NY Times … Bill of Rights is for EXTREMISTS

Charles Blow:

That sound you hear is the sound of a cultural paranoia by people who have lost their grip on the reins of power, and on reality, and who fear the worst is coming.

And they are preparing for it, whatever it may be — a war, a revolution, an apocalypse.

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.

Andrew P. Napolitano, a Fox News analyst, said in a video posted Thursday on the network’s GretaWire blog: “Here’s the dirty little secret about the Second Amendment, the Second Amendment was not written in order to protect your right to shoot deer, it was written to protect your right to shoot tyrants if they take over the government. How about chewing on that one.”

He went even further in a piece in The Washington Times, saying that the Second Amendment “protects the right to shoot tyrants, and it protects the right to shoot at them effectively, with the same instruments they would use upon us.”

I didn’t realize until today that there was actually disagreement as to the reason for the 2nd Amendment .. AND ITS CONNECTION to the Bill of Rights.

I didn’t realize that to defend the Bill of Rights, and its reason for being was ‘extreme’.

Perhaps there is a way to distinguish between the freedom of religion and the 2nd Amendment, the freedom of speech and the press (which the NY Times exercises) and the 2nd Amendment but I cannot figure out what that is.

Maybe that’s because ‘common sense solutions’ which some people have in mind require that we abnegate our responsibility to uphold the Constitution and PRESERVE it’s meaning …something which I believe some federal office holders have sworn to do, and I am pained to point out.

I have no idea what the ultimate end of ignoring the path the Constitution COMPELS (an amendment) would be if we adopt some ‘common sense solutions’ in the current excitable, emotional milieu … but how long would it be before the exercise of unpopular free speech becomes so unpopular that is is common sense to make such speech go away? All we have to do is use our common sense.

Charles Blow’s suggestion that only cultural extremists point out that the 2nd Amendment is not about deer hunting, which is say, that only extremists point out that history is fact, reminds us of just who Thomas Jefferson, John and Sam Adams, George Mason, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Ben Franklin and the others really were …

Revolutionaries with a cynical view of men, with a revolutionary set of ideas about the individual rights of human beings.

Rights which must always be preserved and kept against the natural weaknesses of mankind.

I am sorry if that is not very ‘common sensical’ right now, but if the solution is to limit the 2nd amendment TODAY, it will be as we adopt the measure by 2/3 of the house and senate, and 3/4 of all state legislatures. If the people by their vote in each state do not elect those who find limiting the 2nd Amendment ‘common sense’, then the 2nd Amendment should stand as is, and the office holders MUST UPHOLD THE CONSTITUTION. If their conscience forbids this, then they have either the course of civil disobedience and impeachment and possible arrest, or resignation as public protest, and then the duty of raising the public conscience.

Office holders who have sworn to preserve the Bill of Rights DO NOT have the option of evading the Bill of Rights by executive order because THEIR common sense informs them it should be evaded.

There is NO distinction between the 1st amendment and the second. One enforces, and reinforces the other. Either direction.

No demagoguery can change this inarguable reality