The Left is determined to have a civil war, part 2

I continue to be concerned that the country is heading towards a civil war.  There seems to be no common ground any more.  We used to disagree on methods to achieve the goals, but agreed on the goals themselves.  I remember when we could have a good and rousing debate, then go out for coffee and a good dinner and laugh with each other.  Today, not so much.  I am not too keen to share a meal with someone who has just called me a racist, a Luddite, a knuckle dragger, etc.

John Hawkins has listed 7 Forces Driving America Toward Civil War over at Townhall.com today. The 7 Forces are 1) A post Constitutional era, 2) Tribalism, 3) Federal Government Too Powerful, 4) Moral Decline, 5) The Debt, 6) Lack of a Shared Culture, and 7) Gun Grabbing. I think all of these forces are part of the problem, and sometimes separating them is difficult, so I applaud Hawkins for attempting to do so.  For example, the Tribalism he mentions also has to do with the Lack of a Shared Culture.  But two of the seven forces need to be addressed first, if we are ever to find common ground on the rest: the Post Constitutional era and Gun Grabbing.

The idea of a "living Constitution" began gaining ground at the turn of the 20th century.  Courts. impatient for changes they wanted to see, began interpreting the Constitution in ways that turned the original meaning of the Founders on its head.  Progressives also believed that they could slowly turn the ship of state by slowly implementing and expanding the principle of stare decisis into court rulings such that one turn away from the Constitution would eventually cause a further turning away in a later case. With an accumulation of such decisions the Constitution could be made to say whatever someone wanted it to say, all without resorting to the slow, difficult process of amending the Constitution. But why amend the Constitution when the words can actually mean anything we want them to mean, as should by the deconstructionists? In fact though, words do have meaning, and the meaning is fairly accessible in the case of the Constitution because it was publicly debated, and written about at the time.

One of the problems that exacerbates a too powerful Federal government is that too many cases that are not legitimately the governments business are decided by the Supreme Court.  For example, same sex marriage is not the Federal governments business and should not have been decided by the Supreme Court, or indeed any Federal court.  Each State should have its own laws on this matter.  Similarly, the abortion issue should have been left up to individual States to decide, and the Federal courts should have turned down the "opportunity" to meddle in it.  If the courts all interpreted to Constitution as originalists, returning to the words of the Founders each time, though of course recognizing any amendments that have been made, there we would have more of a shared culture.

The other problem is gun grabbing.  Every time there is a mass shooting, or a school shooting, the gun grabbers come and dance in the blood of the victims and accuse an estimated 80 million Americans of being responsible for the heinous act.  Those 80 -100 million Americans though, had nothing to do with the crime, have never been to the crime scene, did not give the shooter either a weapon or encouragement.  At the same time, there are far more gang shootings every day in cities like Chicago, that nobody takes notice of, even though many of them are similar aged children and young adults.  To people in the gun culture this looks like hypocrisy.  Chicago disarms the law abiding citizen, fails to protect its citizens, and treats those caught carrying a prohibited weapon, though otherwise law abiding, as more harshly than actual crimes like rape, murder, and gang activities.  This also seems like hypocrisy.

The world has seen too many cases of governments first disarming its citizens, and then committing mass  murders of undesirable citizens and genocides of entire peoples.  Lenin, Stalin, Hitler,Mao, Pol Pot, the Castros and on and on.  Liberals may not be aware of this history, but we in the gun culture are all too aware.  When Hawkins writes:

Another thing that seldom seems brought up is that large numbers of conservatives would see this as a prelude to the government’s use of force against the citizenry. When it is discussed on the Left, there seems to be an assumption that lone resisters might get into firefights with dozens of police or soldiers, as opposed to ganging up with other formerly law-abiding Americans to waylay gun confiscators, politicians and anti-gun activists at THEIR HOMES in guerrilla actions that would be silently applauded and supported by hundreds of millions of Americans concerned about their freedom.

Of course we are concerned for ourselves, and our loved ones.  But we are concerned about you too. 

It is possible to live, if not in harmony, at least at peace with one another.  It has been done before, I don't know if it is too late to turn back, or not, but we must try.