Saturday, April 27, 2013
Monday, January 21, 2013
The Debate Is Only About Control--Not Guns
Gun control isn't about guns, it's about control. The intention of the Second Amendment is to prevent control. Last Wednesday's post about gun rights being inalienable whether or not they are written, was about what we are born with rather than what we are given. What we are given is called 'positive rights'. What we are born with are called natural rights. What laws are supposed to prevent being taken from us are called 'negative rights', and natural rights are 'negative rights'.
President Obama and others said we must "protect the children", sometimes adding "at all costs" or "at whatever cost". But others in the past have said that we cannot protect one person's rights at the expense of another.
On Saturday at one of the many pro gun-right rallies held across the nation, former Marine Damon Locke said to applause at a Florida rally he had helped organize, "We are law-abiding citizens, business owners, military, and we are not going to be responsible for other people's criminal actions."
What lesson does it send to children and to young adults to learn their political leaders have a desire to protect them by diminishing the right of law-abiding citizens? What lesson does it send to demonstrate that when a problem arises, the only means their leaders can think of is to destroy the Constitution?
What lesson, when they are old enough to stop to think that the utilitarian and pragmatic ideas coming out of Washington have gone from the fallacy of the greatest good for the greatest number, to using children as pawns in the fight to control the weapons without which we could not protect our First Amendment?
The right to bear arms does not say which kind of arms. Certainly we do not want live cannons and mortars in our neighbors' back yards, so we ban those things. That isn't about control, it is about immediate safety; in other words, if a cannon shot a round from suburbs of Detroit, where would the round hit, and does anyone have a right to fire a cannon anywhere except on a training field? What if it was not properly maintained and it blew up? We wouldn't let people have tiny nuclear reactors, if they existed, in their homes for their electrical needs, because when those devices have accidents, they are often irreparable.
"The Second Amendment was not written to protect your right to shoot deer. It was written to protect your right to shoot tyrants if they take over the government," said Judge Andrew Napolitano.
© Curtis Edward Clark 2012
President Obama and others said we must "protect the children", sometimes adding "at all costs" or "at whatever cost". But others in the past have said that we cannot protect one person's rights at the expense of another.
On Saturday at one of the many pro gun-right rallies held across the nation, former Marine Damon Locke said to applause at a Florida rally he had helped organize, "We are law-abiding citizens, business owners, military, and we are not going to be responsible for other people's criminal actions."
What lesson does it send to children and to young adults to learn their political leaders have a desire to protect them by diminishing the right of law-abiding citizens? What lesson does it send to demonstrate that when a problem arises, the only means their leaders can think of is to destroy the Constitution?
What lesson, when they are old enough to stop to think that the utilitarian and pragmatic ideas coming out of Washington have gone from the fallacy of the greatest good for the greatest number, to using children as pawns in the fight to control the weapons without which we could not protect our First Amendment?
The right to bear arms does not say which kind of arms. Certainly we do not want live cannons and mortars in our neighbors' back yards, so we ban those things. That isn't about control, it is about immediate safety; in other words, if a cannon shot a round from suburbs of Detroit, where would the round hit, and does anyone have a right to fire a cannon anywhere except on a training field? What if it was not properly maintained and it blew up? We wouldn't let people have tiny nuclear reactors, if they existed, in their homes for their electrical needs, because when those devices have accidents, they are often irreparable.
"The Second Amendment was not written to protect your right to shoot deer. It was written to protect your right to shoot tyrants if they take over the government," said Judge Andrew Napolitano.
© Curtis Edward Clark 2012
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
Inalienable Gun Rights Are Not Extremist
Last week, Judge Andrew Napolitano revealed a secret about the
Second Amendment: “The Second Amendment was not written to
protect your right to shoot deer. It was written to protect your right
to shoot tyrants if they take over the government.”
Why is it a 'secret'? It's a secret because 230 years ago, during a time when the Patriots and other colonists knew they would need weapons to fight the British, they knew they had right under the natural rights theory to own them, though the British government wanted to take them in order to keep the upper hand.
But since that period we have forgotten there might come a day when the federal powers to make us do whatever they wanted would be so great we would have to fight our own government. The NDAA which the President signed on New Year's Eve day, gives him the authority to use the military to arrest and detain indefinitely any American he chooses, for reasons he does not have to disclose.
On April 19, 1775, after British General Thomas Gage sent 700 trained troops to Concord, Massachusetts, the shot heard round the world began a war. The British had come for the guns of Americans. "Their own government had come to disarm them." [1] Arizona, Tennessee, Washington, Virginia, and six local governments including one in my home state of Michigan, have either nullified the NDAA, or are debating doing so. Several sheriffs and other law enforcement officials have stated they will not enforce the NDAA. In some places states have made it illegal for state authorities to enforce the NDAA and certain provisions of ICE rules. [2]
About Napolitano's comments, "Charles Blow wrote in The New York Times, 'These extremists make sensible, reasonable gun control hard to discuss, let alone achieve in this country, because they skew the conversations away from common-sense solutions on which both rational gun owners and non-gun owners can agree.' "
So those who defend the natural right of property ownership against a government that would abrogate those natural rights are the "extremists"; those who see the Second Amendment as something added to the Constitution, rather than as something which reinforces it as an "inalienable", right are common-sensical.
Why is it a violation of the right-to-safety of other people to have a populace who is armed and has violated no laws? Is it because someone could steal his mother's guns and shoot 20 children and 6 adults?
If that is the reason, then who is to prevent President Obama or another President from sending another "General Thomas Gage" to some part of the U.S. to disarm people it knows will fight the tyranny of a government that does not act Constitutionally, but rather acts like a utilitarian extremist?
[1] http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles2/silveira119lw.html
[2] http://www.naturalindependent.com/archives/7123/virginia-nullifies-ndaa-the-tenthers/
© Curtis Edward Clark 2012
Why is it a 'secret'? It's a secret because 230 years ago, during a time when the Patriots and other colonists knew they would need weapons to fight the British, they knew they had right under the natural rights theory to own them, though the British government wanted to take them in order to keep the upper hand.
But since that period we have forgotten there might come a day when the federal powers to make us do whatever they wanted would be so great we would have to fight our own government. The NDAA which the President signed on New Year's Eve day, gives him the authority to use the military to arrest and detain indefinitely any American he chooses, for reasons he does not have to disclose.
On April 19, 1775, after British General Thomas Gage sent 700 trained troops to Concord, Massachusetts, the shot heard round the world began a war. The British had come for the guns of Americans. "Their own government had come to disarm them." [1] Arizona, Tennessee, Washington, Virginia, and six local governments including one in my home state of Michigan, have either nullified the NDAA, or are debating doing so. Several sheriffs and other law enforcement officials have stated they will not enforce the NDAA. In some places states have made it illegal for state authorities to enforce the NDAA and certain provisions of ICE rules. [2]
About Napolitano's comments, "Charles Blow wrote in The New York Times, 'These extremists make sensible, reasonable gun control hard to discuss, let alone achieve in this country, because they skew the conversations away from common-sense solutions on which both rational gun owners and non-gun owners can agree.' "
So those who defend the natural right of property ownership against a government that would abrogate those natural rights are the "extremists"; those who see the Second Amendment as something added to the Constitution, rather than as something which reinforces it as an "inalienable", right are common-sensical.
Why is it a violation of the right-to-safety of other people to have a populace who is armed and has violated no laws? Is it because someone could steal his mother's guns and shoot 20 children and 6 adults?
If that is the reason, then who is to prevent President Obama or another President from sending another "General Thomas Gage" to some part of the U.S. to disarm people it knows will fight the tyranny of a government that does not act Constitutionally, but rather acts like a utilitarian extremist?
[1] http://www.backwoodshome.com/articles2/silveira119lw.html
[2] http://www.naturalindependent.com/archives/7123/virginia-nullifies-ndaa-the-tenthers/
© Curtis Edward Clark 2012
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Gun Control and the Second Amendment
President Obama's stance, indeed the stand of anyone who is against ownership of guns or of specific guns and/or of specific bullets, clips, or other portions of guns, are acting as utilitarians. This is against the concept of natural rights inherent in the Constitution.
Opponents of such restrictions are fighting it on grounds of the Second Amendment. But they are fighting on the grounds that it is that Amendment which gives us the right. It is not. That merely states the right which existed before it was written. Indeed, James Madison and others were fearful that if some of man's natural rights were put into a Bill of Rights, it would seem as if that was the limit of them, that there were no others. But more than that, many members of Congress knew that by listing some of them it would open them to scrutiny 'as written'. In other words, while all natural rights belonged to Man, the way one or another was written could be argued against and altered.
That has happened in the modern case of the Second Amendment. The right does not exist because it is written; it was written because it exists, and because some Congressional leaders believed it necessary to say they existed.
A Bill of Rights was not only unnecessary, but would even be dangerous. James Madison agreed with Alexander Hamilton, who asked, "For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do [by Congress]? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed?"
The harming of another in his person or property is not a right, natural or otherwise. The restriction of a natural right is the prerogative only of a tyranny.
© Curtis Edward Clark 2012
Opponents of such restrictions are fighting it on grounds of the Second Amendment. But they are fighting on the grounds that it is that Amendment which gives us the right. It is not. That merely states the right which existed before it was written. Indeed, James Madison and others were fearful that if some of man's natural rights were put into a Bill of Rights, it would seem as if that was the limit of them, that there were no others. But more than that, many members of Congress knew that by listing some of them it would open them to scrutiny 'as written'. In other words, while all natural rights belonged to Man, the way one or another was written could be argued against and altered.
That has happened in the modern case of the Second Amendment. The right does not exist because it is written; it was written because it exists, and because some Congressional leaders believed it necessary to say they existed.
A Bill of Rights was not only unnecessary, but would even be dangerous. James Madison agreed with Alexander Hamilton, who asked, "For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do [by Congress]? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed?"
The harming of another in his person or property is not a right, natural or otherwise. The restriction of a natural right is the prerogative only of a tyranny.
© Curtis Edward Clark 2012
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
More Nasty Politics Heading Our Way
"Brought together by the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Communication Workers of America, and the NAACP,
the meeting was invite-only and off-the-record. Despite all the
Democratic wins in November, a sense of outrage filled the room as labor
officials, environmentalists, civil rights activists, immigration
reformers, and a panoply of other progressive leaders discussed the
challenges facing the left and what to do to beat back the deep-pocketed
conservative movement."
Of course they met at the HP of the NEA, the National Education Association.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/democracy-initiative-campaign-finance-filibuster-sierra-club-greenpeace-naacp
© Curtis Edward Clark 2012
Of course they met at the HP of the NEA, the National Education Association.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/democracy-initiative-campaign-finance-filibuster-sierra-club-greenpeace-naacp
© Curtis Edward Clark 2012
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