The Smallest Minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. – Ayn Rand
Sebastian at Shall Not Be Questioned writes:
We are not facing the anti-gun crowd, save Bloomberg. We’re facing the left-wing of the Democratic Party, and they mean to destroy us. They are betting this trend is real, that the country will be increasingly urban, left of center, and more in favor of gun control. They are betting the farm that we’re on our way to extinction. Are we?
Call your Congresscritters.
Daily.
From his On Second Opinion Blog, The Mason Triad Context of Second Amendment Development and Purpose: Barriers Against Power in All Forms and Departments of Government:
The citizens in 1789 relied on flintlock firearms just as the soldiers of a period army. At that time, a standing army in time of peace was the face of tyranny. Today, the face of tyranny is just as common in the world, but is much more intrusive and dangerous, and is usually referred to as a police state. Americans have the constitutional right and duty to prevent the establishment of any police state in the United States. The people must keep their government under their control, which is accomplished, not by fighting, which is only a last resort, but by making certain that violations of the Constitution by those at the helm of government are challenged and reversed.
In the modern world, government raised forces, whether troops or police, are not armed with flintlock firearms. Police forces always carry modern arms. The purpose of such arms is self-defense. Every American citizen is guaranteed the same right by the Second Amendment. In order for Americans to keep their government and its forces under their control, as the Constitution guarantees, the people, at a minimum, have the right to keep and bear the same type of arms that police are provided.
RTWT. David has the distinct advantage of being able to make his point quickly and with ironclad references.
From Samizdata a couple of days ago:
Let’s see – Native Americans were wards of the state for a century, and, until the recent casino boom, were the most impoverished, addiction ridden, unemployed group in society; the family farmer has been the object of endless state programs to save him for most of the 20th century, and his numbers have shrunk from over half the population to under 2%; black people were “adopted” by the modern welfare state about 50 years ago, with the result that the black family has shattered, perhaps irreparably, and the male part is massively either in prison or unemployed, while the female half now has a 75% or so rate of births out of wedlock, and single parent families struggling with poverty lead to homicide from gang activity being the primary cause of death for young black males.
The wars on poverty and drugs continues to decimate the very populations they were supposed to help, the federal education programs have overseen a massive decline in the competency and educational achievements of our youth across the board, and catastrophically poor literacy rates among the minority communities.
The Fed decided to massively aid the housing market, to assist people in buying homes, and within a few decades, the housing and financial markets collapsed into a recession which we are still struggling to climb out of, and return to a semblence of our former economic levels.
And so now, the progressive state under the current progressive regime is going to come to the aid of the struggling middle class?
Yeah, that will work out just fine…
– Samizdata commenter ‘veryretired’
And NOW they’re going to take over HEALTH CARE!
What could possibly go worng?
Today Michael Bane posted The Rabbit Hole and said (among other things):
As I have said for years, the controlling word in the phrase “gun control” is control, not gun. I’ve followed with interest many of the threads on various forums arguing about “terminology”…if, for instance, we all agreed to call black rifles “modern sporting rifles” or we were careful to never refer to firearms as “weapons.” I used to agree pretty wholeheartedly with those arguments, but over the years I’ve come around to a different view. Our enemies aren’t antigun, they’re anti-people-with-guns. It’s not the guns they hate…it’s us.
—
The reason there is no middle ground (and Mike Thompson, now would be a good time to take notes) is this war is between two fundamentally opposed world views. After living in New York City and spending a lot of time in California, I’ve come to see the fight as one between the adults and the perpetual children of the Nanny State.
I think it’s worse than that. Back around 2004 ex-blogger Ironbear from the now-defunct blog Who Tends the Fires wrote something I’ve quoted repeatedly here:
It would be a mistake to paint the conflict exclusively in terms of “cultural war,” or Democrats vs Republicans, or even Left vs Right. Neither Democrats/Leftists or Republicans shy away from statism… the arguments there are merely over degree of statism, uses to which statism will be put – and over who’ll hold the reins. It’s the thought that they may not be left in a position to hold the reins that drives the Democrat-Left stark raving.
—
This is a conflict of ideologies…
The heart of the conflict is between those to whom personal liberty is important, and those to whom liberty is not only inconsequential, but to whom personal liberty is a deadly threat.
One of the few things Patrick J. Buchanan has ever said that I agree with is that “Our two parties have become nothing but two wings of the same bird of prey.”
Interesting that more people seem to be awakening to the idea. Sad that more haven’t.
Edited to add: Read also Michael’s earlier post, A Certain Kind of Peace. Excerpt:
The point that I want to make here is that just because we have the facts on our side doesn’t automatically mean that we win. Every word that Mitt Romney said about Barack Obama in the last election has proven to be true, yet you’ll notice that BHo is the President and Mitt Romney is a future trivia question on Jeopardy. This is not a debate, and we are not a debating society. This is an all-out war for the soul of the United States. I don’t want to win this debate; I would rather borrow this quote from Conan the Barbarian (channeling Genghis Khan of course), “To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women.”
Facts are indeed weapons of this war! We must have those weapons at our fingertips (and I’ll do my best to help in that arena), but weapons alone do not win a war. Strategy wins a war. And in this war we need to be thinking of ourselves as guerrillas facing a large, heavily funded, absolutely ruthless oppressor.
David Mamet, playwright and recent convert to the right has written an op-ed on gun control for Newsweak. Today’s QotD is excerpted from its opening:
Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death.
For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to each according to his needs.” “Needs and abilities” are, of course, subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to “the State shall take, the State shall give.”
Read. The. Whole. Thing.
No one can convince me that this was an “unintended consequence.” Via GOF in comments:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhhkhmCbcZk?rel=0]
The .gov essentially just took their property from them without compensation.
Edited to add: Don’t forget, essentially the same thing is happening to Roger Kimball (and undoubtedly hundreds if not thousands of others) on the other side of the country where Sandy made landfall.
Honestly, I ought to just reproduce the whole piece, but from Roger Kimball’s Wall Street Journal column This Metamorphosis Will Require a Permit, I have selected this excerpt as QotD:
In “The Road to Serfdom,” Friedrich Hayek noted that “the power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionnaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work.”
And how. But what makes the phenomenon so insidious is that many of the functionaries are as friendly as can be. It’s just that they’re cogs in a machine whose overriding purpose is not service but self-perpetuation and control.
It is, as Alexis de Tocqueville saw, a recipe for a form of despotism peculiar to modern democracies. It does this, wrote Tocqueville, by enforcing “a network of small, complicated, painstaking, uniform rules” that reduces citizens “to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.” The sobering thought is that we’re all complicit in that infantilization. After all, we keep voting for the politicians who put this leviathan in place.
RTWFT.
I would say “unbelievable,” but it is, in fact, all too believable.
Wherein the editors tell us how they really feel:
Trying to rein in Leviathan is somehow depicted as “obstructionist.” One must never obstruct the bloody beast. One must continue tossing raw meat into its maw. Anyone who stands in the beast’s way is full of “hate” and “anger.” We know who the problem is here, right? It’s those Tea Party redneck rural paint-huffing Bible-thumping cousin-humping bigots who aren’t like we are and whose chief sin is that they don’t like people who are different than they are. We all know it’s a scientific fact that those people are only against abortion because they prefer the taste of newborn babies.
The average naïve and uninformed American seems to believe that a politician’s main role is to care about his or her feelings. As long as the words sound vaguely compassionate and the soundtrack is uplifting, they’ll swallow whatever ball of honey-coated dung that politicians feed them. In truth, politicians care about us so much, they even indenture the unborn to lifetime financial servitude.
If you oppose taxing the lifeblood out of the people until their bodies are dried-up like beef jerky, well, you’re obviously a racist. Not that there’s any correlation. There doesn’t need to be a correlation in a world where feelings trump facts.
…just remember this:
Stolen blatantly from Phelps.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdnY8r7_fLw?rel=0]