their existential goal. The lid was blown off that charade when a 97-year-old man who previously occupied a position at the top level of our country (retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens) advocated for the abolition of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in the paper of record – The New York Times.
Before anyone jumps off a cliff about this proposition, let me state who I am on this issue. I am not a gun owner. I am not a member of the National Rifle Association nor any other group that supports gun rights. I was fairly ignorant about essential elements of guns and gun owners until I did a series of columns on the subject and became knowledgeable about the subject of guns through extensive research and interviews.
I strongly support the right to bear arms. I don’t care about or believe that garbage about a well-armed militia. The Second Amendment was put in place and obtained its lofty position as the “Second Amendment” right behind the most essential amendment giving us free speech etc., etc., for a reason. The people who founded this country did not trust government. Even though they were possibly the most talented, intelligent and capable group of people ever assembled for one cause, they lacked the arrogance of most people in government that government was or is the answer.
Today we have a multitude of reasons to have a high concern about a government that has become far too large, too invasive in too many issues and operated by people who are almost impervious to being fired for normal matters that citizens have to face in their own lives.
When I have discussions with people wanting to shrink the rights of gun owners, they discount this essential aspect of why citizens should be allowed to own guns. When I ask them to explain the explosion of armed representatives of the government in non-military agencies, they are universally ignorant of that fact. Here are just a few:
The IRS has 2,300 Special Agents armed with AR-15s, P90 tactical rifles and other heavy weaponry. The IRS recently spent $12 million on ammo and weapons. The Small Business Administration (SBA) spent tens of thousands on Glock hand guns. In 1996 the Veterans Administration had no armed employees. Today they have 3,700 officers armed with millions of dollars worth of guns. The list goes on.
As a Jew, I have a problem with any government having all the guns. The last time we allowed that to happen, it ended with millions of dead Jews. I believe any Jew who denies that reality puts their own political naiveté above the survival of the Jewish people.
If you think that is far-fetched because it happened over 70 years ago, then just cast your eyes south to Venezuela. Hugo Chavez took over a country that had open elections and was the most prosperous in South America in 1999. In less than 20 years Chavez and his successor Maduro have run an educated, productive country into the ground. It is a human disaster and they control all the guns while people are starving.
Let’s look at the current move by the anti-gun people to limit guns.They call a restriction of certain long guns “common sense” legislation. First let me say, these people have destroyed the use of the words “common sense” for all of us just like they destroyed the word “liberal.” In both cases, the use of the words was driven into oblivion by using them in an Orwellian manner.
Let us believe that the banning of these guns was achieved as they previously were for 10 years with non-existent benefit. Toward what end? The fact is that deaths from long guns average one per day. If you exclude suicides, gun death by hand guns are 42 per day. If you include all gun deaths (suicides) by hand guns it is 104 per day. We are led to believe by their rhetoric that once the anti-gun goal of banning certain long guns has been achieved (guns responsible for one death per day), they will stop and not go after guns that are used to kill 104 per day. Balderdash.
Those of us who have some experience in life know that is not the way it works with the Left. They play a long game and are happy to move the ball forward with mini steps until they achieve their goal. That is how they moved a free market for medical care in America just 55 short years ago to a position that some states like California are toying with 100% government-run health care. There is an expression that could be used in this situation – if that ever happens, just shoot me.
I don’t trust the government and this country was established on that bedrock principle. I don’t trust the people who are lying to us about what their true intentions are about gun control just like they lied to us about government-run health care. They want all guns in the control of government-controlled apparatchiks.
As Charlton Heston said: “From my cold, dead hands.”
To quote the Nazi Party member running for sheriff in one of our sh*thole states as the “democrat” candidate, “Okay”.
This is a well-written, logical piece. I’ll share it with others.
I always read those ‘nobody is coming for your guns’ things as having a silent second part to the statement that the activists dare not breathe out loud in front of the rubes who parrot their lines believing they are reasonable people.
Nobody is coming for your guns... (but when they do, you bigots are gonna deserve every bit of what’s coming for you.)
“Does Stevens desire “repeal” or abolition”? I suspect abolition is the right wore. He would like to see the Supreme Court declare the 2Amd to be unConstitutional On thee surface it would work. The populace has come to feel in its bones that whatever the Court decrees is thenceforth immutable law.
All too many of the other great tragedies of history— Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few—were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. See Kleinfeld Dissent at 5997-99. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.
My excellent colleagues have forgotten these bitter lessons of history. The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed—where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.
Fortunately, the Framers were wise enough to entrench the right of the people to keep and bear arms within our constitutional structure. The purpose and importance of that right was still fresh in their minds, and they spelled it out clearly so it would not be forgotten. Despite the panel’s mighty struggle to erase these words, they remain, and the people themselves can read what they say plainly enough:
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 sheer ponderousness of the panel’s opinion—the mountain of verbiage it must deploy to explain away these fourteen short words of constitutional text—refutes its thesis far more convincingly than anything I might say. The panel’s labored effort to smother the Second Amendment by sheer body weight has all the grace of a sumo wrestler trying to kill a rattlesnake by sitting on it—and is just as likely to succeed.
[Silveira v. Lockyer: Judge Alex Kozinski’s Dissenting Opinion]
Thanks to Trumps breaking of his gun support pledge, Republicans in Florida and Vermont feel it is now safe to disarm law abiding adult Americans.
This train is derailing faster than the NRA or anyone else can intervene to stop it.
Excellent thumbnail sketch. Thanks for the post, Kaslin.
Deserves a wider audience.
Parkland Survivor: ‘When They Give Us That Inch, That Bump Stock Ban, We Will Take a Mile’
Boulder, Co. city council will vote on Thursday evening to ban many types of weapons led by Jill Adler Grano who thinks she’s a progressive hero. I got an NRA alert about the meeting. This will affect the Boulder Rifle club which the council hates with a passion.
We know what happens to disarmed people.
The Supreme Court can't declare an amendment unconstitutional. It's part of the Constitution! What they can do is revisit Heller and rule that the 2A only applies to National Guard elements. This is what liberals would love to see happen.
bkmk
American Left:
No problem.
Bears repeating, but also explains why the Left disparages them and wants the Constitution re-interpreted if they can't rewrite it....
Democrats have actively been after our guns a long time.
“If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States, for an outright ban picking up every one of them up...Mr. and Mrs. America turn ‘em all in I would have done it. I could not do it. The votes were not there.”
February 5th, 1995. Diane Feinstein on 60 Minutes
“What they can do is revisit Heller”
My greatest fear. I do not want this SC getting another shot at this. Last time it was 5-4 and Kennedy was very shaky. We need to tolerate state encroachments until we get at least 1 more conservative Justice. In this atmosphere I can see us losing the 2nd.
Gun control is about control, not guns.
The Supreme Court has been woefully wrong many times.
“I am not a gun owner.”
Get one.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.