Why You Should Support A Fully Developed Second Amendment

Tom Knighton today at Bearing Arms makes the point that rather than having one party looking to repeal the Second Amendment, it should be treasured by all Americans as the guardian of all our other liberties, and a direct threat to tyranny in Why The Second Amendment Should Be Considered a National Treasure. Knighton is not the first to note this either. No less a sage than St. George Tucker, writing in Blackstone's Commentary that the Second Amendment was the "true palladium of liberty," is a good example.  Tucker was writing in 1803 and his Blackstone's Commentary was highly influential on legal thinking throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.    But a number of the founding fathers also made that point, including George Mason.

Knighton believes that the Second Amendment should not be a Left vs. Right issue, or a Democrat vs. Republican issue. It should be a universally supported issue, because as we have seen, one party then another takes the reigns of government. No one wants to be herded into concentration camps because the current head of government doesn't like us. So, Knighton seems to be puzzled:

The Second Amendment is anything but a relic of a bygone era. It’s an integral part of the American fabric, one that should be embraced because it serves no master. Preserving it shouldn’t be a conservative or libertarian issue, but an American one. Yes, liberals should support and embrace it as well. Feminists should see the armed woman as empowered and the equal of any male predator. Those who think Trump is “literally Hitler” should embrace the Second Amendment as their great hope, their way to make sure he doesn’t create death camps or whatever.

It should be a universally supported position. More than that, it should be considered a national treasure, the ultimate insurance policy for liberty anywhere in the world.

Let me take a stab at dispelling the seeming paradox of having one party, the Democrats, on the side of restricting our gun rights, ultimately either repealing the Second Amendment, or making it irrelevant.

At least since the Civil War, the Democrat party has been about controlling people. In the South, after the war, the Democrats created laws that disarmed blacks in particular, but also white Republicans as well. Laws like North Carolina's, that require a person to obtain a permit from the Sheriff's office to purchase a gun were originally part of the black codes known as Jim Crow laws. Fearing the black population, they didn't want to arm that population. The Ku Klux Klan became the militia wing of the Democrat party to put down any unrest, while giving the official wing of the Democrat party plausible deniability.

 Democrats have also sided with the criminal, often romanticizing what is, at heart the ugly business of people taking what they have not earned. In 1911, gun control came North to New York in the form of the Sullivan Act. People were rightly concerned about the immigrants to New York who were thought to bring a new violence to the city.  But New York had long been plagued by gang warfare.  The problem was it was spilling out under the noses of the blue bloods, and they didn't like it.  Sullivan, a state legislator who had ties to criminal gangs came up with a way to disarm potential victims, which became the Sullivan Act, and it just got worse from there.

Disarming the law abiding is what any gun control measure is all about.  Whether it is the government wanting to know where every gun is, and who owns it (as if that is their business) or restricting what may be owned, or telling us where we may not be armed, all gun control is designed to set up a monopoly of violence.  The criminal class will not give up their guns.  No matter how many laws you make, the criminal will find a way to have a gun when they need it.  Think about it.  If they can smuggle drugs into this country, isn't it a simple matter to smuggle weapons as well?   The government is not worried about the criminal class, who generally harass the general public.  What they are worried about, what keeps them up at night, is that the vast majority of law abiding citizens might have as much fire power as they do. 

At the time of the founding, the government only possessed muzzle loading, single shot, muskets, and cannon.  We the people also had the same weapons.  There was, therefore, a balance of firepower on the peoples side, because of our far greater numbers.  However, today the government possesses fully automatic assault weapons, machine guns, tanks, armored vehicles, and so on, while we are "allowed" to possess semiautomatic handguns, semiautomatic rifles, as well as hunting rifles.  There is no balance of firepower, because of the technological advantage.  If we could possess the same weapons today man for man, as the government does today, then there would be the proper balance.  Then we would be safe from tyranny.  As it is...not so much.

All this why you should support a fully developed and expressed Second Amendment, whether you are a Democrat or a Republican, a liberal of a conservative.  We, the people, must have the firepower necessary to disuade would be tyrants.  Its the only language they understand.