This is a hugely fascinating article.
What so many of the truly evil in this country wilfully do is openly betray rights that are protected (not granted) by our Constitution. They do this along with a potful of the illiterati who move in concert with whatever sounds most cozy.
Here is a fact: each and all of the human rights mentioned in the Bill of Rights pre-exist the founding of this nation and the writing of its most basic documents. Each and every right existed before any other authority sought to write them down or soil them with regulation or revision.
Nowhere in the Constitution nor any other document is it said that the right to free speech is hereby granted by “we, the blowhards in Congress.” Likewise, rights to a free press or free assembly or free religion–or the right to keep and bear arms–are pre-existent and irrevocably override anything any government body, agency, or individual may choose to try to do to countermand those rights.
Period.
So when the State of Montana recently did what it did, as evidenced in the article referenced above, I felt a real surge of gratefulness. There are thinkers still. It’s past time to stand up to those who would steal our ironclad freedoms, and it is definitely the time to prepare to take a stand.
Again, here’s that link. Be encouraged. It was for times such as these that the Second Amendment was written into our Constitution. The sole intent of the first ten amendments was to thoroughly ensure that the limited powers of the federal government stayed that way.
The Founders knew from personal experience that a standing army could easily threaten liberty. They saw what the British did with one. So they wrote into our Constitution that we would have no standing army. They didn’t do the same with a navy, interestingly, because personal experience once again demonstrated which of the two actually threatened freedom.
Yet we have a long national history of nearly continuous and increasingly hideous warfare, especially throughout the 20th Century and into the 21st. That might be its own discussion at some time, but the initial idea was that militias could be raised in times of peril. Militias comprised of conscripted citizens who were already armed and familiar with their weapons.
That in mind, the Second Amendment (along with simple additions by me that state what the Founders understood to be inherent in the original phrasing) reads as follows:
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“A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the [pre-existent] right of the [already armed and capable] people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”
Impractical in today’s world? Yes. An impracticality, however, that is highly irrelevant in that the militia bit has absolutely nothing to do with the pre-existing human right of every American to keep and bear arms. Each of us, whether we choose to or not, owns the irrevocable and pre-existent right of all humans to keep and bear arms for self defense, for bringing in food, and for joining in local groups when it all hits the fan, and to join in protecting communities and neighborhoods.
The positions to which we have encouraged our legal systems to fall will have to iron themselves out, but the right to defend oneself is paramount to survival, freedom and (yes) peace.
Remember the Rodney King-inspired LA riots: The only stores that were not looted or burned were those that hosted armed business owners who stood ready and able to use lethal force in defense of their families’ livelihoods.
Don’t forget, either, where the cops were. They were strung so thin they couldn’t do diddly, and it was the individual pre-existence of the right to keep and bear arms that saved the day for those few with the initiative, the wisdom and the courage to believe in it.
Responses?
ara
