When one of your site visitors wrote that as an attorney he saw no modern basis for the second amendment it drew no agrument. The subsequest testimony you printed last week brought up the second amendment and dismissed the argument...and this does not produce strident comment???A few clarifying notes:
You posted a letter positing that the second amendment had been rendered meaningless, that it had become a mere cynical fund raising ploy. That drew comments from 6 distinct individuals on a site that draws thousands a day? On the RKBA site when I log on for my daily news I am "one of 87 - 450 persons logged on at that time" - This translates to NO INTEREST IN THE TOPIC.
A million people may begin to have some voice but a hundred...a hundred is just a few more than the dead and forgotten at the Branch Davidian "compound" in Waco. You often bring up the possibility that people in numbers may have some effect and just this week in one of your postings you mentioned the 81 million gun owners and 400 showed up type thing. Our "side" shows no numbers.
Our "side" has enough persons with the willingness, interest, guts and foresight to stand up despite their comfort and not kiss the Pharaoh'’s ring to make us an easy and obvious scapegoat for totalitarian government and a super photo op for the coming "one world" infrastructure that is being built by the day.
Based on the numbers (81 million gun owners that can'’t / won'’t coalesce) against an apparent continental or international plan to open or erase our borders, average our laws with the countries of the continent and the world, create ever increasing webs of laws that can not be understood or abided by - can it be long before gun owners are out of favor and marginalized as a group?
Friends of mine who are police officers have been telling me for some time that there is a trend in law enforcement that the criminals are the "customers" and then there is everybody else. The theory being that the criminals drive the system and employment not the law abiding. The converse of this thinking is that a) check every citizen to see if they are a customer and b) Law abiding citizens are not customers and possible enemies. It'’s just good marketing to convert "citizens" to "customers".
Among the comments of posters on the topic (and we can admit it is a widely held sentiment) was that "when the time comes, I won'’t register my guns" or "I'’ll bury my guns" or "If they come for my guns we'’ll all be dead" ad nauseum and that is fine and I hold that sentiment myself in principal. HOWEVER, it is easy to hide your guns and be under the radar if you have 3 or 10 but if you have 500 or a thousand you won't be viewed as a collector you will be viewed as an enemy of the state and you will not hide or be hidden when they start compiling 4473's. Didn't the FBI kill Vicky Weaver and Sammy Weaver over one machine gun transfer?
But will you take to the hills? Hell, the Weavers were in the hills!
The second amendment has seemingly been rendered entirely symbolic. If you look at McCain-Feingold (limits on the most fundamental first amendment protected speech), Kelo (eminent domain expansion) and increasing narrowing of the fourth amendment, a reasonable person can conclude that the constitution as a whole is on a path toward meaninglessness.
Those us of that believe (romantically) in the constitution and that the second amendment secures all other rights are being sold out and screwed by absolute lowest common denominator traitors at every level of government installed by a comfortable and illiterate population of easily manipulated TV watchers. MY CHILDREN ARE BEING SCREWED!
"We" have built a welfare mommy state and we vote our own entitlement. I am losing faith that the government is acting in the best interest of the US and not the un. I am starting to fall to the one worlders' conspiratorial views because I can not see freedom or sovereignty as the basis for anything going on legislatively or in the courts. AND TO GET THERE THEY WILL HAVE TO TAKE OUR GUNS. If not from you and me then from our children. Let's call a spade a spade now and not wait to be told.
I am not ordinarily a pessimist.
Our children need guts. We have to actively counter the indoctrination they get at school and on TV (we don't allow TV). We need Paul Revere again...but that is just...the rest of the story...
I refuse to be a party to raising "villagers". Let's fight and stop embarrassing ourselves.
I am not a prisoner, I'm a free man. Period.---------------------
I wish this site drew "thousands a day." Hundreds is more like it. Sorry, but most gun sites/blogs don't ( or won't) link to me, and I won't beg anyone for links. If WarOnGuns readers think this site has merit, I'll let them be the ones to spread the word on their own initiative--if I have to ask them to do this, it apparently does not.
In re the testimony that specifically excluded talk about 2A, that did not trouble me as it apparently has some--we need to be able to attack the problem from various angles and with various strategies. Prof. Covey wasn't dissing 2A--in fact, he specifically stated it was an individual right. He was simply applying an original approach that may produce results on its own merit, and certainly bolsters all other arguments. Think of it as one more tool in the kit, and a pretty useful one at that.
--David Codrea
[More "Escaping the Village"]
You posted a letter positing that the second amendment had been rendered meaningless, that it had become a mere cynical fund raising ploy. That drew comments from 6 distinct individuals on a site that draws thousands a day? ... This translates to NO INTEREST IN THE TOPIC.
ReplyDeleteI visit often, but usually don't comment because someone has already said what I think, and said it better than I could. I bet a lot of readers do the same, we see no point in just nodding and saying "Amen."
David has been at this for much longer than I. And I've felt "What's the point?" many times over the last year+.
ReplyDeleteDavid has had his ups and downs as well - we all do. But the key is not giving up, or giving in.
The problem I perceive, is that the general feeling is - 'what's the use'? Going by the impression that resistance is futile. In other words giving up before even attempting.
The pen (keyboard) truly is mightier than the sword.
I've witnessed where we, the people in support of the Constitution and our Rights, have hammered some chinks in the wall. It is imperative that we keep hammering until the 'wall' is broached.
It is my belief, that the next two years will probably two of the most critical years to our freedom and liberty, in the history of our country.
Education is crucial. Knowledge of just what freedom and liberty really is, is absolutely necessary. So many look at the words and give a nod of assent, and let the true meanings slide right on by.
We are in a war of good and evil. Evil is controlling, anti-freedom, anti-liberty, and just desires to subjugate. Good realizes there is responsiblities attached to freedom and liberty, and that they MUST be fought for.
Government will gather unto itself as much power as We The People ALLOW it to.
We can realize our error, in allowing gov. to overstep beyond its delegated authority. And put a stop to it. And save ourselves and our progenies liberty and freedom.
Or, we can continue watching the boob-tube. And getting caught up in all of the other distractions. Which have been engineered for that very purpose - to DISTRACT us.
As Patrick Henry put it:
"You trust to chance; for sure I am that that nation which shall trust its liberties in other hands cannot long exist."
Or as mentioned by...Alex Kozinski, a Federal Appeals Judge, (Ninth Circuit), and an immigrant from Eastern Europe, warned in 2003, "the simple truth -- born of experience -- is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people."
"The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do," Judge Kozinski noted. "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."
- The doomsday provision, 10/19/2005, by John Stossel
As well as Dwight D. Eisenhower:
"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid."
And;
"A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both."
We ARE talking about our LIVES, and our childrens LIVES here, after all.
Absolute power, corrupts absolutely. One would have thought we would have learned that leason last century - the most tyrannical and murderous in the history of mankind....
Speaking in generalities of Americans, it may be that some of our problems in recognizing our rights and performing our duties in the continued securement of those rights is due to ignorance. But by and large, I believe it may be more generally true that cowardice is the cause or our pretended noncomprehension of the duties and responsibilities incumbent on a free people.
ReplyDeleteCowardice that is rapidly becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. For you see, we do not even need to be able to win in a straight-up armed conflict. All we need to do is convince the abusers of our freedoms that they will pay a higher price than they wish. Cowards never understand this simple fact.
People that would steal from you by subversion, distraction, fraud, sematics, and political chicanery are not people prepared to suffer physical danger to gain their ends. They would have no problems sacrificing others to physical danger, but they themselves would not venture forth into the arena.
Ergo, it behooves all who would be free to convince all who would steal that freedom that they will be hurt. Even if the forces they should gather could win the war against the citizen, their hands would be stayed by their masters who will not risk injury or loss at a personal levcl. They are much better at "feeling our pain" when they actually don't. They are not worth a damn at accepting pain for themselves.
It behooves all free men to make the world aware that we will punish severely all those "...who approach that jewel."
But of course our cowardly majority worries too much about the possibility of their personal costs to realize that surrender to that worry guarantees their subjugation by people no more courageous, but better at making scary faces. How shameful!
BTW DEQ, what is the source of that partial quote? I forgot exactly who said, I know you will know.
"Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined"
ReplyDelete-Patrick Henry
or
"Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely."
-Lord Acton (british historian), in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887.
Couldn't decide which you were asking about so I thought I'd try to cover all bases. Of course, I could be totally off track, in which case I'll just scratch ma pointy lil haid in confusion.
SA -Civis called it out right. Patrick was speaking to Edmund Pendleton at The Virginia ratifying convention, June, 1788
ReplyDeleteCowardice indeed does play a role. But, I think it has more to do with the lack of knowledge of We The People's SOVEREIGNTY. As well as that, we have voluntarily relinquished it out of laziness, fear and incorrect placement of values.
Once a person has full knowledge of what freedom and liberty REALLY is - they cannot possibly be subjugated. They WILL die first, in the attempt to maintain their freedom and liberty.
Fear truly is an evil and corroding thread, and it does indeed appear as if the fabric of our present existence is interwoven throughout with it. The answer to fear, is FAITH.
Time after time, throughout the history of mankind. Small groups of people with FAITH have stood up against seemingly impossible odds, and have prevailed.
Our Constitution and laws were originally founded upon "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God". If we recur to these, does it not reason to follow that we shall prevail? As noted by Alexander Hamilton:
"When the first principles of civil society are violated, and the rights of a whole people are
invaded, the common forms of municipal law are not to be regarded. Men may then betake themselves to the law of nature; and, if they but conform their actions, to that standard, all cavils against them, betray either ignorance or dishonesty."
- The Farmer Refuted, 23 Feb. 1775.
We ABSOLUTELY MUST return to the FUNDAMENTALS. Failure to do so, will most assuredly lead to our subjugation and destruction....
"You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe."
ReplyDelete--John Adams
I tell people that no statistician, nor Colonel Colt, nor James Madison (with all due respect to the latter two) granted me my natural rights to life, liberty, and several property (consistent with a like enjoyment of the same rights of others who live in society, which is merely to say in intercourse with other people): it was the Heavenly Father did that.
Democracy Can't Last
ReplyDeleteFrom TJ
This quote is over 200 years old. It was penned by Professor Alexander Tyler, a Scottish historian, who in 1787 wrote about the fall of the Athenian Republican over 2,000 years earlier..... "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves money from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most money from the public treasury, with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy followed by a dictatorship. "The average age of the world's great civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through the following sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence and back to bondage." What phase of this cycle do you think we are in?
Or more simply put;
QUOTES TO REMEMBER
The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money. — Alexis de Tocqueville
I greatly fear that many thinking people, sore and weary from years of presenting fact only to be met with a vomitus of emotion and ignorance, have simply decided that they are done trying to argue.
ReplyDeleteI and many like me have simply decided that we are going to ignore laws that infringe our liberty.
If, later, it is decided that I am a criminal, then I will be the worst, the most dangerous criminal they ever faced.
I, for one, am done talking.
The state of affairs in the United States is depressing; but for those of us that have children, what choice have we but to continue to struggle to restore as many of our lost liberties as possible.
ReplyDeleteI will not lightly say 'it is too hard' and force my children to inherit this mess, I'll work to make things better, I know I'm not alone.
We can and will fight. And we will win. All other considerations are secondary. Go ahead, indict me. Go ahead, villify me. I don't care. Words are long past important, meanings mean what they mean, it's all just words. We can and we will fight. And we will win.
ReplyDeleteVoolfie said...
ReplyDelete"I and many like me have simply decided that we are going to ignore laws that infringe our liberty.
If, later, it is decided that I am a criminal, then I will be the worst, the most dangerous criminal they ever faced."
Voolfie speaks for me, also, to that point. However, I am not done talking. I prefer not to kill my fellow man and will avail myself of evcry opportunity short of surrender of my rights, honor, or liberty to avoid doing so. If however,my fellow man insists on my subjugation to men he thinks superior in endowments of rights and royalty from the Creator or the wielding of force is demanded, there will be no place he is safe so long as I draw breath.