Friday, March 29, AD 2024 10:52am

Repealing the Bill of Rights

The majority falls prey to the delusion, popular in some circles, that ordinary people are too careless and stupid to own guns, and we would be far better off leaving all weapons in the hands of professionals on the government payroll. But the simple truth, born of experience, is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people… A revolt by Nat Turner and a few dozen other armed blacks could be put down without much difficulty; one by four million armed blacks would have meant big trouble. 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. … 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.

Alex Kozinski, Federal Circuit Judge

 

What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, the guns of our war steamers, or the strength of our gallant and disciplined army. These are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land. All of them may be turned against our liberties, without making us stronger or weaker for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, every where. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage, and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises.

Abraham Lincoln, September 11, 1858

 

 

 

Well, on the Left in this country, everyone from former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens to Mark Shea, are calling for repealing the Second Amendment.  Now, there is no chance that is going to happen.  Go here to read about such an attempt would entail.  However, think about what the mere calling for this means.  Americans throughout our history have treasured our liberties.  Now, a large portion of the American people are willing to take an axe to the Bill of Rights in order to reach a political end.  The people doing so, I suspect, do not treasure the right to bear arms, and thus their liberty is not at risk, but merely a liberty prized by people they obviously despise.

Dale Price has a good response to this:

The First Amendment’s free speech protections are the relic of a backward 18th Century elite’s preoccupations with protecting the intellectual output of a now-extinct leisure class of slaveowning Deists.

In an age where hate and harassment can be transmitted across the globe with the click of a button and the children of vulnerable groups are being bullied into suicide every day, it is time to repeal the First Amendment.

However, I would caution Dale that many on the Left have no love of freedom of speech for those who disagree with them.  Those with the temerity to disagree with the Left are regarded as purveyors of hate speech and must be shouted down.  It is not fearmongering to assume they will eventually wish to amend the First Amendment.  Perhaps it would read as follows:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, except when a religion discriminates; or abridging the freedom of speech, except when speech is hateful or discriminatory or of the press, except when false news is being purveyed; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, except for those assembling to promote racism and discrimination, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances, unless they are petitioning in support of racism or discrimination.

For radical egalitarians, the Left seems to long for a very stratified society where Platonic Guardians will rule over the common people in a progressive utopia  where freedom will be as absent as religion.  This all calls to mind the quote of CS Lewis:

 

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Art Deco
Tuesday, March 27, AD 2018 7:39pm

1. You have the harassment of political dissidents in Canada, in Sweden, in Germany, in Belgium &c. N.B. the bogus ‘human rights’ NGOs are content with this.

2. Keep in mind that the Democratic Party is the electoral vehicle of the bar, the faculties, the school apparat, the mental health trade, and the human services apparat. The notion of working adults supporting themselves through exchanges of goods and services and governing their own households is quite alien to them. The notion of civic status deriving from being a yeoman, artisan, merchant, or journeyman is alien to them. Their interactions with people are patron-client or peer-to-peer and ‘speech’ is proper and consequential only on one side of the demarcation which separates peers from others.

3. Anthony Kennedy has no conception of ‘free speech’. The only time he’s ever spoken to freely is by irate service personnel who don’t know who he is.

Dave Griffey
Dave Griffey
Wednesday, March 28, AD 2018 5:20am

Barry Lynn said that years ago on an interview with Anderson Cooper (when Cooper was just a fill-in host). This was when Lynn was running around yelling about James Dobson sending a card to John Roberts during his Supreme Court nomination. Lynn was insisting that was some step down the road toward theocracy or some such. To Cooper’s credit, he asked Lynn where he was when religious leaders – Jewish and Christian – went to congress and demanded marriage equality. Isn’t that a more obvious case of religious leaders trying to impose religion on the state? I remember Lynn was quite taken aback by the question and tried to worm out of it, but Cooper held on. Finally Lynn said pretty much what you said: Those religious leaders weren’t imposing any religion, they were merely standing for truth. Of course there is nothing wrong with religion in the public square advocating truth. But religion that discriminates or preaches hate has no business being allowed in the public forum. Cooper didn’t press him on that, and I wish he would have. I wish he would have pointed out the obvious, that Lynn seems to be saying people who disagree with him (based on his own subjective view of what is discriminatory or hate) should not have the same rights as he does. And that interview was a long time ago. I’d say today, quite a few people see freedom Lynn’s way. We’ve seen it on these marches. A growing willingness to let others give up their rights for my freedom.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Wednesday, March 28, AD 2018 5:34am

It’s not about safety. The facts show more guns, fewer crimes. Authoritarians have to be authoritarians.

The odds are better for ratifying an amendment banning abortion, which kills one-plus million a year; while all school shootings kill on average 4.9 a year (statistics since 1900; since 1998 it rises to 15 out of 300,000,000+).

The Bill of Rights did not give us our unalienable rights, God did. The Bill of Rights only guaranties that the state cannot infringe or deny my rights.

When those people bleat, “Your rights are not unlimited.” Ask them which ones? Speech? Press? Religion? Life? etc.

This is walking, talking proof that only the good die young; and Alzheimer’s Syndrome.

Nate Winchester
Nate Winchester
Wednesday, March 28, AD 2018 5:49am

Just found this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwKThyMmi7I

Like all good comedy, it functions as a Rorschach test with either side able to get something out of it.

father of seven
father of seven
Wednesday, March 28, AD 2018 6:03am

Every day in every way the Left is about nothing other than might makes right.

Howard
Howard
Wednesday, March 28, AD 2018 10:34am

An armed insurrection of Jews in Germany would have ended very badly for them. As fond as we are of pistols and rifles, they don’t stand up well against dive bombers and artillery. What’s worse is that an armed insurrection, though easily crushed, would have been a dream for Goebbels; it would have provided him plenty of fodder for both domestic and foreign propaganda.

No one should mess with the Bill of Rights, of course, but it does not need nonsense to defend it.

Foxfier
Admin
Wednesday, March 28, AD 2018 11:56am

The problem with parodying them, as you note, is the risk that they’ll think it’s a great idea.

Saw someone try to do it with banning phones for anyone under 21… problem being, those stats have been as horrifically mutilated as the “gun violence” ones. Fewer than five hundred fatal accidents with a driver, at fault or not, using a phone. In any way. For comparison, that’s about twice the number of fatal accidents involving a bus. (Which doesn’t include “kid got hit leaving the bus.”)

You hear about a “huge increase” in traffic deaths? That means that it has returned to the gross number from less than ten years ago.

Any of the stats about distracted driving? That is only those where there was a cause included, and they include “this person might have been able to avoid hitting the guy who ran into traffic if he had been watching the side of the freeway.”

Same way the gun grabbers inflate their “School shooting” numbers by including the guy who committed suicide in a parking lot by a school that was being torn down, or a news report that someone thought they heard gun fire.

DJH
DJH
Wednesday, March 28, AD 2018 2:45pm

At my son’s college, someone draw a picture of a gun on a bathroom stall. School wasn’t shut down, but a number a professors let their students off the hook as far as exam were that day. Apparently, the next day, at least half the student body did not show up. (This is a commuter college). My son showed up and took his test (in a subject he struggles in). The no-shows also have to take the test, but, guess what? They are getting a whole ‘nother week to study the material. (This seems very inappropriate to me to allow so much time.)
.
A couple of days later, another gun picture appeared. Hmm. Pretty clear that someone is avoiding his homework, term paper deadlines, or exams.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Thursday, March 29, AD 2018 6:08am

The crap oozing from the left can be summed up in a few words: illogical, unreasonable, unscientific. Or, was that a sentence form “Notes From The Tide Pod Generation?”

“. . .An armed insurrection of Jews in Germany would have ended very badly for them.” For that I present my certificate for dumbest sentence of the day. What, 7,000,000 instead of 6,000,000 would have been murdered? No, wait, If we can save one life . . .

Those people want to be slaves.

Foxfier
Admin
Thursday, March 29, AD 2018 7:14am

An armed insurrection of Jews in Germany would have ended very badly for them. As fond as we are of pistols and rifles, they don’t stand up well against dive bombers and artillery.

As I point out when a similar argument is made for why American’s second amendment couldn’t possibly do anything– why, exactly, would those resisting neatly file into a nice, open field well away from everyone else? (Also now I’m having visions of how inaccurate bombing was then– *shudder*.)
Exactly how many troops would they use to come in and snag the targets– and any neighbors or relatives that might object? Who wouldn’t make it known they objected until the shooting started?

There’s a reason that “Roof Koreans” are an example of memetic awesome; it is entirely possible for a rather small group to effectively defend buildings designed to be entered. With California legal rifles.
Now apply that rule to houses, which are much more defensible.

Whoof.

Art Deco
Thursday, March 29, AD 2018 7:52am

An armed insurrection of Jews in Germany would have ended very badly for them. As fond as we are of pistols and rifles, they don’t stand up well against dive bombers and artillery.

An Army is a set of social relations. There’s a limit to the willingness of soldiers to turn their weapons on people who occupy a certain circle of affinity.

William P. Walsh
William P. Walsh
Thursday, March 29, AD 2018 1:50pm

In the Warsaw Ghetto, “Seven hundred and fifty fighters armed with a handful of pistols, 17 rifles, and Molotov cocktails faced more than 2,000 heavily armed and well-trained German troops supported by tanks and flamethrowers.” The prevailed for an entire month, from April 19 – May 19, 1943. If they had at hand the level of gun ownership available to Americans, they might have prevailed.
Long Live The Second Amendment.
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/the-warsaw-ghetto-uprising

Mary De Voe
Thursday, March 29, AD 2018 2:59pm

No one can repeal innate human rights without repealing the sovereign person. Self-defense is an innate human right. Incumbent is the power to defend the neighbor as thyself.
Unalienable human rights are endowed by an infinite God. The finite state can only endow finite rights. “The rights the state gives, the state can take away.” Thomas Jefferson Self-evident truth.

Penguins Fan
Penguins Fan
Thursday, March 29, AD 2018 8:25pm

If 1939 Poland were a nation free to own arms, the Wehrmacht and the Red Army would have had a much harder time of things. I wish Poland did allow for the private ownership of firearms. I think the Czechs already do so.

T. Shaw
T. Shaw
Friday, March 30, AD 2018 7:56am

Know Jesus. Know peace.

We are forgetting the Swiss. There were only a few million. Hitler didn’t attack them. No one has attacked in what 600 years. Every man/woman is armed; trained and knows her/his military specialty; and the murder rate is about zero.

It isn’t guns. It’s people.

It all makes sense when one realizes that everything the left says about guns is a lie.

No Jesus. No peace.

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