- The US Constitution has few friends on the right or the
left.
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- During the first eight years of the 21st century, the
Republicans mercilessly assaulted civil liberties. The brownshirt Bush
regime ignored the protections provided by habeas corpus. They spied on
American citizens without warrants. They violated the First Amendment.
They elevated decisions of the president above US statutory law and international
law. They claimed the power to withhold information from the people's representatives
in Congress, and they asserted, and behaved as if, they were unaccountable
to the people, Congress, and the federal courts. The executive branch
claimed the power to ignore congressional subpoenas. Republicans regarded
Bush as a Stuart king unaccountable to law.
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- The Bush brownshirt regime revealed itself as lawless,
the worst criminal organization in American history.
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- Now we have the Democrats, and the assault on civil liberty
continues. President Obama doesn't want to hold Bush accountable for his
crimes and violations of the Constitution, because Obama wants to retain
the powers that Bush asserted. Even the practice of kidnapping people
and transporting them to foreign countries to be tortured has been retained
by President Obama.
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- The civil liberties that Bush stole from us are now in
Obama's pocket.
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- Will it turn out that we enjoyed more liberty under Bush
than we will under Obama? At least the Republicans left us the Second
Amendment. The Obama Democrats are not going to return our other purloined
civil liberties, and they are already attacking the Second Amendment.
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- Rep. Bobby L. Rush (D, IL) has introduced the Blair Holt
Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009. As the British and Australians
learned, once firearms are registered, the government knows where they
are. The government's next step is to confiscate the firearms.
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- Moreover, the Act would permit the government to negate
Second Amendment rights by refusing to issue a license. Any parents who
bequeathed family antique or historic firearms to heirs would be in violation
of the act, as it bans any transfer of a firearm other than via a licensed
dealer.
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- William Blackstone, the revered 18th century defender
of liberty whose Commentaries on the Laws of England was a bestseller
in colonial America, wrote that "the last auxiliary right" of
free men is "having arms for their defense." Blackstone, England's
greatest jurist, said that the right to bear arms enables the "natural
right of resistance and self-preservation, when the sanctions of society
and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression."
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- The Bush regime's reversion to medieval methods of incarceration
and torture are an indication that we now live in a time "when the
sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the
violence of oppression." Why do the Democrats desire Americans to
be helpless in the face of oppression by the armed state? How can it be
that Democrats want Americans to be free from the threat of being thrown
into dungeons and locked away without a court ever hearing evidence, but
are prepared to deny Americans the ability to resist such horrendous treatment
should it come their way?
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- In response to my question, one progressive acquaintance
said that he wanted to reduce "gun violence." As guns are inanimate
objects, I assume he meant violence committed by people who use guns instead
of knives, fists or some other weapon.
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- "Gun violence" is not something committed by
the vast majority of gun owners. "Gun violence" is the preserve
of the criminal elements, such as gangs fighting over drug turf. Criminals
are already prohibited from owning guns, but criminals pay no more attention
to this law than they do to laws against robbery, rape, and murder. Why
do Democrats think that disarming law-abiding citizens will disarm outlaws?
For how many decades have drugs been banned? Does any Democrat think that
the ban on drugs has succeeded?
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- All the ban on drugs has done is to make the drug trade
profitable. Now people fight over it. How can guns be successfully banned
when the war on drugs is a failure? All a gun ban would do is to create
a new criminal activity.
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- England, in violation of its unwritten constitution,
banned ownership of pistols and rifles. But now the police have to be
heavily armed, because criminals are now armed, but not law-abiding citizens.
When I lived in England, the police were not armed with firearms. I remember
reading a few years after the passage of England's gun ban that criminals
were selling submachine guns on London street corners. The police discovered
a warehouse in London filled to the brim with machine guns that were being
sold to all comers.
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- So much for gun bans. They only disarm the law-abiding
and leave them defenseless.
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- Gun bans also greatly increase the crime rate. When households
are armed, robbers prefer houses where no one is home. In England, criminals
are no longer deterred from entering an occupied home. The more people
at home the better. There might be someone to rape and someone to beat
up. There is little to fear from a disarmed household.
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- When I lived in the metro area of Washington DC, I resided
on the Virginia side of the Potomac. There was no problem with owning
a gun in Virginia, but in DC, until the recent Supreme Court ruling, the
only way a person could have a firearm was to keep it disassembled and
unloaded.
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- The Washington "gun control" ordinance benefitted
criminals. The crime rate in DC was much higher than across the river.
Despite, or because of, the gun ban, DC was the murder capital of the
US.
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- Police seldom, if ever, prevent a crime. Their job is
to appear after a crime is committed and to investigate with a view to
identifying the perpetrator. A large number of careful studies show that
private gun ownership prevents far more crimes than police ever solve.
Criminals are routinely deterred, apprehended, and sometimes killed, by
armed private citizens.
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- In contrast, police, especially the notorious SWAT teams,
accidentally kill more law abiding citizens than they do criminals. If
anyone should be disarmed, it is the police. When police become militarized,
as they increasingly are in the US, their attitude toward the public changes
from protective to hostile.
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- Militarized SWAT teams have established a record of showing
up at the wrong address.
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- In Maryland recently, a SWAT team mistook the mayor and
his wife for drug dealers. A large number of armed men in black, and not
identified as police, broke into the mayor's home, killed the family's
Labrador dogs, and held the mayor and his wife spread eagled on the floor
with loaded automatic weapons a few inches from their heads. Fortunately
for the mayor and his wife, a local policeman happened by and informed
the paramilitary unit that it was the mayor and his wife whom the SWAT
team was terrorizing.
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- Many progressives oppose gun ownership because they have
sympathy for animals and oppose hunting. However, most gun owners are not
hunters. Most members of gun clubs are content to shoot holes in paper
targets or at clay pigeons. They enjoy hand-eye coordination, the study
of ballistics, and reloading for antique rifles. An outing is really just
a chance to get together, to talk about history and the load they are
working up for their 1873 Winchester, and to enjoy each other's company.
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- There is a vast number of small businesses that exist
because of gun ownership. Repairs, customizing, parts, sights, brass, bullets,
primers, and powders for reloading, reloading equipment, targets, cleaning,
refinishing, engraving, it goes on and on. What would happen to these hundreds
of thousands of people, to the family businesses and to the skills accumulated,
if Americans are deprived of their Second Amendment rights? We would have
another million people deprived of livelihood and on the streets. Would
they turn to crime?
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- The progressive canard is that the Second Amendment,
unlike the rest of the amendments to the Constitution, is not a constitutional
right for citizens. Rather it is a right for a defunct organization known
as the militia. Why in the world would the Founding Fathers, when laying
out the rights of individuals, confound the point by sticking in among
individual rights a right for a military organization?
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- But so what if they did. Americans have had squatter'
rights to firearms since 1776.
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- In 1992 when the Supreme Court revisited Roe v. Wade,
the justices acknowledged that the legal argument behind the 1973 decision
legitimizing abortion was flawed. However, the justices ruled that women
had exercised abortion rights for 19 years, and the passage of time had
given women squatters' rights to abortions.
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- Americans have exercised Second Amendment rights for
234 years. Regardless of the meaning of the Second Amendment, the right
of adverse possession makes gun rights final. To assault such a well-grounded
right is an act of tyranny.
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- _______________
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- Paul Craig Roberts a former Assistant Secretary of the
US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has
been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A
new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with
Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how Americans lost the protection
of law, has just been released by Random House.
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