BY Herschel Smith
10 years ago
Timothy Carney:
Naturally, Democrats and the Left have tried to pry Southerners away from their guns and religion. Gun control has largely been a culture war effort for Democrats. “Some of the southern areas have cultures that we have to overcome,” was Congressman Charles Rangel’s explanation for why gun control was both needed and difficult.
The Washington Post’s Gene Weingarten cursed the Second Amendment as “the refuge of bumpkins and yeehaws who like to think they are protecting their homes against imagined swarthy marauders desperate to steal their flea-bitten sofas from their rotting front porches.”
So let’s deal with the second amendment yet again. To be sure, the second amendment was written within a certain cultural context of unorganized militia who used their own weapons, weapons they had to defend themselves and their families against both animals and men, as well as provide for themselves. So one might argue for the notion that the presupposition necessary for the second amendment to make any sense at all is private ownership and use of guns. But this requires deductive thought, and progressives aren’t big on that. So in legal debating terms, I will stipulate, and I won’t press the issue because I want to make another more important point.
Progressives have yet to pick up on the fact that we don’t believe the second amendment gives us rights to defend ourselves or homes. They would be much more aghast at the truth, but their blindness keeps them from seeing the truth. God gives us rights, the state only recognizes those rights.
But more importantly, the second amendment says nothing about defense of persons or the home during the normal course of life. It has nothing whatsoever to do with that. I have a right anyway to defend myself and my family with any weapon I choose, so says God. The second amendment says something different. It says that the state recognizes that God gives me the right to shoot people who would take away our guns – like Gene Weingarten – through the skull, even if their taking is approved by the state.
