The Arrogance of Socialism; Same as the Gnostics Of Old

Yet more on so called "Red Flag" laws today.  The first comes from retired Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, Jr.  Clarke has special reasons for not wanting gun control.  As a black American, whose ancestors were held as slaves in this country, Clarke does not want to be enslaved again in modern times by people who would take away his God given rights to weapons of self defense.  Clarke writes at  Townhall.com in an article entitled Raising A Black Flag Against Red Flag Laws.

Clarke is pretty clear that he doesn't trust the gun grabbers as far as he can spit:

That brings me to the latest emotion-based idea to stop mass shootings: Red Flag Laws. Let's strip away the good intentions part of this right away. This law would allow the government to violate our Fourteenth Amendment due process rights along with Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights to the Constitution and confiscate our property (guns) on an unsubstantiated citizen complaint about something a person might do. That is a lower standard than the reasonable suspicion standard we allow police to use. That is an “anything is possible” standard.

Red Flag Laws will not stop the next mass shooting just like banning the Confederate Flag after Charleston did not nor did banning bump stocks after the Las Vegas massacre. Red Flag Laws are an assault on our Second Amendment rights. Period. Anything proposed by the left regarding firearms is a ruse. It's like the left attacking the First Amendment to supposedly curb hate speech. You always have to look for the hidden agenda within their “good intentions.” They do everything stealthily to conceal their real objectives. They are exploiting El Paso and Dayton like they exploit any horrific incident to catch a nation in shock to hopefully give away their liberty.

Of course, Sheriff Clarke is more concerned than many about liberty, having had a more recent family history of not being allowed liberty. But I stand with Sheriff Clarke. My people came from Northern Europe, where we were serfs and peasants. A serf is just a different kind of slave.

Which brings us to Michael Smith's piece over at the American Thinker today entitled Mass Shootings, Politics, and The Law. Smith takes as a point of departure the famous James Madison quote "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." It has been a while, but I have pointed out many times, to those who insist that the police will protect us, so that we don't need guns ourselves, that the police are drawn from the same population as the rest of us. They are not angels, nor even any better or worse than the average citizen.

Regulations are never simply for the criminal, like the law of gravity, they are equally applicable to all. Therefore, any across-the-board restriction of access to firearms to reduce gun crime also necessarily restricts protective use by law-abiding gun owners. In all honesty, gun owners are suspicious of the motives of those who push for increased legislation while ignoring the failures of the current legal regime without honestly considering the statistical facts of gun use, in suicides, in homicides and in defensive usage. The greatest of these facts is new restrictions will impact not only criminals but the 99.997% of gun owners who have never committed a crime.

In point of fact, the proposed regulations will not impact criminals at all. They already can not buy guns legally. How they acquire them is by different illegal means. And while some may be outed by those living close to them, the majority will likely not be impacted by red flag laws because those who know them fear the criminal, with good reason.  But it is the law abiding who are the real targets of such laws. 

Many note the right to life is the first right identified in the Declaration of Independence -- and that positioning must mean it is a “supreme” right, one rising above all others -- but if one truly believes in such a supreme right, one must also accept the defense of that right must also be supreme, that it must be defended at all costs and with any means necessary. To do otherwise puts the lie to the idea the right to live is supreme and renders the phrase “right to life” into trite political sloganeering.

In 1850, the noted French economist and philosopher Frédéric Bastiat wrote, “If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?”

And here, Bastiat has hit on the problem with Socialism, which was all the rage in France at the time and still is). The Socialist believes, like the Gnostics of old, that he has the secret knowledge. These self appointed elites believe they know better than you how you should live your life. They believe they know better how to spend your money, how and what you should eat, where and what kind of work you should do, and when your economical usefulness has been used up, when you should die. They know all this because they have been granted to secret knowledge that you are too stupid, or too blinded to see.

It is an arrogance of breath taking proportions.  But it is an arrogance that has always existed in the human heart.  It is an arrogance that allows people to think it is fine to enslave others, and to take as their own what others have done.  It is an arrogance that allows people to think that the police can protect everyone, when the Supreme Court has said that the police have no duty to protect anyone.

I fear that liberty and freedom are too scary for too many of our citizens.  The notion that one lives by one's wits can not be tolerated.  They need to have a government safety net to guarantee against hard times and bad decisions.  But life is made up of just such occasions, when unexpected things happen.  Everyone pays their money and takes their chances.  The government can not guarantee against these things, any more than they can guarantee against the next shooter.  You must be ready yourself to be your own first responder.

Update:  Listen to Armed Lutheran Radio Number 181.