We are living in interesting times right now in America, because various important rights and obligations are both in tension and in constant discussion. In discussing fundamental rights, one dishonest tactic the Left often uses is to deliberately misinterpret or wrongly present the nature and objective of those rights, so uninformed citizens are not able to understand and defend those rights properly. Perhaps the best known example of liberals intentionally twisting the meaning of a fundamental right is the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms. It is similar to when the far Left claims to value the First Amendment’s freedom of speech. Liberals will say they believe in freedom of speech, but then amend and explain that they also believe that speech with which they disagree should be regulated, limited, or cancelled by the government, by private industry working for the government, or by some other agents of the government. Of course, this completely misunderstands the First Amendment.
The First Amendment exists specifically to protect unpopular speech. Popular , woke speech requires no protection. Rather, it is speech that the government or people do not like that must be protected from censorship and cancellation, precisely so citizens can be exposed to unpopular facts and opinions. A great recent example relates to the dangers of the new technology mRNA vaccines, which actually inject particles of viral mRNA into the patient’s own cells. This is a completely new and different kind of vaccine, with thousands of examples of side effects – the discussion of which was deliberately suppressed by the Pharmaceutical industry and government exactly at the time citizens needed to be exposed to that information.
On the Second Amendment the right to keep and bear arms, the far Left is doing exactly the same thing: it is deliberately misstating the nature and purpose of the Second Amendment and throwing out arguments and interpretations concerning gun rights that make no sense at all if you have any real understanding of the Second Amendment. The actual meaning, and the historic and political importance of the Second Amendment were comprehensively discussed in the well known case of D.C. v. Heller, a 2008 Supreme Court case in which Justice Scalia wrote the controlling decision.
The central holding of Heller is that the operative and important language of the Second Amendment, namely, “[T]he right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” provides an individual right for US citizens to keep and bear firearms. Incidentally, the inclusion of the words “the right of the people” to keep and bear arms is of grave significance, because it shows that the right to keep and bear arms belongs to the American people – meaning to the whole free citizenry and not to some police force, national guard, federal agents, authorized body guards or other special or select militia. It is the citizens, the people, who have the right to keep and bear arms – all of them, whether man or woman, black or white, gay or straight — all American citizens have the God given right to keep and bear arms for personal defense and other purposes. Now, listen how the liberals lie about this fundamental right – a right so important it was listed as the Second Amendment – the second of ten rights in the Bill of Rights.
You will recall that during his many speeches ,most substantively vacuous, Obama would say things like “white people are clinging to their guns and Bibles” and “no one is trying to take your right to hunt and target shoot away.” More recently, Biden has made blithering comments suggesting that citizens do not need semi-automatic weapons or large capacity magazines, because “deer do not wear Kevlar vests.” Biden thought this breathtakingly stupid comment was so funny that he said it multiple times. “Deer do not wear Kevlar vests” – a comment that joins the list of the ten dumbest things I have heard in my life time from a politician. Stupid, stupid, stupid: semi-automatic rifles and large capacity magazines are in fact necessary and protected by the Second Amendment, not because deer wear Kevlar, but because the police and military forces of oppressive governments wear Kevlar! Citizens need ample fire power, not to riddle deer with bullets, but to defend their homes, resist riots – a purpose that has never been more relevant – and to deter and oppose government tyranny. Again, the Second Amendment is fundamental, not because deer wear Kevlar (you halfwit) but because Antifa, rogue FBI agents working for a fraudulent government, and military units participating in illegal police actions all wear Kevlar. The American citizen cannot deter unlawful tyranny threatened by government agents armed with automatic weapons if he is only armed with bolt action rifles and similarly ineffective firearms.
Leftists like Obama and Biden purposely misconstrue and misstate the true purpose of the Second Amendment. It is emphatically not a right to hunt and eat venison. It is a right to protect your family and home, to suppress riots and insurrections, and to deter government tyranny and aggressive over reach – in other words to preserve our Constitutional Republic from overthrow. For this reason, the US citizen must be allowed effective armaments. And indeed, studies show that the lives of ten of thousands of Americans are saved each year precisely because they are well armed.
A final big picture observation. In the 20th century, various tyrannical socialist and communist regimes murdered or starved substantially over 100 million persons. Murderous regimes in Nazi Germany, in the communist Soviet Union, in communist China, in Cuba, in North Korea, in Cambodia, in Mozambique, and in many other countries murdered and starved millions and millions of persons by using excessive government power often for the purported purpose of making things “better” or “fairer.” None of these experiments in “equality” “equity” or “fairness” ever worked. There is not a single example of a radical socialist government being successful. They all ended in failure, and most of them ended in death on a massive scale. These horrors are what the Second Amendment is intended to prevent.
The Second Amendment, and gun control efforts related to the Second Amendment is never about saving ten people in Buffalo, or 100 people in Chicago or Baltimore. The Second Amendment is not about gang shootings or fatherless homes in the inner city. Those problems must be addressed by other policies, including by locking up criminals who actually use firearms in the commission of their crimes. It is both nonsensical and evil for liberals to be trying to pass new laws to hinder lawful ownership of firearms, 95% of which will never be used in a crime, while letting actual felons out of jail without serving hard time. Criminal law is about stopping day to day shootings. The Second Amendment is about stopping a far Left or far Right tyranny from taking over the US government. It is about stopping the takeover by a communist government that might murder millions of Americans, much more than it is about shootings at a grocery store. To stop the explosion of routine criminality, we must prosecute the felons and let them rot in jail for a very long time. But leave the Second Amendment alone to serve its fundamental purpose of deterring government oppression. That purpose has never been more relevant than today, when far left zealots dream of destroying America and seizing power … forever.
Copyright 2022 By Paul H. Beattie. All rights reserved. “Notes from the Right” is a Trademark of Paul H. Beattie.
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