Scratch a virtue signaling lefty and you’ll find a snarling, blood-thirsty totalitarian tyrant just beneath the surface.
They always start out trying to sound reasonable but when their ambitions are stymied you will see the militant side come out sooner rather than later. They want their way and dammit! they’re going to get it no matter who or what stands in their way.
Want an example?
Recently Congressman Swalwell (Dimwit, California) proposed an “Assault weapons buyback” program.
To some it may sound reasonable but to anyone with any active brain function it comes across as ridiculous. It is ridiculous to think that criminals or crazies who plan evil deeds with their so-called assault weapons will give them up for a Target gift card or $200 cash. Further, these brain-dead politicians can’t even decide what an assault weapon is with definitions varying from know-nothing politician to know-nothing politician. Moreover the hysteria about gun violence, in a country where gun homicides have been reduced by nearly 50% at the same time gun ownership has risen by over 50% in the past few decades, is meretricious.
Additionally schools are safer now than they have ever been.
See HERE
And despite what politicians are so very fond of saying, gun violence DOES happen in other parts of the world and at a greater rate than in the US and with higher lethality.
But, set that aside and look a little deeper and you will see that Swalwell’s plan is not a buyback at all but rather a confiscation regime attitudinizing as a voluntary buyback program. The “buying back” prevarication was just the pretty curtains on the abattoirs windows. What he actually proposed was a forced, mandatory buyback, aka confiscation, aka no choice involved; a “buyback” wherein those who refused would be prosecuted and imprisoned. To drive the point home he went so far as to threaten the use of nuclear weapons on those who failed to comply with his unconstitutional confiscation.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again here; they always start out with the soft attempt of the power of persuasion and when that fails, because their arguments are flawed and usually quite insane, they drop that script and go straight to the persuasion of power.
“Let us buy them back or we’ll nuke you.”
Reminds me of a scene from “The Godfather” and a certain offer that couldn’t be refused.
Now I don’t really think Swalwell meant he would use nuclear weapons since he has none, has no authority to order their use, thanks be to God, and since their use would be akin to burning down your house to finally be rid of the mice that live in the walls. But what he did mean was he would have no compunction with regard to using the full weight of the US military against any patriots who dared to disobey him. In his fit of Twitter pique he let his mask slip and the ugly, totalitarian just beneath the surface peeked out.
But now try on that which Swalwell said but instead of that “Palladium of Liberty”, the Second Amendment, insert any of the five points in the First Amendment; freedom of speech, of the press, the right to peaceably assemble, to petition the government for a redress of grievances, to practice the religion of your choice.
Follow this up in the thought experiment with a politician advocating the removal or severe truncation of any of the First Amendment’s rights and then saying that anyone who dared noncompliance would be dealt with by the military and crushed for their disobedience.
Insert any of the rights enshrined in the Bill of Rights and try on what he said.
It’s hard to imagine any congressman or senator saying such a thing isn’t it?
What if he advocated for a law that would disallow any public criticism of congress in general and congress-critters in particular and proposed that the military be used if necessary to enforce this new law, with full brutality, upon anyone who failed to comply?
Hopefully our collective patriotic ardor is still strong enough that this would bring an immediate rebuke from the entire body politic. Sadly though, there would be, to me at least, a shocking number of people who would think this would be just fine.
In his own twisted way and quite unintentionally, I’m sure, the sullen Swalwell demonstrated the very reason the Second Amendment was written; to ward off the tyrannical ambitions that Lord Acton, a British historian of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, warned humanity about regarding power and absolute power and the observation that a person’s sense of morality lessens as his or her power increases which can apparently decay so far and fast as to result in a modern elected leader saying “Do as I say or I’ll have you all incinerated!”
This is the reason that the true meaning and full force of the Second Amendment must be restored.
At an address to the Virginia Ratifying Convention, June 4, 1788, George Mason said: “I ask who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers.”
Rep. Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, on August 17, 1789 said: “What, sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty.”
In Federalist Paper #29 Alexander Hamilton said: “No standing army can ever be formidable to the liberties of the people, while there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in the use of arms.”
This is the actual meaning of the Second Amendment. The people should be armed similarly to the armed forces of the government to act as a balance against the misuse of this military might, the threatened use of which has now been leveled by a seated Congressman from California who, according to many, plans to run for the Presidency in 2020 (Yikes!).
Now to be sure I don’t think there is any reservoir of thought, even among the most hard core Second Amendment promoters, for allowing regular citizens to own thermonuclear weapons and install intercontinental ballistic missile silos in their backyards. But, I do believe that there is a school of thought that has had enough of the very infringement that the Second Amendment so clearly prohibits. Speaking for myself I think the reasoning of even some of the recent pro-gun Supreme Court decisions have been flawed in that they do not go far enough and their reasoning is muddled. These decisions allow the infringement ratchet to always click in one direction; and always towards more and more rules and regulations, aka infringements.
The Heller decision (2007 HERE) demands that courts determine whether a firearm restriction is “longstanding,” and in the case of gun bans, whether the firearm was “in common use.” The meaning seems to be if these weapons were outlawed long ago then they can remain outlawed since now they are not in common use but my copy of the Second Amendment has no such circular logic test in it regarding how long something was banned being a determinant factor in its continued ban. My copy of the Second Amendment restricts the government from banning anything by simply stating that the right of the people to keep and bear arms SHALL NOT be infringed. The laws that are being proposed, and in some cases passed into law, are the very nature of infringement. Magazine capacity bans, pistol grip stock bans, bayonet lug bans, flash hiders vs muzzle brakes and the melting temperature of the solder used to attach them, etc. are all infringements on the right to bear arms and are therefore unconstitutional. The entire National Firearms Act of 1934 is an unconstitutional infringement on my right to keep and bear arms as are the Gun Control Act of 1968 and wildly misnamed Firearms Owners’ Protection Act of 1986 with its Hughes amendment. The clear intent of the founding fathers was that the citizens should be as well armed as any governmental force so as to ward off any misadventures that any future leaders might decide to carry out against their citizens, and clearly seeking to ban an entire class of weapons and employ thermonuclear weapons to compel compliance falls into the category of a tyrannical misadventure.
It may be worth noting here that the comment that caused Swalwell to lose his cool and reveal his true self was one where a Twitter user explained that to ban semi-auto rifles and handguns and attempt to confiscate them would spark a new civil war. Swalwell posited that the war would not last long because the military has nukes. How little this ass canker understands about America. Sure, in any cold analysis of force on force, armed civilians against fully equipped, modern military forces, the modern army wins; but only if they act robotically following all orders to shoot their fellow citizens and reduce their own hometowns to rubble killing their former neighbors and relatives. Even in this unlikely scenario pacification of millions of citizens who stalwartly wished to remain free would be a very tall order with guerilla warfare smoldering on for decades. Now factor in that many military divisions would refuse to carry out these unconstitutional orders to murder innocents for the gratification of a power-hungry pantywaist such as Swalwell and things begin to look very different.
Here’s some food for thought for Emperor Eric to chew on; the largest standing army in the world currently is China at just under 2.2 million and number two is India with 1.4 million. The US is third and has 1.35 million people under arms.
(29 Largest Armies In The World data HERE)
As a comparison, the licensed hunters from just four US states, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin add up to 2.8 million.
(US Fish and Wildlife Service National Hunting License Data Calculation, Year 2017; PA – 984,637, OH – 394,598, MI – 719,850, WI – 700,843, Total-2,799,928)
(Complete 50 state hunting license data HERE)
Add in the licensed hunters from the other 46 US states and you get 15.5 million hunters armed with deer rifles and shotguns and modern sporting rifles who for the most part know how to sneak around in the woods stealthily enough to be undetected by deer and other game animals who never hear the shot that takes them out. Now you might be saying, that these hunters don’t possess the same skills and equipment as soldiers, but the question would still remain, what army of 1.35 million (only a small fraction of which are actual trigger-pullers) would want to face 15.5 million hunters with high powered deer rifles? How about the remaining 40, 50, 60 million armed citizens who do not hunt but still own the estimated 350 million plus guns in America? How might this play out Congressman Swalwell? Still feeling cocky and invincible?
History is replete with accounts of smaller, lesser forces emerging victorious over larger, better equipped armies from the Battle of Thermopylae to the American Revolution that gave us the nation we live in today.
(At the Battle of Thermopylae, the vastly outnumbered Greeks who ultimately lost this battle, held off the Persians for seven days. Both ancient and modern writers have used the Battle of Thermopylae as an example of the power of a patriotic army defending its native soil. A year later at the Battle of Plataea, the Greek army won a decisive victory, destroying much of the Persian army and ending the invasion of Greece.)
So why then is the Second Amendment treated as the bastard child of the Bill of Rights?
It is because it is the one right that actually provides the teeth to restrain government’s ambitions. All of the others give lip service to ideas and concepts of what the government cannot do to a citizen and although they codify pre-existing God-given rights they are just words on a parchment. This brings to mind the response by Joseph Stalin to Winston Churchill who cautioned the Russian leader to consider the views of the Vatican as World War II ended. To this the Soviet leader responded “How many divisions does the Pope of Rome have?”
What is it that we citizens have to resist tyrants such as Swalwell and the never ending supply of them who will follow?
The armed citizenry brought about through the Second Amendment is the only thing that gives pause to fascist tyrants such as Swalwell and therefore it is imperative to such tyrants that it be removed or rendered impotent thus making their wonderful, collectivist policies so much easier to carry out….whether we want them or not.
This also makes it imperative to a free people that liberty’s teeth be preserved.
God bless the founding fathers and their divinely inspired wisdom that has placed the insuperable obstacles in the way of the tyrant’s ambitions. May it ever remain this way.