Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 5:53am

Alexander Solzhenitsyn Explains the Importance of the Second Amendment

 The amendment, like most other provisions in the Constitution, has a history.  It was adopted with some modification and enlargement from the English Bill of Rights of 1688, where it stood as a protest against arbitrary action of the overturned dynasty in disarming the people, and as a pledge of the new rulers that this tyrannical action should cease.  The right declared was meant to be a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers, and as a necessary and efficient means of regaining rights when temporarily overturned by usurpation.

Thomas Cooley, Principles of Constitutional Law (1898)

(Whenever the usual suspects are in full cry for gun confiscation control, as they are now, I am going to repost this.)

 

Hattip to Babalu Blog. 

 

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?

Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?

After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you’d be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria [Government limo] sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur — what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked.

The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!

–Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The GULAG Archipelago

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DonL
DonL
Monday, October 5, AD 2015 8:00am

I am convinced that without private gun ownership by the “good guys” this nation would have been totalitarian decades ago.
One has to ask why liberals are such “freedom to do anything morally corrupt” freaks, but across the board, seek to take away firearms from free people.
Maybe it’s because it becomes exceedingly difficult to impose one’s will on armed innocent people?

Ernst Schreiber
Ernst Schreiber
Monday, October 5, AD 2015 8:57am

My stab at an answer woud be that for liberals freedom consists largely of freedom from responsibility —“no fault freedom” Rick Santorum called it; the freedom to be a perpetual adolescent. That kind of freedom is incompatible with firearms ownership. By and large, an armed citizen chooses to embrace a higher degree of responsibility, not evade it.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Monday, October 5, AD 2015 3:20pm

Make no mistake. Gun control, as with all their nightmarish programs, is about people control not guns.

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Channeling Rush Limbaugh here. Democrats and liberals come in two brands”. Those that hate Americans and their way of life and those that really, really hate Americans.
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They know, like Hitler, that there would be a rifle behind every blade of grass to resist the end game which is total control over you. That’s why they are destroying American communities and the middle class with massive illegal immigration. Because the destitute, desperate dependent is so easy to control.
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Patricia
Patricia
Monday, October 5, AD 2015 8:45pm

More available for unregistered weapon distribution for the poor malcontents?
How about constructive control/ help for the sociopaths with illegal arms popping up around the country, or would the issue go away?

Tim Quinlan
Tim Quinlan
Tuesday, October 6, AD 2015 5:50am

No one of Irish or Scots ancestry with any knowledge of history could fail to embrace the second amendment.

Tom D
Tom D
Tuesday, October 6, AD 2015 11:44am

“My stab at an answer would be that for liberals freedom consists largely of freedom from responsibility —“no fault freedom” Rick Santorum called it; the freedom to be a perpetual adolescent. That kind of freedom is incompatible with firearms ownership.”

My firsthand observation exactly! Twenty years ago I was rather ambivalent on the issue of private gun ownership. I started to work in an office, and I quickly noticed that the nice people were gun owners and the backstabbers tended to be gun control supporters. I eventually decided that the correlation was not accidental. People who like to kill others with slander and innuendo deep down know they cannot be trusted with weapons.

Tom D
Tom D
Tuesday, October 6, AD 2015 11:53am

Patricia, my opinion is that if the citizen’s militia were properly re-institutionalized, it would be a lot easier to spot sociopaths. We have out present problems because 1) Federal law now classes the citizen’s militia as the “unregulated militia” and 2) mass media continues to drive the sociopaths who seek herostratic fame (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herostratus)

William P. Walsh
William P. Walsh
Tuesday, October 6, AD 2015 4:09pm

Gun-Control: Here is the factor overshadowing this issue. The gun control movement is not about crime or safety. It is part of the progressive agenda to exercise governmental control over private life, and is among various categories of matters including health, diet, energy use, communication, religious practice, population control and thought control. The essential difference between a progressive and a conservative is a matter of unbelief versus belief. And I think we all fall somewhere between these polar opposites. Else, why would one pray, Lord, we believe, help us in our unbelief. Now, we believe God made us in His own image and likeness, and accordingly gave us free will, the ability to accept the One Who is Love or to reject Him, to love our neighbor or to hate him. To the extent our leaders believe in God’s plan, they leave us to self-governance. To the extent they do not believe in God’s plan, they seek to enslave us.

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