Amping Up the Effort for Stricter Gun Control, Part II
As discussed in Part I of this article, the Constitution attests and secures that government is prohibited from infringing on the inviolable right of the individual to effectively weaponize against a threat to their absolute rights. That prohibition was included in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution to sustain the individual’s inalienable right to self protection, and more specifically as a last resort safeguard against a government fallen to tyranny and despotism.
To confront a threat with armed force – the force powerful enough to kill – obviously the threat must be extreme. A threat to life (which could take the form of starvation or a direct attack on one’s person or family) would clearly be an extreme threat. A threat to other inalienable rights such as “liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” however, could be separate from a threat to life and be of varying degrees.
A threat to one’s life, as in a direct and sudden attack by an aggressor, is the most apparent extreme threat requiring immediate armed defense. And where could such an attack take place? Would it be rational to think that an aggressor would attack us only in our homes? That’s a ludicrous proposition. Yet, that is exactly the place many anti-gunners, including many politicians, would restrict our ability to protect ourselves. Referring back to the Second Amendment wording, citizens have the absolute right to protect themselves – to “keep and bear arms.” That phrase means the individual citizen has the right to own and have about their person the proper weapon to effectively counter the extreme threat from whatever source, and wherever the threat may occur. Nothing in that phrase restricts the individual’s protection right to his home alone. Nor is it logical that a person who has the absolute right of self-protection would have that right constrained only to some specifically designated square footage, such as in their home or, by extension, in their automobile, boat, or place of business if self employed.
A threat to liberty and/or the pursuit of happiness, on the other hand, could be more subtle and drawn out compared to an immediate threat to life. And, while certainly there could be relatively minor infractions in some situations, in others, as in the case of abrogating, denying or robbing a person of their inalienable rights altogether, a major or extreme effect is the consequence. This situation is what our Founders fought so hard to counter and what the Framers of the Constitution fought so hard to prevent in our time. Protection against the loss of liberty by a miscreant governing body is as equally important as protection against an immediate threat to life.
Our Founders agreed that it is only the threat of an extreme degree that justifies the individual, or a citizenry, to rise up in armed defense against a sitting government, though they were resolute about that justification. The Declaration of Independence makes it abundantly clear that a “long train of abuses,” of tyrannical and despotic acts are required before the extreme measure of armed revolt could be justified. It is, in fact, not only justified, but the right to self protect the condition of liberty in a free state carries with it, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, the duty of the citizenry to revolt against such abusive government.
Tyrants and absolutists are ultimately held in check by an extensively and powerfully armed populace. It is the threat of revolt against tyranny by an effectively armed citizenry that holds tyrants at bay and works essentially to hold the civil society of a free state together. Liberty in a free state and a powerfully armed citizenry are manifestly allied.
To thwart the possibility of revolt, tyrants recognize that powerful weapons must be banned from the general populace. So, aside from outright confiscation, how do the tyrannical elites in government go about convincing the general populace to relinquish their guns? An effective way is to sway them, through propaganda, that it is concern for their safety that the government must eliminate their access to arms.
Along those lines, recent media articles and editorials are trumpeting statistics that show deaths by ‘gun violence’ now equals deaths by vehicular accidents. The obvious grab here is that ‘gun violence’ deaths, which are presumptively hostile assaults by gun owners, have become so pervasive that something must be done (through government intervention). So, for the safety of the citizen we must have more rules restricting guns (which could also include ammunition), on the way to complete gun elimination of the general public. Equating gun violence deaths to vehicular accident deaths is pure misinformation (propaganda). Step down just one level into the touted statistics and we find that suicides are a major number in the gun deaths count. Gun suicides are not synonymous with hostile assaults with guns, aka ‘gun violence.’ Remove the suicide count and gun deaths drop by more than half. So, there continues to be nowhere near the same number of deaths by assaults using guns as there are in car accidents. End of that so-called argument.
Beyond suicides, about half of the remaining number of deaths by guns is related to gang violence. A government true to the cause of protecting its citizens, instead of blaming inanimate objects such as guns and amping up the effort to restrict the inalienable rights of lawful citizens, would instead go after gangs with full force and resolve. That action would actually move the needle on ‘gun violence.’
Wrapping all gun deaths into the ‘gun violence’ category fits the inflexible rhetoric of the anti-gunners and the progressives in government as it gives them a platform on which to espouse their propaganda against the inanimate gun. The real agenda, however, is more power in the hands of the government progressive-elites and less liberty for the individual. A complete weapons ban is what they connive to attain, leaving government with the monopoly on guns – exactly what our forefathers were so justly fearful of.
In amping up for more gun controls right now, President Obama and other progressives are aware that it is too extreme to go after a complete firearms ban all at once, so they scheme to take any inroad they can get to gun and/or ammunition restrictions because it gives them ground on which to build later. That is why they often just try to restrict (infringe on) a person’s right to protect themselves with guns only to their home. Or, they go after a restriction (an infringement) on a certain type of gun, such as the so called “assault” gun. Or, now with new Obama executive orders, to close the so called gun-show loophole which would restrict (infringe on) private individual-to-individual gun sales or transfers.
Other possible areas of gun restrictions include involving ordinary doctors as stool pigeons. The Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) already requires a newly comprehensive database of information on every patient. It would simply add one more step to mandate the reporting to that federal database of a patient that the doctor, in his or her opinion, would have possible aggressive tendencies, or that was taking anti-depressants, or that had children in the house where guns were not under lock and key, etc. And these conditions would allow what, the government brown-shirts to go and confiscate the guns of that person? To add emphasis, we’re talking about denying an individual’s right to self protection here – an innate and sacred right of the individual. To legitimately do that a person must be held legally incapable of having that right. That cannot be accomplished simply because of a doctor’s opinion, or by the determination of one or a committee of government officials. Political abuse would run rampant in such a system. One of the tenets of ‘who we are’ as a nation is the protection of an individual’s due process and, on its face, such a system would deny due process.
All of those and other governmental measures being initiated or discussed are only temporary and fractional means to forward the ultimate agenda of cancelling out the right of any American to own and bear a firearm, of any kind, anywhere. It is a hostile and miscreant government that works to restrict or deny any legal citizen of their inalienable rights. And make no mistake; restricting the legal citizen of the right to own arms (in this case guns) of their choosing and to bear those arms wherever a threat might occur are miscreant deeds against life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
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