Most government workers are amazingly dedicated and talented, and they put in a level of commitment that is far out of proportion to their salaries.
But we’re also seeing government workers, who, far from checking their own desire for control, have taken it out for a romp.
Brooks is an idiot. At the bottom of the page, it notes that he’s filling in for Paul Krugman, who’s also an idiot, so he must be competing with Paul Krugman for some inter-office idiocy award.
Auditing low-level agents at the IRS do not “take their desire for control out for a romp”. Doesn’t work that way. They may agree with the IRS conservative crackdown plans and go along with them, but the guy doing the paperwork does not come up with schemes and machinations. The mid-level manager gal doing the office paperwork to make sure the guy doing the lower paperwork doesn’t come up with these schemes. She may go along with them, but they have to be passed down to her from someone with the authority to be able to waive all the concerns about repercussions for IRS personnel doing something wrong and getting fired. Normal people do not get together to “take their desire for control out for a romp” at the low level, as though there’s some spontaneously generated lust for power in people who double-check math all day.
It’s hard to tell now if the I.R.S. scandal is political thuggery or obliviousness. It would be one thing if the scandal is just a group of tax people targeting the most antitax groups in the country. That’s just normal, run-of-the-mill partisan antipathy.
Sure, it’s okay if they target people who try to restore the nation to founding priciples. That’s okay. It’s fine if you’re tax collectors who target people who want the tax burden reduced through legal means and legislation. Of course that’s fine. No problem with that kind of targeted oppression by government whatsoever.
It’s just as okay as if the government targeted any other group that the government didn’t like. Because after all, the citizen exists solely for the government to deem either worthy or unworthy.
It would be far worse if the senior workers of the I.R.S. have become so isolated by their technocratic task that they didn’t even recognize that using the search term “Tea Party” was going to be a moral and political problem.
Gee, it’s too bad they didn’t come up with a more clever way to target those sniveling teabaggers. If only they had been smart enough not to outright say they were targeting the Tea Party. Then they could’ve gotten away with it.
Everyone is treating the I.R.S. issue as a bigger deal, but the Justice Department scandal is worse. This was a sweeping intrusion that makes it hard for the press to do its job. Who is going to call a journalist to report wrongdoing knowing that at some future date, the government might feel perfectly free to track the phone records and hunt you down?
I would have thought a dozen Justice Department officials would have risen up and splashily resigned when they learned of the scope of this invasion. Aren’t there some lawyers in the Justice Department, and, if so, did they go to law schools where the Constitution is left unassigned?
The DOJ smuggled guns to narcoterrorist cartels and hushed it up and you and your reporter friends helped hush it up. Brooks, when the DOJ decides to make you sign your own confession Soviet-style, you will have earned your statist utopia and all the hard labor it will sentence you to until the end of your days. Maybe after a few decades in the ground, they’ll even take the time to posthumously rehabilitate you.
We clearly have a values problem in the federal government. We clearly have a few or many agencies where the leaders don’t emphasize that workers need to check themselves, or risk losing what remains of the people’s trust.
There is no “values problem” in the fedgov. There is a fedgov that is unconstrained by the document that created it. Men are the same, that’s why we have a Constitution.
We have a Constitution, and that creates our government. The Constitution is what creates the government and limits it – it is the laws by which the government is created and those it must abide by. When government ignores the Constitution, as it has been doing, it should have no trust – because it is an entity of domination composed of men with power – whether malignant or benign. When it ceases to be an entity that exists at the behest of the citizen, it becomes oppressive. A massive, distant power composed of men with power and no constraints are never deserving of any trust.
I generally support the little behavioral nudges that Cass Sunstein describes in his outstanding book “Simpler” — the subtle policy shifts that induce people to save more, or eat healthier.
Ah, David Brooks, lickspittle for tyrants.
I’d trust somebody with a minimalist disposition like Sunstein to implement these policies.
That’s so precious that you want to be dominated, David. You’re so vanilla.
But I wouldn’t necessarily trust the people at the I.R.S. or Justice Department to implement them.
Guess who you’re going to get? Guess who’s going to be running your health care? Guess who’s been hushing up the murders of your Mexican neighbors to the south?
Cass Sunstein is a tyrant wannabe, along with all of his authoritarian ilk. Revisit his rave review of “Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism”. They want to coerce you – to force you – into something they think is good for you. Brooks wants to be coerced – to be forced – into something someone else thinks is good for him – and he wants you forced as well. Everybody knows what’s best for you, and they’re going to force it on you, because they’ve decided you need to be forced into what they think you should be. Brooks wants to be dominated and be controlled by government.
Brooks wants a bad government to dominate him, he just wants one that doesn’t spank too hard.
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But I’ll end this with a quote from a tax collector and freedom fighter:
If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
The Manchin-Toomey “wrote it on our yacht” background check-prelude to registration bill went down 54-46, failing to get the 60 votes to pass.
The AWB goes down 40/60. Remember a few weeks ago when Reid claimed they didn’t have even 40 votes for it? He wasn’t kidding. They barely ended up with that much. It’ll be a few minutes before the roll is up, but assuming Republicans voted against it unanimously, that means no fewer than 15 Democrats joined them.
It’s a good start to stalling the tyrannical aspirations of government.
Today’s vote is a damning indictment of the stranglehold that special interests have on Washington. More than 40 U.S. senators would rather turn their backs on the 90 percent of Americans who support comprehensive background checks than buck the increasingly extremist wing of the gun lobby.
Why is it that anti-gun tyrants love using the number 90% so much? They make up numbers saying guns are going to Mexico at a rate of 90%, and they claim 90% of people support draconian checks as a step towards registration, confiscation, and obliteration of gun rights. Do they just love targeting minorities of 10%? Oh, that’s right, they do.
Soon he’ll fade back into obscurity once the schtick of having a lying Brit who threatened violence and lectures down to Americans wears off. Oh, and it has.
President Obama angrily blamed the defeat Wednesday of his centerpiece gun-control proposal on lies spread by the National Rifle Association, calling it “a pretty shameful day for Washington.”
“The gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill,” Mr. Obama said in the White House rose garden about 90 minutes after the vote. “It came down to politics.”
There’s also a certain type of projection on the left. They accuse others of lying while they do. The NRA warned of true objectives.
“They claimed that it would create some sort of big-brother gun registry, even though it did the opposite,” Mr. Obama said. “This pattern of spreading untruths … served a purpose. A minority in the U.S. Senate decided it wasn’t worth it. They blocked common-sense gun reforms, even while these families looked on from the Senate gallery. It’s not going to happen because 90 percent of Republicans just voted against that idea.”
Of necessity, to work, it had to create a big brother gun registry – which would be either an amendment or a future bill when this one was found. There was no secret that Democrats were pushing for a big-brother gun registry. But, as Levar Burton would say, don’t take my word for it – take NY Democrat Senator Chuck Schumer’s:
There’s that 90% statistic again, too. They just love it.
And again, the “families” are being led by Democrat propagandists. I say “families” because Mark Mattioli isn’t represented, nor are many other Newtown families who don’t hold the same opinions as those who are politically aligned and campaigning for the Democrats’ rights-control schemes.
“You’ve got to send the right people to Washington,” he told voters. “That requires strength and it requires persistence. I see this as just Round One. Sooner or later, we are going to get this right. The memories of these children demand it.”
The American people and those who’ve fought for liberty don’t want their tyranny.
We didsend the right people to Washington. We sent Ted Cruz and Rand Paul.
But do note what Obama said in there. The meaning is clear.
…requires strength and it requires persistence. I see this as just Round One. Sooner or later, we are going to get this…
He uses some of the Newtown families as props, and it seems many of them are willing props – but he doesn’t care about them any more than he cared about the hundreds of dead children in Mexico murdered by his Fast and Furious program.
And lastly, but not least, the Assault Weapons ban and the limitation on the size of magazines, let me say this as clearly as I can: this is just the beginning.
I’m a veteran. When I write things like “for those who’ve fought for it, freedom has a flavor the protected will never know”, I mean it. It’s not a cliche, it’s a reality. There are a lot of people, myself included, who fought for our rights and our Constitution. Our nation is unique in that we don’t swear an allegiance to a president or a king or an autocrat. We swear our oath to a piece of paper. We swear it to a contract made by free people to create a government that serves us. We swear our oaths to that Constitution and the protection of those natural rights it guarantees.
The natural right to self defense against oppression, against tyranny large and small, whether it be a dictatorial government or a lone criminal, is something that many men and women have fought and died for. The forces against the natural right to self defense are those who would be our masters, who demand autocracy and think they know best and should tell us how to live – tyrants.
The demand that we surrender rights that our forefathers and sometimes our friends fought and died for is unacceptable.
Those rights were fought for, and men and women died for those rights, so that people back home could be safe with the protections those natural rights provide. They the honored dead and we the veterans did not fight for those rights so that those rights could be hastily abandoned to a political cry of “now is the time”.
No. Never is the time.
–
The Newtown families, if truly driven by grief, will still have my sympathy, but what they demand in the name of children and family who would not even be protected by the unconstitutional laws they demand is both anathema and wholly unacceptable to those who have served and those who remember our honored dead who fought for those rights. The contract that our honored dead and we the veterans signed was to protect those rights. Against more than two hundred years of adversaries within and without we’ve fought to preserve those rights with millions of men and women who’ve served and hundreds of thousands who’ve died in service – all to protect those rights.
The emotional demand that one tragedy, manipulated by fiendish politicians for their own power and demand to control the American people, mean that we the citizens give up the rights bought and paid for in blood by our honored dead and our veterans and often ourselves as veterans is one that can only be answered with a resounding no.
Today those demanding the surrender of our rights and our arms do so with words, because we have arms. With history as our guide, when we have no arms, they won’t use words to take our rights. This is again why we have fought for those rights.
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There may be solutions to limit the horrors in the world, but abrogating the right of self defense that is intrinsic to the contract of our safe and secure society is not an option. We may still have individual madmen and criminals – and we have fewer of them when we can fight back; but we have no tyrants here – our tragedies are counted in ones and tens but never in millions.
Stalin famously said that a single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. To a dictator’s perspective, he’s right.
To a free man’s perspective and to a patriot perspective, that’s not the case. A single death is a tragedy, and a million deaths is a million individual tragedies. The twenty-six individual tragedies at Sandy Hook do not outweigh the incomprehensible human suffering and death endured by millionsof individual citizens who fought and so often died so that we could live free covered by the protections of the natural rights our Constitution provides. The willing and also unwilling sacrafices of those millions of individual tragedies and sufferings thus prevented millions more individual tragedies. Those who fought and died knew that they fought for that piece of paper and the rights it guaranteed.
The actions of one madman and the desire to correct those twenty-six tragedies can be understood. They are fathomable. The rows upon rows of graves of those who fought to prevent greater tragedies are often beyond comprehension and thus some folks can miss the far bigger picture. They aren’t seen as a million individual tragedies and lives of suffering undertaken for a larger cause to ensure greater rights that ultimately protect us all – those lost lives are right in front of us and yet some forget both those lost lives and the payments in blood they made on liberties.
Each one is an individual tragedy.
Each individual tragedy was undertaken as an oath to protect and defend the Constitution.
And yet there are those who would still trade away that liberty bought at so dear a price for temporary security… and they would soon find themselves with neither.
… the Newtown families, political novices just a few months ago, are proving to be savvy, effective advocates as they promote the gun legislation that has finally begun to move through the Senate. The families are well-educated, and many are well-off. They have been polished and sharp on TV. They’re mostly non-political, but quite accomplished in their own fields. With access to money and media, they’re using persistence, visibility — and, most all, their unique moral authority — to help prod Senate action. They also have their own lobbyists — several of them, in fact.
They’re pushing anti-rights legislation. Maybe some among them think it’ll “save children”, but as I illustrated last time, the things they’re asking for wouldn’t have prevented Sandy Hook. They are pushing for exactly what anti-gun groups have been pushing for for years, though.
They’re pushing for something that is a step towards widespread disarmament, emotionally pushing for things that they feel are so critical that they “must” be done, emotionally pushing for things so hard that “now is the time” before anyone starts to look at the bigger picture calmly and at the long-term implications of what happens when citizens are left disarmed.
Then there are the comments by their Democrat political handlers:
“These are smart, articulate people, who don’t have a scintilla of Washington about them,” said Matt Bennett of the centrist Democratic group Third Way, which has been helping the families navigate D.C. “But they virtually cannot be denied a meeting. There are not many groups of people that can get a meeting with any senator they want, whenever they want.”
He’s a lying about his group. They Democrats came in and the families have been embraced by the Democrat party and anti-rights, anti-gun citizen disarmament groups as the heartwrenching emotional story they need to use to acquire more power. There’s keeping rights, restoring rights, and loss of rights. They’re pushing for loss of citizen rights, and they’ve got leftist Democrats guiding them the whole way. There is nothing “third way” about Bennett’s group, either – they’re a partisan Democrat group used to target low-information moderates. Their notable members include such partisan leftist Democrats as Kathleen “F the Hatch Act” Sebelius and Ken “Boot Stamping on a Human Face Forever” Salazar.
He is right about the demands they can make. They can portray anyone who rejects them as devoid of sympathy, of being a cruel monster who wants dead children. They and their handlers are exploiting the respect we offer the grieving to push their agenda.
A group of experienced operators is guiding these families — to a degree that has irritated some pro-gun Republicans. An uber-strategist for the families is Ricki Seidman, a familiar face at the top levels of Democratic politics ever since she ran the Clinton-Gore campaign’s famous 1992 war room. Seidman, a senior principal with TSD Communications, was Vice President Joe Biden’s communications director during the 2008 general election, and helped the White House win confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotmayor.
Bennett’s Third Way connected the families with a lobbying firm, Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti, that set up more than 25 Hill meetings this week alone. And Lara Bergthold, a veteran of Democratic presidential campaigns now with Griffin, Schein in Los Angeles, is helping to manage the media onslaught.
These are political operatives using the families as props (at best). It would be nice to believe that the families in their grief are simply pawns in this, but then there are comments like this:
“This is now part of my day-to-day life, and it is a full-time job to me and my family,” Jillian Soto said. “To be honest with you, I still don’t know how the mechanics in Washington work. I still find it absurd that senators can even say my sister wasn’t murdered with an assault rifle. She was shot multiple times in front of her kids, and that’s not OK to me. It’s not OK to most Americans.” (As her raw language indicates, Soto is working with Bloomberg’s group.)
An assault rifle is select-fire, so no, she wasn’t murdered with an assault rifle. Those are highly restricted and have been since the GCA of 1934. The killer did not have an assault rifle. So no, she wasn’t. Soto’s indignation is intended to get you mad at pro-rights senators for questioning her – with her dead sister as a moral bulwark, she can scream and it’s considered callous and heartless and horrific to correct her. The constant push against the rights of citizens, ignoring the actual data, is now, to her, “part of my day-to-day life and it is a full time job to me and my family”. She’s going to press to restrict your rights full time based on the acts of a madman – a madman who would never be stopped by the solutions she champions, and if her solutions pass, a lone madman who in time will be replaced by an administration of madmen – as history shows us again and again.
This is a very clever political movement being handled by the Democrats. They’re going to dance in the blood of those children as long as they can to get more power.
What started as a support group is now a lobbying force unlike any other to descend on Capitol Hill. The family members typically begin their pitch to senators softly, telling the story of the child that they lost. They gently say they could not have imagined themselves in this position, but they’re doing it to honor the memory of their children. They say they’re supporters of the Second Amendment, and just want to have a conversation.
They don’t want a conversation. That’s a lie, just the same as their “I’m not racist, I have a black friend” claim of support of the Second Amendment. They have demands.
But there’s nothing subtle about the way some of them conclude their visits: by leaving behind a color card with a photo of their slain relative. Nicole Hockley, who introduced President Barack Obama in Hartford this week, hands senators a card with three photos of her son Dylan, who was 6 when he was gunned down. One frame shows him grinning, in a Superman shirt.
“Dylan Hockley, 3/8/06 – 12/14/12,” the card says. “Honor his life. Stand with us for change. NOW IS THE TIME.”
“Now is the time” is the kind of fierce urgent emotional demand that stifles debate. The entire purpose is to generate an emotional response and demand NOW NOW NOW without stopping to question why or what is being done.
The universal background checks they want, the universal registration that background checks require to be complete, the denial to citizens to actually bear, trade, or acquire arms, the denial of citizens to own modern arms – none of that would’ve prevented the murders at Sandy Hook. But they demand action “NOW NOW NOW” because that stifles debate. They demand “NOW NOW NOW” and any question of why, or what these things will change is stopped by bringing up their dead children. The argument for immediacy and the argument for necessity are well-known pleas of tyrants, and are the hallmark of liberal fascism, where something must be done for your own good right NOW… Again, if you take the time to ask about why, or what the long-term effects are (say as in “we need to pass it to see what’s in it” Obamacare), you’re shouted down.
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I’m a veteran. When I write things like “for those who’ve fought for it, freedom has a flavor the protected will never know”, I mean it. It’s not a cliche, it’s a reality. There are a lot of people, myself included, who fought for our rights and our Constitution. Our nation is unique in that we don’t swear an allegiance to a president or a king or an autocrat. We swear our oath to a piece of paper. We swear it to a contract made by free people to create a government that serves us. We swear our oaths to that Constitution and the protection of those natural rights it guarantees.
The natural right to self defense against oppression, against tyranny large and small, whether it be a dictatorial government or a lone criminal, is something that many men and women have fought and died for. The forces against the natural right to self defense are those who would be our masters, who demand autocracy and think they know best and should tell us how to live – tyrants.
The demand that we surrender rights that our forefathers and sometimes our friends fought and died for is unacceptable.
Those rights were fought for, and men and women died for those rights, so that people back home could be safe with the protections those natural rights provide. They the honored dead and we the veterans did not fight for those rights so that those rights could be hastily abandoned to a political cry of “now is the time”.
No. Never is the time.
–
The Newtown families, if truly driven by grief, will still have my sympathy, but what they demand in the name of children and family who would not even be protected by the unconstitutional laws they demand is anathema to those who have served and those who remember our honored dead who fought for those rights. The contract that our honored dead and we the veterans signed was to protect those rights. Against more than two hundred years of adversaries within and without we’ve fought to preserve those rights with millions of men and women who’ve served and hundreds of thousands who’ve died in service – all to protect those rights.
The emotional demand that one tragedy, manipulated by fiendish politicians for their own power and demand to control the American people, mean that we the citizens give up the rights bought and paid for in blood by our honored dead and our veterans and often ourselves as veterans is one that can only be answered with a resounding no.
Today those demanding the surrender of our rights and our arms do so with words, because we have arms. With history as our guide, when we have no arms, they won’t use words anymore. This is again why we have fought for those rights.
-
There may be solutions to limit the horrors in the world, but abrogating the right of self defense that is intrinsic to the contract of our safe and secure society is not an option. We may still have individual madmen and criminals, but we have no tyrants here – our tragedies are counted in ones and tens but never in millions.
Stalin famously said that a single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. To a dictator’s perspective, he’s right.
To a free man’s perspective and to a patriot perspective, that’s not the case. A single death is a tragedy, and a million deaths is a million individual tragedies. The twenty-six individual tragedies at Sandy Hook do not outweigh the incomprehensible human suffering and death endured by millionsof individual citizens who fought so that we could live free covered by the protections of the natural rights our Constitution provides. The willing and also unwilling sacrafices of those millions of individual tragedies and sufferings thus prevented millions more individual tragedies. Those who fought and died knew that they fought for that piece of paper and the rights it guaranteed.
The actions of one madman and the desire to correct those twenty-six tragedies can be understood. They are fathomable. The rows upon rows of graves of those who fought to prevent greater tragedies are often beyond comprehension and thus some folks can miss the far bigger picture. They aren’t seen as a million individual tragedies and lives of suffering undertaken for a larger cause to ensure greater rights that protect us all – those lost lives are right in front of us and yet some forget both those lost lives and the payments in blood they made on liberties.
Each one is an individual tragedy.
Each individual tragedy was undertaken as an oath to protect and defend the Constitution.
And yet there are those who would still trade away that liberty bought at so dear a price for temporary security… and they would soon find themselves with neither.
The SCOTUS Heller decision has a note of “commonly used/owned firearms”. The Second Amendment is clear on “shall not be infringed”. The “in common use/commonly owned” argument is bunk. If the government embarks on a tyrannical move, say with something like the NFA of 1934 or the GCA of 1968 and bans a bunch of firearms, then they’re no longer “commonly owned”, even though they were banned unconstitutionally. “Commonly owned” is a effectively a ban.
Imagine if there was a “right to drive and own automobiles”, now imagine that the Car Control Act of 1983 outlawed any car that has more than 150 HP and drives more than 90 mph, requiring registration of assault cars and destruction and confiscation of others, deemed “particularly dangerous” by the government. Suddenly, something like this 1969 Plymouth Roadrunner is illegal:
Now along comes the State of New York vs The Stig SCOTUS decision of 2009. Suddenly, the court finds that the onerous restrictions on cars were absurd, but SCOTUS is still an appendage of the state as one of the three branches of government, and they decide that only cars in “common use” are legal. That leaves the 1969 Roadrunner, which isn’t in common use because of the decades-long ban, unprotected. Specifically because it was the target of a ban, it was made uncommon. Now with the “common use” exemption, it’s still illegal – because it was made uncommon by unconstitutional laws.
Because of that interpretation of common use, nothing new can come into being, either. You can’t build a V10 Challenger or the Viper, because they’re more powerful than what’s in “common use”.
All that there can ever be is what’s in common use at the time of the SCOTUS decision, and what’s allowed to be in common use is what little bit of freedom managed to hang on despite the unconstitutional bans.
How does any of that fit in with a Constitution that says, “A well-regulated vehicle fleet, being necessary to the badassness of a free nation, the right of the people to own and drive automobiles shall not be infringed“?
Easy, it doesn’t.
There will be arguments by anti-horsepower eunuchs that “do you think everyone should be able to own a tank?” or “do you want everyone to drive a bulldozer to work?” or “why do you need 400 horsepower to drive to work?” or just “you hate children!”
All of these are fallacious and based on the desire of tyrant statists who “know what’s best for you” to try and dominate you. Assuming that the framers of the 28th Amendment recognized “automobiles” and “armor” as two different things, just like “arms” and “ordnance”, then there’s the option for government, through the 9th and 10th Amendments, to regulate vehicles beyond automobiles in their own territories. Same goes for “automobiles” and “tracked construction equipment”. “Why do I need?” is easily responded to with “Why do you want to restrict myrights?” It should be personal – you are who they are targeting for their ban.
And as to the last one, cars are cool. All kids love cars, play with toy cars, and even if they aren’t allowed to, want to play with toy cars.
Heck, some kids from the 1980s were in part raised by toy cars and trucks. Arguably they have better moral compasses, too.
Freedom is the right of all sentient beings. – Optimus Prime
The “common use/commonly owned” argument is an unconstitutional justification for state tyranny at the expense of the citizen, and in opposition and violation to a right that states “shall not be infringed“. SCOTUS is wrong. Isn’t the first time, won’t be the last.
I think that quote goes quite well next to a tyrannical, military concentration camp that denied the rights to life, liberty, property, and happiness, where there was fear of actual military firepower – because it was in the guard towers.
This declaration that the insurrectionist argument “has no place” in the debate is ridiculous. The Founders made it pretty damned clear.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
In general, our government, even though currently run by economically destructive Keynesians and professional anti-colonialist Marxist-socialist street agitators who want to fundamentally transform the nation, isn’t yet wholly destructive of the security of the rights of Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Property (which was what the Founders wrote before they changed it to the intangible Happiness). A government that is of, by, and for the citizens that institute it by their consent, has no real reason to fear insurrection, nor to give it a second thought.
The citizenry, armed, represent the nation as well, and should never be a threat to the state, provided the state is operating with the consent of the governed, as outlined by their charter – the Constitution.
The Coalition to Disarm Everyone is giving the knee-jerk reaction of tyrants everywhere, giving that tyrant’s plea of necessity, and mocking any concern that a government might, just maybe, get out of hand.
Inalienable rights to life, liberty, property and happiness all exist until someone violates them. That’s why we have natural rights to defend ourselves, as individuals, citizens, and as a nation of citizen-individuals, against all enemies, foreign and domestic, oppressors large and small. And because of those inalienable natural rights of self defense – specifically noted in the Constitution with the Second Amendment’s acknowledgement of the right to the tools of self-defense, it’s exceedingly rare that we have to exercise the rights of self defense.
“The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it.”
ShortTimer
JBHIf ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
