Dear Editor,
“They have a right to do anything we can’t stop them from doing.” Catch 22
A recent Gallup poll finds that “dissatisfaction with government”, not guns, or terrorism, tops the list of concerns: “guns/Gun control” was considered “the most important problem” by 2%.
The Constitution doesn’t and can’t grant “rights”: it recognizes them. Government never had any rights to grant to anyone. The state can’t stop people from getting what they want. Those who ignore existing laws will ignore additional ones. We’re told by ‘our representatives’ that a majority want more gun laws, but those ‘representatives’ ignore demonstrated majorities who want weed legalized, single payer health insurance and no overseas military adventures.
The second amendment: the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed. A gun is a tool; No better and no worse than any other tool; printing press, a knife. A gun is as good or as bad as the person using it. Ownership of guns, like the printing press, is specifically protected by the Bill of Rights. The Second Amendment protects your right to go deer hunting in the same way that the First Amendment is for protecting your right to publish poetry. The second amendment is about the citizens/militia, having weapons to confront tyrants that control government.
‘Our government’ says you have a right to self-defense but controls access to the tools necessary for self defense while saying police have no obligation to provide individual protection. ‘Our government’ claims it can take guns from criminals only if honest folks will give up theirs. When seconds count police are minutes away.
In the 1992 Los Angeles riots, Korean shop owners, not cops, defended themselves and their property against rioters and looters. In that same riot, the truck driver pulled from his truck and nearly beaten to death on TV could have benefited from a pistol. Virtually every Swiss home has a gun. Their murder rate is a small fraction of the American rate, and is less than the rate in Australia, Canada or England, which strictly control guns. Switzerland’s gun crime rate is so low that statistics aren’t kept. America’s murder rate is equally low when you remove gang crime statistics.
Gun control zealots’ somehow believe signs, like ‘gun free zone’, will shape reality. How often have supposedly mentally unbalanced shooters opened fire at an NRA convention? They’re not that crazy. They pick places where people aren’t likely to shoot back. The problem is some people with guns. Banning firearms or imposing difficult restrictions goes against the Constitution, and increases the odds that innocents will become targets like we’ve seen in ‘gun-free’ areas such as Chicago, Paris and San Bernardino.
Gun prohibition fails just like drug or liquor prohibition. Guns don’t disappear because they’re banned. They go underground, like in Chicago, becoming easily acquired like prohibited drugs. No taxes paid or purchases reported with government background checks. If ‘our government’ declares a ‘war on guns’ that will be as successful as the ‘war on drugs’; A police state disaster that has done nothing beyond filling prisons while justifying the outrageous growth of police state agencies like the DEA.
We’re told an AR15 used by police is a personal defense weapon, a ‘patrol rifle’ but the same rifle owned by you becomes an assault weapon. Government trusts Americans with all kinds of weapons when it sends them somewhere to kill foreigners, usually to benefit some corporations. When citizens take off their uniforms suddenly politicians don’t trust them with a gun. Gun control isn’t about crime. It’s about government that fears and despises you.
After a bombing, everyone blames the bomber, but after a shooting, the problem is the gun. It is known that Evil guns have a will of their own, which moves their owners to murder. Typewriters/keyboards can similarly motivate libel. A rifle can be used to destroy paper targets, stop an attacking bear, or murder your neighbor. The choice is entirely up to the user. If you get angry or drunk and run over someone with your vehicle, should your neighbor launch an organization to prohibit all vehicles? Guns or cars aren’t responsible for deaths. Making it difficult to buy a gun is penalizing somebody because someone else was stupid.
Statistically most ‘gun crime’ comes from the inner city gangs and their illegal guns in cities that have been influenced by sociologists, urban planners, social justice activists, community organizers and political fools for generations. Are you surprised that people stop caring about being a ‘law-abiding citizen’ when they lose respect for the law and the people who inflict it on them?
Chicago has extremely tough gun laws believing they discourage criminals. Gun violence is 90% concentrated in the urban kill zones, created by welfare policies since 1964. If you’re willing to shoot someone, you’ll ignore any law. Do you think gang bangers get their weapons at gun shows? Whenever politicians discuss gun control, they avoid mentioning gangs whose body count is larger than that of the ‘lone mass shooters’ who grab all the headlines.
Crazy lone white guy spraying bullets around equals mental illness, and therefore, seize all the guns, but ghetto ‘youths’ with guns spraying bullets equals ‘we have to do something about conditions in the inner cities’ and racism.
We’re told ‘our government’ will rescind the second amendment because of terrorists/crime, but cops, here in the Empire, have killed many more innocents than terrorists. Most accused ‘group’ shooters passed background checks. Instead of demonizing the one hundred and fifty million people in America who legally own guns and don’t shoot up the neighborhood, perhaps we should identify the causes of violence in our society and address them. Until Americans educate themselves on the cause of this violence, uninformed and corrupt lawmakers will continue to focus on controlling the symptoms.
While the federal government attempts to limit your access to guns, America’s arms industry encounters no barriers: it’s the world’s leading weapons provider to tyrannical regimes and terrorist groups worldwide. America, the hypocritical merchant of death, simultaneously pushes to limit American citizens’ gun rights using the excuse of making ‘consumers’ safer but it’s a steady move towards disarming American citizens.
Those who give guns to ‘moderate’ rebels worldwide lecture law-abiding Americans about selling guns to each other. Gun laws apply to sales between Americans but they don’t apply to sales by Americans to those in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, or other ‘friends’. Want to avoid the hassle? There are several overseas locations to which you can relocate and if you promise to be a moderate terrorist, you’ll have access to an armory of weapons not legally available to you in the Empire.
If you trust that ‘our government’ will never infringe your rights, then I suppose you’ll find my argument senseless but if you see a future when drones fill the skies for the purpose of surveillance, intimidation, or worse, then you might see the need to own a couple of rocket launchers.
Gun control will lower crime rates like Obamacare lowered insurance premiums and allows you to keep your plan/gun. If a politician wants to disarm the public, he should give up his own security protection to set an example.
Obama said, “If you’re too dangerous to board a plane, you’re too dangerous, by definition, to buy a gun.” Like most government programs seeming, and being reasonable, are different things. The terrorist watchlist reportedly has over a million names on it, but no one knows, because it’s a secret and it’s unknown how and why your name can be added to these lists. Government completely repeals those individuals’ rights, without due process, no judge, jury or means for appeal. Liberty, to include gun rights, can only be taken away for just cause. The law has acceptable causes and process for denying any rights. A secret list that’s collected by government agents without due process or means of remedy isn’t due process.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, drug overdose, with a death rate of 13.9 per 100,000, is four times more common as a cause of death than gun homicides (3.6 per 100,000). Death from prescription drugs (7.2 per 100,000) is twice as common as gun homicides.
“The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.” Thomas Jefferson
Craig Dudley