Dangerously Silly

Mike Vanderboegh forwarded me an old email he first sent to an errant editorialist back during the Clinton the First era.

It's still more than relevant today:

Date: Tue, 14 Apr 1998 08:18:55 -0600
From: Mike Vanderboegh, Pinson, AL
To: Rich Hood, Kansas City Star Editorial Page rhood@kcstar.com (Rich Hood)
Subject: Your Dangerously Silly Editorial of 12 April Entitled "Gun Ban Was Needed."

Mr. Hood,

It is a measure of how far common sense and respect for the rule of law have deteriorated in our constitutional republic during the present administration that educated men such as yourself could write such dangerously silly and unconstitutional drivel such as your editorial "Gun Ban Was Needed."

In the past, when I had illusions that legal, moral and historical arguments could sway anti-freedom ideologues such as yourself and the President, I would have mustered a formidable array of facts, cited legal opinions and quoted from the Founders' own lips to refute your wrong-headed opinion that law-abiding Americans need to be disarmed. (Oh, I know you do not say it directly, but isn't that what you're endorsing when you urge "the President should consider stricter prohibitions"?)

Forget that the Second Amendment is, like the First you cherish, both an individual and collective right. Forget, indeed, that it is the Second Amendment that secures all the others, including the First.

Forget that the Founders' didn't write the 2nd Amendment with "sporting purposes" in mind. Forget that the very idea of codifying the right to "keep and bear arms" for the purposes of shooting fuzzy animals would have been laughable to men such as Thomas Jefferson.

Forget that the 2nd Amendment was designed to guarantee the 18th Century equivalent of "assault rifles" to the citizenry so that they might resist tyrannical administrations. Forget that the Clinton Administration has from the beginning used every means at its disposal to strip law-abiding Americans from exactly these kind of previously legal arms of military utility.

Forget that this President has acted like he was King George III himself, not only adopting His Late Majesty's firearms policy, but issuing imperial "Executive Orders" in the middle of the night, when Congress is not in session, contraryto law and Constitution.

Forget all that.

If the law and the Constitution mean nothing to you and your President, let's explain this in terms you will understand. If you want my legal, semiautomatic rifle then I suggest you come and get it. Yourself. Today. Bring the President if he's suddenly caught a draught of courage. Have the strength of your gun-grabbing convictions and come along with the raiding party you are encouraging through your editorial page to confiscate my weapons. Don't send someone else's son to do the job. Don't cry out for the police or military to disarm me while you sit safely at home and cluck your editorial tongue in approval. You want my rifle? Come and get it. Call your gun-grabbing buddies at the BATF, they'll give you directions to my house. You don't even have to call and tell me you're coming.

Of course, I'll bet you won't because you're a smart little editorial writer and you know that you'll likely get killed if you try. And you know what? That's exactly what the Founders had in mind. That tyrants, or their pissant editorial apologists such as yourself, would think twice before trying to disarm the law-abiding citizenry, the final arbiter and guarantor of American liberty.

Mike Vanderboegh