Ramblings
A few thoughts on our most recently voted on attempts at further gun control…
- No, gun owners and members of the NRA do not want terrorists to have access to guns. If you will grant me that one I will grant you that gun control advocates are not involved in a pernicious effort to turn the US into a police state.
- I don’t believe Republicans in Congress fear the NRA. What they do fear, I submit, is the four to five million NRA members and the far greater number of gun owning non-members, all of whom take their 2nd Amendment liberties very seriously and who also have very long memories.
- This thing that is now being identified by the newly coined term “terror gap,” also goes by a much older term. This much older term is found within the Constitution of the United States. It is called due process of law. You can put whatever face on it you wish but the truth is this: the proposals put forth by gun control advocates in the wake of Orlando would deny people their due process rights. If you are not familiar with the concept of due process I encourage you to read both the fifth and fourteenth amendments to the Constitution.
- I am astounded that many liberals, who were so very rightly critical of the Patriot Act, are ok with proposals that attack not just one civil liberty, but several.
- No, I do not believe in some vast conspiracy to deprive Americans of their civil liberties. I have made that point here and here. I do not need to believe in such a thing. History, I submit, teaches us that it is the nature of government to always seek to increase the control it exercises over citizens. People in power like being in power. Quite often, they feel and believe they are better qualified than most citizens to tell the citizens what they must do. This is independent of nation or type of government. It is simply the nature of the beast.
- People do not propose laws to keep them from doing things they should not do. Instead, they propose laws to keep other people from doing things they don’t believe those other people should do. The problem with laws that limit or take away liberties is this: because of the tendency of government to always increase the power it has over citizens, each loss of liberty makes the next easier to accomplish. Eventually, unless one is quite fortunate, the liberties you happen to favor or like find themselves on the chopping block and you become one of those “other people.”
- It gives the appearance of more than a little hypocrisy that so many of those who advocate for further, greater and stricter gun control frequently enjoy protection (often around-the-clock protection) by people armed with the very weapons and exercising the very liberties they wish to curtail for the rest of us.
- Finally, I would like to leave you with this. If you wish to understand the frustration of most gun owners regarding further gun control efforts, I would encourage you to consider the history of gun control legislation in this country. In every case of which I am aware, the “reasonable compromise” offered by those who favored the legislation was a thinly veiled version of this: “Let us pass this legislation or we’ll simply take away all your 2nd Amendment rights.” I can do no better than to refer you to the words of the so very articulate Lawdog.
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