July 15, 2008

Tyrants

In light of D.C. v Heller, The district has responded with these proposed new rules:

  • Allowing an exception for handgun ownership for self-defense use inside the home.
  • If you want to keep a handgun in your home, the MPD will have to perform ballistic testing on it before it can be legally registered.
  • There will be a limit to one handgun per person for the first 90 days after the legislation becomes law.
  • Firearms in the home must be stored unloaded and disassembled, and secured with either a trigger lock, gun safe, or similar device. The new law will allow an exception for a firearm while it is being used against an intruder in the home.
  • Residents who legally register handguns in the District will not be required to have licenses to carry them inside their own homes.

Oh – and it gets better – read the whole thing. The application process is a bureaucratic nightmare.

If this crap flies it will undoubtedly ignite another case, which, given the makeup of the lower courts will ultimately land this thing right back into the supreme courts lap - 10 years later of course. And by then the writing that’s on the wall now will be patently obvious to everyone - The system is not working. These assholes are refusing to abide in good faith to the law handed down by the supreme court.

It’s just a tab bit ironic that this should all come down to the second amendment.

The founding fathers were some pretty bright people. They designed and constructed the best form of government man has ever seen. The most significant point of their governmental design was the system of checks and balances between the various branches of government. Run properly, by people of good faith, it would stand forever. But they also realized that man was man and thus fallible, so they threw in final fail safe - a final ‘check and balance’ to the whole equation. The second amendment:


A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Most people get hung up on the militia part – equating militia with a government sponsored military. But that’s not what they meant. That’s not what their own personal history reflected. To them, a militia is an armed citizenry. Period. And when you understand that to be a militia, the entire amendment makes unquestionable sense. If it helps, rearrange the comma’s thusly:


The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, [to form] A well regulated Militia, [and] being necessary to the security of a free State, shall not be infringed.

One more point often overlooked, or wrongly emphasized - the ‘security of a free State‘ part. The operative word here is ‘free’. Free as free from tyranny. Free from oppression. Free. And in case you are especially daft, the same found fathers authored another document in which they very succinctly describes their vision of a proposed ‘free state’:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

The second amendment codifies and limits the new government’s role in regards to an armed citizenry, because the founding fathers wanted to insure that future generations would be able to exactly as they did should it ever become necessary.

Our American history would not have been possible without guns. And all the (remaining) freedom we enjoy today is the direct result of some very smart and ideologically charged men with guns.

Posted by Clancy at July 15, 2008 11:00 AM