Archive for the 'Second Amendment' Category

Paul Waldman at The Week.

We are a nation divided, as everyone knows. And what we need to fix that problem is to reach out, express some empathy, and show our opponents that we don’t hate them even if we disagree.

Or at least, that’s what liberals are supposed to do.

You can hear that argument everywhere on the subject of guns: Whatever policy changes liberals might be proposing, it’s important to communicate to gun owners that you respect their culture and you don’t mean to wage an assault on their way of life. When someone like retired Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens writes an op-ed in The New York Times calling for the repeal of the Second Amendment, it only convinces people that you’re a bunch of gun-grabbers.

I’m all for respecting other people’s cultures and taking their feelings into account. But when was the last time you heard someone implore conservatives to respect the culture of coastal or urban-dwelling liberals?

We’re told that if you grew up around guns, then you’re right to worry that your culture could be eroded, and we need to understand and sympathize with your perspective. But here’s something that might surprise you: For millions of Americans, not having guns around is an important cultural value. It’s part of how we define the kind of places we’d like to live. Since most Americans don’t own guns, maybe that’s worthy of respect and consideration, too.

We never seem to hear that — both sides of the gun issue may have opinions, but only one side is supposed to have a “culture.” But it’s important to understand that “gun culture” is a relatively recent invention.

Make no mistake, in the past a greater proportion of Americans owned guns than do today. As recently as 1977, half of American households had guns, according to the General Social Survey; by 2016 that number was down to 32 percent. But back when a far greater portion of the American public lived in rural areas and small towns than do today, there wasn’t really anything like today’s “gun culture.” If you had a hunting rifle or a shotgun your dad gave you, as millions of Americans did, you weren’t participating in an encompassing “culture” in which guns defined your identity. That gun was a tool, like a broom or a shovel or a cleaver.

But the gun culture of today, with so much fetishizaton of guns and an entire political/commercial industry working hard to spread and solidify the idea that guns are not just a thing you own but who you are, is what we’re now expected to show respect for. For instance, the idea that anyone should be able to own military-style rifles designed to kill as many human beings in as short a period as possible, for no real reason other than the fact that some people think they’re cool, is supposed to be a part of people’s culture, no matter how ludicrous it would have seemed to your grandparents.

And when you say something is part of your culture, you’re placing it beyond reasoned judgment. Its status as a component of culture infuses it with value that can’t be argued against. I don’t tell you that your religious rituals are silly, because they have deep meaning for those within that culture. Your ethnic group’s traditional music may not be pleasing to my ears, but I’m not going to argue that it sucks and you ought to start listening to real music, defined as whatever I happen to like. The food your parents taught you to make from the old country might not be to my taste, but I’ll appreciate it (at least once or twice) as a window into another aspect of our rich human tapestry.

In other words, when you place something in the sphere of culture, you automatically afford it a kind of conditional immunity from criticism. And you can demand that it be respected.

Nobody understands this better than gun advocates, who have been working to change the culture around guns, and our expectations about them, for some time. With only the most minimal restrictions on who can buy guns and what kind, their focus in recent years has been on putting guns in the hands of as many people as possible in as many places as possible. State laws have been passed to allow guns in government buildings, churches, schools, restaurants, even bars. They encourage people to get concealed carry licenses and to open carry whenever possible, to inculcate everyone with the idea that we should just expect to see guns wherever we go — until their culture becomes your reality, whether you like it or not.

Oh my God.  You’re not going to cry, are you Paul?  Based on the tone of this commentary, I think you’re going to cry.  You don’t want to hold hands in a circle and sing Kumbaya, do you Paul?  Because I don’t think I can take that.

Listen Paul and others like Paul.  We’re educated enough to know that the war of independence was catalyzed over gun control.  We also know that guns were not only ubiquitous in colonial America, they were highly valued and used for all manner of things, including self defense and the amelioration of tyranny.

In the colonies, availability of hunting and need for defense led to armament statues comparable to those of the early Saxon times. In 1623, Virginia forbade its colonists to travel unless they were “well armed”; in 1631 it required colonists to engage in target practice on Sunday and to “bring their peeces to church.” In 1658 it required every householder to have a functioning firearm within his house and in 1673 its laws provided that a citizen who claimed he was too poor to purchase a firearm would have one purchased for him by the government, which would then require him to pay a reasonable price when able to do so. In Massachusetts, the first session of the legislature ordered that not only freemen, but also indentured servants own firearms and in 1644 it imposed a stern 6 shilling fine upon any citizen who was not armed.

When the British government began to increase its military presence in the colonies in the mid-eighteenth century, Massachusetts responded by calling upon its citizens to arm themselves in defense. One colonial newspaper argued that it was impossible to complain that this act was illegal since they were “British subjects, to whom the privilege of possessing arms is expressly recognized by the Bill of Rights” while another argued that this “is a natural right which the people have reserved to themselves, confirmed by the Bill of Rights, to keep arms for their own defense”. The newspaper cited Blackstone’s commentaries on the laws of England, which had listed the “having and using arms for self preservation and defense” among the “absolute rights of individuals.” The colonists felt they had an absolute right at common law to own firearms.

The culture you’re talking about, where you want safety and cradle to grave security from the state is the one that’s new, not mine.  Furthermore, I feel absolutely no brotherhood with you or your kind at all.  In the defense of kin and kith, you can have your state because I won’t be there to help you.  You can sleep in the bed of your choice.

You have a right to the culture you seek, but what you don’t have a right to do is enforce yours on me or mine.  And that’s what it would take, Paul.  We’re through talking.  There is no discussion on this that can make me change my mind, there is no compromise.

When you ascribe the differences to “culture,” I don’t think you understand that it’s a comprehensive world and life view that separates us, not merely culture.  You can respect mine or not.  I really don’t care either way.  The bottom line here for you is that the gulf that separates us is far wider and deeper and more problematic than you can imagine, and will never be bridged.  We will never come to agreement over these things, any more than we will about whether the state has the right to confiscate our wealth and redistribute it, force us to buy products or services, or force us to believe in certain things and behave in certain ways.

Your best solution is for some sort of amicable separation of the two of us, some peaceful departure that lets us live the way we choose and lets you worship the state.  Would you go for a solution like that?  I’m betting not, because the fundamental rule of controllers is that you want to control the lives of others no matter the cost.

NYP:

What enables this dictatorship of the caliber-iat? A spineless Congress that puts re-election ahead of children’s lives, safe schools and the right to safety of law-abiding citizens.

The irony is that, if only members of Congress banded together against the NRA, they’d quickly find that the emperor-for-life has not only no hunting clothes but an empty magazine, too.

[ … ]

The NRA’s dire warnings fuel a bizarre, all-too-common fantasy among its acolytes (I’ve been startled by how often I’ve encountered it). The scenario runs that either our government and military will turn on the population in a new civil war, or the government and military will suffer catastrophic failure — at which point our freedom will be preserved by out-of-shape, middle-aged men with AR-15s.

My fellow Americans, if our military can’t protect us, geezers with guns won’t.

[ … ]

Also in the name of liberty, NRA supporters circulate carefully selected quotes from several Founding Fathers — Jefferson, Madison, Patrick Henry — in support of the notion of a well-armed population.

None of those cited served in the Continental Army that freed us from Britain. Each of them let others do the fighting for them.

Jefferson famously remarked that “the tree of freedom must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots.” He just didn’t want it to be his blood.

And each of those men was a slave owner. I’d take their rhetorical bravado with a very large grain of saltpeter.

Hey Ralph, I don’t cite Jefferson, Madison or Henry to justify my views of liberty, an armed public or the right to either defense of family or the amelioration of tyranny.  I go right to the fountain of such rights.  The constitution is just a covenant by which we’ve agreed to live together.  If you want to break it, thanks for letting me know.  I’ll make a mental note of it right alongside your name.

As for whether these men did or didn’t fight in that “continental army that freed us from Britain,” Francis Marion says hello.

Regarding those “middle-aged geezers with AR-15s,” I don’t really think you understand 4GW.  In fact, I know you don’t.  The U.S. Army is practicing 5GW because they never learned to win at 4GW.  But in order to know that you’d have to be a military analyst, and you suck as a military analyst.

I always thought you were a crackpot.  Now we have the proof.  What are you doing – trying to beef up your creds for a gig at MSNBC or CNN?  You never really believed in your oath of enlistment, did you?  You knew all along it was a lie, didn’t you?

JMW:

Privately owned warships are so deeply at the heart of American maritime tradition that a reference to them is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. With their own contract crews who rushed to the fight for independence during the American Revolution and in defense of the nation during the War of 1812, the private warships successfully waged naval guerrilla warfare against the world’s most powerful fleet. Private warships also fought the Barbary pirates in the nation’s first foreign war.

The privateers of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 were much different from the private military contractors (PMCs) and private security contractors of today. They operated as independent businesses, chartered by Congress and bonded to ensure observance of the law, but, unlike PMCs, they were free of the military chain of command. They served the national interest not as government contractors, but made their profits by attacking enemy shipping—especially commercial shipping, on which the enemy’s economy depended. Those on the receiving end viewed privateers as glorified pirates. But the U.S. government viewed them as legitimate weapons against the commercial engine that fueled the enemy’s armed forces. Several European powers also used privateers at sea.

By necessity, American naval warfare at the time was asymmetrical against the overwhelmingly superior Royal Navy. From the very beginning, the leaders of what would become the United States of America turned to the private sector to do cost-effectively and efficiently what the government could not do at all. Before independence, in April 1776, the Continental Congress voted to issue commissions for “private ships of war” to attack the British. Borrowing from established French and British practices, the Continental Congress authorized the issuance of “letters of marque and reprisal” for the owners and captains of private warships to attack enemy vessels. In one of the Founding Fathers’ earliest regulations of private business, the Continental Congress legislated how the private naval forces and their commanders and crew would conduct themselves, and required privateer owners to post bond to guarantee compliance.

The “letters of marque and reprisal” language appears in Article 1, Section 8, Paragraph 11 of the Constitution.

I ran across this excellent analysis a few days ago and thought it would be good to remind my readers of the American tradition.

So the next time someone says to you, “You don’t really believe that the second amendment protects your right to own military hardware do you, that means you could own a tank?”

You can say to them, “Why yes, yes I do, and yes it does, in the best tradition of the American states and our founders.  For the peace, good and dignity of the country and the welfare of its people.”

Vox:

Realistically, a gun control plan that has any hope of getting us down to European levels of violence is going to mean taking a huge number of guns away from a huge number of gun owners.

Other countries have done exactly that. Australia, for example, enacted a mandatory gun buyback that achieved that goal, and saw firearm suicides fall as a result. But the reforms those countries enacted are far more dramatic than anything US politicians are calling for — and even they wouldn’t get us to where many other developed countries are.

Always remember that.  The progressives who really understand what’s going on know that in order to disarm the American public would require taking a “huge number of guns away from a huge number of gun owners.”

But here his understanding stops, because he thinks the American people will acquiesce to a buyback.  Either this is a red herring or he’s stupid.

It may be a red herring and he knows there will be untold bloodshed and doesn’t care, or he’s stupid and thinks that something that worked in Australia will work here, where armed resistance is the amelioration for tyranny, always has been, and always will be.  Or said another way, being armed is the amelioration for tyranny if and only if it is exercised, and apparently the Australian people didn’t want to go down that road, being “subjects of the crown” and all of that.

We won’t give up our guns.  If Dylan knows that, then he also knows that the notion that confiscating guns wouldn’t end bloodshed – it would cause it to crescendo into a river of red.  But be careful, Dylan.  If you’re not armed, you won’t fare well in a period of armed resistance.  Fair winds and following seas isn’t the way your life will be described.

ISIS fighters were gun controllers, remember.

“ISIS was telling everyone, ‘We’re all brothers,’ ” Abu Malik said. “They let people smoke and drink. At the checkpoints, they distributed presents to the kids. They ate with people, drank tea with people. They were very nice—they didn’t bother anyone. Then, a week or so after they arrived, they started confiscating weapons. They told us it didn’t matter if we’d been with the Awakening or the Army or the police—if we gave up our weapons, we’d be forgiven. Ten days later, they started taking people. Everything changed. They took my cousin. My brothers dug holes in the fields and hid. I was at my house when they came for me. It was afternoon. I saw two Hyundai Santa Fes pull up outside, and I ran out the back and jumped over the wall. That was the last time I saw my family.”

This is no different than Adolf Hitler, who confiscated weapons and outlawed a lot of other firearms hardware from his enemies.

… the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 was consolidated by massive searches and seizures of firearms from political opponents, who were invariably described as “communists.” After five years of repression and eradication of dissidents, Hitler signed a new gun control law in 1938, which benefitted Nazi party members and entities, but denied firearm ownership to enemies of the state.

Do you want more?

“The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms.  History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing.  Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty.   So let’s not have any native militia or native police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order throughout the occupied Russian territories, and a system of military strong-points must be evolved to cover the entire occupied country.”

How about Benito Mussolini.

“The measures adopted to restore public order are: First of all, the elimination of the so-called subversive elements. … They were elements of disorder and subversion.  On the morrow of each conflict I gave the categorical order to confiscate the largest possible number of weapons of every sort and kind.  This confiscation, which continues with the utmost energy, has given satisfactory results.”

We could go on with Pol Pot, communist China, Stalin, the Christian Armenian genocide at the hands the Turkish Muslims, and so on.  Suffice it to say that dictators love gun control.

What about today?

Khamenei’s “hard line” on guns is nothing new. One of the Ayatollah’s first orders of business, when he came to power, was to disarm his own citizens – a technique regularly used by “supreme leaders” to extend their tenures.

Ultimately, Khamenei makes a unique case that the Second Amendment is, in fact, an insurance policy against tyranny.

Now, of course, the left, despite being vocal on gun control for the last several weeks, embracing nearly every unqualified expert in agreement with them, up to and including members of the Kardashian family, has been silent on the Ayatollah’s expressed agreement with their agenda. But there is an undercurrent of support – as recently as early January, the Huffington Post wrote glowingly of some of the Ayatollah’s ideas.

Gun control is tyranny, and tyrants love gun control.  It’s in their blood.  It’s who they are.  Any time you hear talk of gun control, remember this and equate the advocate of gun control with Stalin, Mussolini, Turkish Muslims, Khamenei, and ISIS.

This includes any gun control measures, like advocating a ban on bump stocks.  Hey, didn’t the NRA do this?

David Codrea:

“If the only thing that comes out of this tragedy is we outlaw bump stocks and we raise the age at which people are allowed to buy an AR-15, that will be a failure,” … “Because the reality – from my perspective – is you need to do what we’ve always tried to do, which is to ban the sale of AR-15s, have universal background checks, and also take away the ability to buy these large magazines.”

Guess who said that?  That’s right.  Behind door number 1, you get a special prize to Fast and Furious.  The same guy who actually gave all of those same things to gangsters and killers in order to do the same thing in America he just said … “ban the sale of AR-15s, have universal background checks, and also take away the ability to buy these large magazines.”

From my cold, dead hands, Eric.  And no, I’m not talking about the Charlton Heston kind of cold, dead hands.  I mean as one who really believes in God-given rights to own whatsoever he damn well pleases to own.

In this Atlantic piece, James Fallows is citing readers, one of whom landed this dud.

The following passage from the person who wanted to compare plinking with guns to flying private planes stuck in my craw (passage spans two paragraphs of the original):

“…the admittedly whacked out perspective that they will fight the oppressive government should it ever come to that.  Again, the last is probably ridiculous, but it is a psychic benefit important to many people.”

To me this was the real nubbin of the argument that was being made: The idea that people are entitled to work out their issues with society by playing with lethal weapons. Think about that one.

How anyone can justify this as “well-regulated militia” is beyond me — it’s more like the opposite.

And what is the “psychic benefit”? For this, read what some of your subsequent correspondents said about white male privilege. These white guys are out in some vacant area shooting up targets or fenceposts or whatever not just for fun similar to paintball or video games, but in order to feel that they are maintaining a certain level of violent threat against others — against their neighbors, really. Let’s not be satisfied with vague talk of “psychic benefit”. This is surely what we are talking about.

The stuff about flying vs. shooting was, as far as I am concerned, a typical astroturfing argument, diverting the reader’s attention from the real point to meta-issues of logic, and thus putting the brakes on discussion rather than furthering it.

Let’s begin with Fallows’ assertion that it is a whacked out position that armed citizens can hold the government accountable.  We’ve asserted differently before.

… while the U.S. military goes about its business preparing for fifth generation warfare, they do so because they haven’t learned how to win fourth generation warfare and are planning their next engagement being a near-peer.

Do you suppose this would look like great land armies getting into formation at the edges of great fields of battle and marching towards each other?  What do you think such a messy civil war in America would look like?  Bubba would be wearing a Ghillie suit, shooting a bolt action rifle, or a modern sporting rifle, and after the shot you will never hear from him again – until the next one.  And you’ll never catch him.  Police will have to decide what side to take, and if they take the wrong one, they will be dealt with in the middle of the night when they take their dogs out to pee in the backyard.

Insurgent will be mixed with progressive statist, and there will be no SEAL teams or nuclear weapons to which you can turn because you won’t know one from another.  There will be nowhere to target a nuclear weapon, and nowhere for a SEAL team to raid.  All of their close quarters battle preparations will be for naught when their own families are in peril due to civil warfare.  These aren’t Afghan tribesmen you’re dealing with.  These are engineers, mechanics, fabricators and welders, chemists, and the world’s best machinists.  If you think Afghanistan was rough, wait to see what civil war would look like in America.

If you have ever said something like, “You can’t win because the government has a land army and nuclear weapons,” here is the moral of the story for you.  You are an idiot.  You haven’t thought through this well enough, and you need to see the second amendment for what it really is.  It is the best guarantor of peace because tyranny is mutually assured destruction.  The statists know that, or else America will suffer the consequences.

So it looks like Fallows is an idiot, but I suspected that.  Next up, let’s deal with the reader’s note to Fallows where he pans the idea that “people are entitled to work out their issues with society by playing with lethal weapons.”  So let’s play a little thought experiment.  Replace “people” with “victims” during the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Turkish Muslims, Pol Pot’s regime, Stalin’s reign, Hitler’s rule, the genocide of Christians in Mesopotamia, Egypt or Uganda.  Recalling that the number of victims of mass shootings at the hands of government entities approaches 170 million between the years of 1901 and 1990, perhaps this self righteous reader would like to explain to us why the victims would have been wrong to defend themselves from genocide?  Go ahead, we’re listening.

As for the final paragraph where the reader uses the terms “astroturfing” and “meta-issues of logic,” I’m not at all convinced that he understands what those terms mean.  In fact, without more context, the entire paragraph is nonsense.

I’m sure in the thousands upon thousands of posts I’ve made something I’ve said could be claimed to be stupid, so I won’t hold Fallows responsible for one stupid article, although a pattern of stupidity is certainly self-inflicted harm.  But I surely have better readers than that, and I think it’s embarrassing for Fallows that he used this letter as an example of reader feedback.

The Blaze:

“Let me tell you why I’m a defender of the Second Amendment,” she began.

“I was a little girl growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the late fifties, early sixties,” she explained. “There was no way that Bull Connor and the Birmingham Police were going to protect you.”

“And so when White Knight Riders would come through our neighborhood,” she said, “my father and his friends would take their guns and they’d go to the head of the neighborhood, it’s a little cul-de-sac and they would fire in the air, if anybody came through.”

“I don’t think they actually ever hit anybody,” she continued. “But they protected the neighborhood. And I’m sure if Bull Connor had known where those guns were he would have rounded them up.”

“And so, I don’t favor some things like gun registration,” she said to a suddenly silent crowd.

“That said, it’s time to have a national conversation about how we can deal with the problems we have. It’s not going to be any single fix to the terrible events at Parkland,” she concluded.

It’s this last part that’s important, but more on that in a minute.  David Codrea links at Washington Times piece saying this.

Bam. That’s it in a nutshell — this is why founders saw fit to put in place a Second Amendment. It wasn’t a right to hunt they were defending; it was a God-given right to protect one’s self and one’s family from harm. And specifically: from harm from the government

And David points out the same thing I’m about to.

“I think it is time to have a conversation about what the right to bear arms means in the modern world,” Rice told radio host Hugh Hewitt on Friday. “I don’t understand why civilians need to have access to military weapons. We wouldn’t say you can go out and buy a tank.”

More specifically, Rice said weapons like the AR-15 rifle that authorities say shooting suspect Nikolas Cruz, 19, used to kill 17 students and teachers Feb. 14, shouldn’t be available to civilians, the Washington Times reported.

I would absolutely say that I should be able to go out and buy a tank with all of the ammunition I could afford to use with it.  So here’s  the bottom line, Ms. Rice.  We have the second amendment to protect us from fake second amendment supporters like you.  My conversation on the RTKBA with you can be neatly summarized as follows: Molon Labe.  That’s about all the conversation I’ll have with you.

You’re what’s called a wolf in sheep’s clothing.  Hey, I recall a time when you supported race sensitive admissions.  I’m just saying that you’re not who you’re purported to be.  But you fit in well with Mr. Bush, who was exactly who he was purported to be, having first sought permission from Bob Bullock to run for governor of Texas.

Well, the obvious answer is yes, but just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean that pinheaded judges get it.

Teixeira has petitioned the Supreme Court to review his case. In this amicus brief, Cato Institute, the Millennial Policy Center, and the Independence Institute seek to persuade the Supreme Court to take it.

The brief goes deeply into the history of ownership and commerce relating to firearms, back to the colonial era. To support its stance, the Ninth Circuit relied on laws from that time that put restrictions on sales of guns and gunpowder to Indians, but the brief argues that such laws were exceptions to “the general right of firearms commerce.” Early Americans and certainly the Founders understood that, with but a few precise limitations, the people were to be as free to buy and sell arms and ammunition as they were to buy and sell anything else.

The notion that the founders would have wanted government control over who could sell guns or anything else, and to whom they could make the sale, is ridiculous on its face.  Anyone who believes that simply doesn’t believe the complaints the founders proffered: “He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”

But then, perhaps they don’t teach American history in schools of law any more.

NYT:

A prominent Republican political donor demanded on Saturday that the party pass legislation to restrict access to guns, and vowed not to contribute to any candidates or electioneering groups that did not support a ban on the sale of military-style firearms to civilians.

Al Hoffman Jr., a Florida-based real estate developer who was a leading fund-raiser for George W. Bush’s campaigns, said he would seek to marshal support among other Republican political donors for a renewed assault weapons ban.

“For how many years now have we been doing this — having these experiences of terrorism, mass killings — and how many years has it been that nothing’s been done?” Mr. Hoffman said in an interview. “It’s the end of the road for me.”

Mr. Hoffman announced his ultimatum in an email to half a dozen Republican leaders, including Jeb Bush and Gov. Rick Scott of Florida. He wrote in the email that he would not give money to Mr. Scott, who is considering a campaign for the Senate in 2018, or other Florida Republicans he has backed in the past, including Representative Brian Mast, if they did not support new gun legislation.

“I will not write another check unless they all support a ban on assault weapons,” he wrote. “Enough is enough!”

Mr. Hoffman, a former ambassador to Portugal, has donated millions to Republican candidates and causes over the years, including more than $1 million to Right to Rise, a “super PAC” that supported Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign in 2016.

A critic of President Trump, Mr. Hoffman has continued to donate heavily to other Republicans.

[ … ]

Peter S. Rummell, a Jacksonville-based donor who gave $125,000 to Jeb Bush’s “super PAC” in 2016, said he was on board with Mr. Hoffman’s plan and would only contribute to candidates supportive of banning assault weapons. He said the Parkland shooting was a turning point: “It has to start somewhere,” Mr. Rummell said, of controlling guns.

Even on its own, Mr. Hoffman’s money will be missed: He contributed heavily to Republican congressional candidates in 2016 and gave $25,000 last spring to the Senate Leadership Fund, a group backed by Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, that is focused on defending Republicans’ Senate majority.

I couldn’t give a rat’s ass in hell what this guy says or does.  But I have to admit that in a way I do.  I hope he succeeds.  He’s just doing what comes naturally to him, to wit, bullying people with his purse.

It’s not a lot different than, say, calls to repeal the second amendment, or “journalists” who run with that editorial and claim that if suburban moms just get involved, things will change.  As if suburban moms are ready to go door-to-door and confiscate guns, or are ready for the bloody carnage that would follow upon such an edict.

But it’s no accident and actually quite amusing that this prominent donor was significantly behind Jeb Bush’s campaign.  We know where the heart of the GOP is, and the valuable lesson in all of this is that just as it was necessary to divide the sheep from the goats, identifying and ejecting the impostors and traitors from our midst and making sure that the internecine warfare has ended is a necessary exigency in the campaign for liberty.

This is good.  At one time I argued data, endless numbers and definitions and connections and correlations.  I probably will still do that given my profession, but the important thing here is that the opposition doesn’t care any more about that than I care about whether this donor bullies people with his money.  We’re beyond that now.  We’ve gone many miles in our dance together.

You see, you can change the constitution if you wish, and I won’t change a thing about myself or what I do.  My rights come from God, not the constitution.  I’ve oft repeated that the constitution is a covenant, an agreement, just like in marriage or work.  There are blessings for those who honor that covenant, and curses for those who don’t.  Under the second amendment, the government has covenanted and contracted not to infringe.  The constitution isn’t God and cannot issue rights or duties – it’s an agreement before God and men.  As for infringe, they have many times, of course, and if not for the longsuffering nature of the American people, the curses of covenant breakage would have already obtained.

But the American people are not longsuffering forever, and what must happen will eventually happen, for it must.  So if you want to go full orbed, full on, all out covenant breakage, go right ahead and do that.  It may be the last straw.  All the opinionator is arguing for is a civil war, since he must be presupposing that gun owners will go peacefully into the night as long as enough people vote for it.

This is a dangerous presupposition, and the suburban soccer moms aren’t ready for what ensues.  So queue up your best soccer moms, or even your best SWAT teams.  We know where they live, and there aren’t anywhere nearly enough of them.  Come and get them if that’s what you want.  We’re waiting.