What Would America Be Like Without the Second Amendment

I am currently reading a book by Alvin J. Schmidt entitled How Christianity Changed the World. Schmidt is a retired Professor of Sociology, and a member of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod. Schmidt starts out asking what if Christ had not been born? He then goes on to show how the movement Jesus started changed people, and thus changed a number of horrible cultural practices that obtained throughout the ancient world. These practices would still be widespread had not Jesus been born. Infanticide and abortion was commonly practiced in ancient times.  Of course, boys would be favored in such a regime over girls.  Girls and women were chattel slaves, the property of their fathers and then their husbands.  The veil was common, and whatever Muslims may tell you, it is a sign of male superiority; always has been.  The practice of suttee, where a widow was burned alive on her husband's funeral pyre was cultural practice until outlawed by the British.  Child brides as young as twelve were often married to elderly men.  Thus a woman as young as 15 might be burned with her dead husband. Christians established the first hospitals for the public, the first colleges and universities, and advanced science.

I asked Mrs. PolyKahr if the car would have been invented without Christianity.  She thinks it would.  I am not so sure.  A number of technological innovations were made during the Greek and Roman times, but these remained one off, and the ideas never spread, nor were the value of these innovations fully realized.  The cultural was not there.  But Christianity introduced a new culture, one of greater freedom, not just for men but for women as well.  This freed us to have yet more ideas.  Christians value of life also meant that we slowly out reproduced the ancient world, with their abortions and infanticides, and their widespread homosexual practices.

On thing I know would not have been had it not been for Christians is the United States Constitution..  The Constitution is a profoundly Christian document, and this nation was founded as a Christian nation.   So, even if we would be living here, in this land, we would not be living under the United States Constitution, and therefore we would not have the Second Amendment.  Peter Skurkiss writes a think piece for the American Thinker entitled A Second Amendment Thought Experiment wherein he asks: What would American be like if we didn't have the Second Amendmeent?  Of course, guns would likely be highly restricted, that is a given. 

That's the easy part of the answer. But there's more to it than that. Without the 2nd Amendment, might not the social and cultural landscape of America be different from what it is today?

To understand why, look at how far within living memory the U.S. has drifted from its founding principles. The country has been pushed further and further to the left by undemocratic means in the form of judicial decrees and bureaucratic edicts, many of which have no basis in written law or the Constitution. Abortion, homosexual marriage, transgender rights, and massive illegal immigration are examples. And think of all the statewide referendums that have been overturned by the courts because the results went against the progressive agenda. So much for “every vote counts.”

Furthermore, we live in what is called an “agency state.” Loosely written laws give government bureaucrats the power to set rules and regulations that have the effect of law. We've seen government departments like the EPA, staffed by environmental radicals, running amok with their regulatory power. Probably no federal government agency is innocent of bureaucratic overreach, some more than others, which is why the country is choking on 'laws,' many of which people neither know of nor can understand.

What does this have to do with the 2nd Amendment and gun ownership? Simple. Most office-bound bureaucrats, left-wing judges, and government elites are not exactly prime examples of virile American manhood. Quite the opposite. When you think of this government class, which is predominately male, a picture of a feminized metrosexual springs to mind, especially the higher up you go in the hierarchy.

This point is this. In the back of their minds, even if it is buried at a subconscious level, these people fear an armed citizenry. An armed citizenry puts a check on how far and how fast the government class dares to push its progressive agenda by unconstitutional means. True, the 2nd Amendment by itself has not completely stopped the unconstitutional drift to the left, but one has to believe it has prevent what could have been from being what is.

To see the real history of the Left. you need to read another book by Jonah Goldberg entitled Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left form Mussolini to the Politics of Change I am sure Goldberg regrets the second part of that title, for the book is larger in scope, but such are the compromises required by editors. The Left goes back to the French revolution, and has been with us since our founding. The differences start out small. They are the difference between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome.  It was while reading this book that the idea first struck that the Second Amendment guaranteed all the other Amendments, and more importantly that in a country with a Second Amendment, a person is a citizen, while in a country without, a person is a subject.  But it is not an original idea.  St. George Tucker, writing in 1803 on William Blackstone's Commentary on the Laws of England noted:

This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty . . . . The right of self defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms, is under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction.

President Reagan said: "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same." Like so many things the great Renadus Maximus said, this one is fundamentally true. Without the Second Amendment, this nation would be far different from what it is, let alone what it was. We need to be ever vigilant, and support and expand the Second Amendment at every opportunity. One such opportunity presents itself now, with the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act. Write your Congresscriters and tell them how you feel.