Ignominy

It's been said the Second Amendment ensures the First. Mostly tongue-in-cheek, but I believe it. If men were angels, we wouldn't need laws. We certainly wouldn't need the Second Amendment, but men are not angels and unless we have safeguards like the First and Second Amendments, tyranny can and will ensue.

In 2000 and again in 2004, I voted (in Florida!) for George W. Bush believing that he would make a better President than either of his two opponents. I believe, and still do, that The Goracle would have turned this country into a septic tank of Socialism. “JFK-lite” John Kerry's unique brand of Massachusetts Marxism only leads to that selfsame bog.

So I voted for George Bush.

Eight years later and the question is begged: how do I feel about Bush's presidency now, and the answer—hard as it is for me to say—has got to be: FUCK!! Apparently someone forgot to tell the President he's supposed to be a conservative. After the fight of both voting years, years I spent in the metaphorical trenches fighting the Bosch (in Florida!), all I got for my troubles was a massive government, spending through the roof and now, the latest in a long line of insults, an Amicus Curiae brief filed by his Justice Department in the most important Second Amendment hearing before the Supreme Court to date.

In this pathetic whimper not worth the paper it's written on, Department lawyers argued that gun ownership is not a “fundamental” right but it is a right deserving only an “intermediate” level of protection, whatever that means.

Translating the lawyer-speak, Ken Blackwell thinks the Justice Department is saying that:

… this is a right that should be protected, but the level of protection should be low enough to allow government to broadly restrict or maybe even eliminate your ability to exercise that right. They try to split the baby of having a right but letting government do almost whatever it wants to that right.

The problem with splitting a baby in half is that the baby usually dies. If our rights can be regulated to the point that we can’t exercise them in our own homes, then they’ve been regulated out of existence.

Thank you, guys. Great job.

Blackwell continues:

So much for civil rights.

The Left refers to racial equality and voting as “civil rights.” But, civil rights are broader than that. Our civil rights are all the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. The Declaration of Independence tells us that government exists to protect our God-given rights, and the Constitution created our court system where those rights are vindicated.

There are three civil rights for which any attempted regulation should be looked at with great suspicion. They are religious liberty, political free speech, and the right to keep and bear arms.

Our country was founded by pilgrims seeking the religious freedom to worship according to the dictates of their own conscience, free from government dictates. The highest promise of free speech is that we may openly discuss the public issues of the day free of censorship or threat, so that we can hold our elected leaders accountable and replace those whom we learn have failed to keep our trust.

And the right to keep and bear arms was put there so that we could defend ourselves and our loved ones, provide for ourselves, and have a last resort to defend freedom.

Indeed. Read the rest of Blackwell's column.

There are scary times ahead and I don't mean that in the typically dismissed way leftists love to say amounts to right wing paranoia. I mean it in the way that if the Second Amendment is construed the way these unworthy “lawyers” at the Justice Department mean it to be, we are indeed doomed. We are doomed because without that Amendment, the government has nothing to keep honest. A toothless Second leads to a defanged First.

Think I overstate? I've lived through six coup d'etats in a country in which any old group of people with guns can—and did!—march up to the state house and demand the reigns of government at gun point.

The British are considering forcing its citizens to donate organs at the so-called point of death, really brain death which doesn't mean death in every case. But whatever. There's a choice to opt-out, but the principal governing idea with such a scheme is the fundamental assumption that your body doesn't belong to you. Government will always expand, if it can. It will, and only way to keep it in check is to ensure its citizens have a real ability to seek redress.

The Second Amendment guarantees that ability, impractical as it may be (I'm sure no one thinks, crazy gungho or not, that they can take on the might of a Marine Division, say). At least, it's there. Of course, the present threat is not from the government (at least for now) but from our fellow citizens, coddled murderers and other malcontents who take what they want by force.

The Second gives the 5'2" woman the capability to truly be the match of a 6'2" marauder. That's true equality, and removing the right to keep and bear arms destroys that idea.

This is why the DC gun ban is unconstitutional.

This is why the Court of Appeals overturned the ban.

And this is why the Justice Department should immediately rescind that brain-dead brief.