David Gregory and “The Greater Good”; Cass Sunstein and the Crazy Second Amendment

From Katie Pavlich at Townhall.com, an excellent piece and roundup of the David Gregory Magazinegate story, with this wonderfully smug snippet of spurned media with rationalization for crime:

POLITICO’s Glenn Thrush took to Twitter to express his disdain for efforts to hold Gregory accountable.

Oh, yes, the public interest.  Only to a certain type of individual would it seem that David Gregory was “acting in the public interest” by violating the law in order to try to crush the rights of citizens, working to gut the Bill of Rights.

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Over at Sipsey Street Irregulars, Mike found a column by Cass “the peons are stupid Homer Simpsons I can manipulate” Sunstein:

Gun Debate Must Avoid Crazy 2nd Amendment Claims

The rise of the Second Amendment as a serious obstacle to U.S. gun control legislation is astonishingly recent.

Its rise is a tribute less to the vision of the Founding Fathers than to the skill, money and power of the contemporary gun-rights movement, which has not only exerted disproportionate influence on Congress, but also helped transform the landscape of constitutional argument. We should be able to have a serious national discussion uninhibited by wild and unsupportable claims about the meaning of the Constitution.

Let’s try that again, Cass.

Its rise is a tribute less to the vision of the Founding Fathers than to the skill, money and power of the contemporary gun-rights movement, which has not only exerted disproportionate influence on Congress, but also helped transform the landscape of constitutional argument. We should be able to have a serious national discussion uninhibited by wild and unsupportable claims about the meaning of the Constitution.

Now, the problem with this radical leftist-statist tyranny-enabling regulatory-nudging deceit is easily illustrated by the following statements:

The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it.

And what country can preserve its liberties, if its rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to the facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two?The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes….Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms.

The constitutions of most of our States assert that all power is inherent in the people; that… it is their right and duty to be at all times armed;…

-Thomas Jefferson

And:

“And that the said Constitution be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the Press, or the rights of Conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms; …”

Among the natural rights of the Colonists are these: First, a right to life; Secondly, to liberty; Thirdly, to property; together with the right to support and defend them in the best manner they can. These are evident branches of, rather than deductions from, the duty of self-preservation, commonly called the first law of nature.

– Samuel Adams

Milton Friedman often pointed out that throughout human history, mankind has almost always lived under the heel of some tyrant, trading one king, emperor, or warlord for another.  The American experiment has been one of the rare times where freedom has existed and been preserved.  We have seen examples such as The Battle of Athens where Americans had to use force to repel tyrants inside our own nation, as the Founders intended.  Samuel Adams’ last quote there about defense of property as a duty of self-preservation and an extension of the First Law of Nature goes back a ways.  It’s not just to repel an immediate physical threat to one’s life, but to the greater threat of the state.  That the state can be held in check by the citizen is what keeps the state honest and sustains liberty.  We need not look further than our southern border to see evidence of what happens when the state (and criminals) have a monopoly on force.

That some manipulative communist wannabe-dictator slimeball like Cass Sunstein would outright lie isn’t really a surprise.  He’s one of those masters of men that knows what’s best for you, and will force you to submit (though he tries to subtly force you to submit for your own good – what was once defined as Liberal Fascism – a term coined by HG Wells).  That anyone could take it seriously, however, means sad times for the republic.

Kurt Hofmann at Examiner.com has some good observations on Sunstein’s call for tyranny.

Sipsey Street has another observation on the graphic:

I look at it as the visual expression of every modern tyrant’s fear. Ten minutemen are replaced in the cartoon by ten rounds, a third of the standard capacity of an AR or AK. In other words, a ten-man modern minuteman squad carrying ARs and just one magazine per has an immediate firepower available of 300 rounds versus 10. Can there be any better illustration of the fear behind the tyrannical eyes of the advocates of citizen disarmament? THIS is why they have been striving mightily to ban semi-auto rifles.

It’s no wonder the Founders wanted her armed, and the tyrants want her disarmed: