PA Bill Number: SR77
Title: A Concurrent Resolution petitioning the Congress of the United States to call a Convention for proposing amendments pursuant to Article V of the ...
Description: A Concurrent Resolution petitioning the Congress of the United States to call a Convention for proposing amendments pursuant to Article V of the ...
Last Action: Reported as committed
Last Action Date: Apr 30, 2024
What We Deserve :: 11/11/2014
Supporters of the Constitution, and particularly those who understand the Founders’ intent in writing the Second Amendment, are engaged in a never-ending war. It is a war against a totalitarian domestic enemy. Some portion of that enemy consider themselves to be enlightened, morally superior, infallible, and benign. Others, should they ever achieve their ultimate goals, will be no different than history’s most vicious, despotic mass murderers. All have one goal: total citizen disarmament. Government–their utopian government–must have an absolute monopoly on the means of using force . . .
Much has been written about the outcome of the November 4th mid-term elections. Some have even suggested that citizens who honor the Second Amendment can breath a collective sigh of relief and relax for a while. Surely after the 2013 failure of all of Mr. Obama’s post-Sandy Hook gun control initiatives, and last week’s monumental whacking of Mr. Obama’s policies and agenda at the ballot box, gun control advocates won’t dare try to sell their wares for a good long time.
Didn’t Gallup recent publish the results of a poll indicating a near-record low public appetite for gun control? Why yes, they did: 
“Less than half of Americans, 47%, say they favor stricter laws covering the sale of firearms, similar to views found last year. But this percentage is significantly below the 58% recorded in 2012 after the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, spurred a nationwide debate about the possibility of more stringent gun control laws. Thirty-eight percent of Americans say these laws should be kept as they are now, and 14% say they should be made less strict.”
This result is part of a continuing trend. The public has apparently stopped listening to gun control arguments, by and large, in ever-increasing margins:
“The percentage favoring stricter gun sale laws in the two years since Newtown occurred has declined despite steady and tragic high-profile shootings in the U.S at schools, malls and businesses. This past week, shootings occurred at a Seattle-area school and of police officers in Sacramento and Placer County, California. Amidst events like these in 2014, and the resulting calls for stricter gun sale laws, the 47% who favor stricter laws is just above the historical low of 43% measured in 2011.
Ten years ago, three in five Americans (60%) said they favored stricter laws regulating the sale of firearms, but support fell to 44% in 2009 and remained at that level in polls conducted in the next two years. Days after the Newtown shooting, support for stricter gun sale laws swelled. Since 2012, however, Americans have retreated from those stronger attitudes about the need for more gun control, and the percentage of Americans who say the laws should be less strict — although still low — has edged up.”
Gun control has become, more and more, political poison, and in the mid-terms, Democrats were mostly careful to avoid mentioning it. The majority of them entirely dropped their past strident calls for “common sense, reasonable gun safety measures.”
Why then should the law-abiding gun owner and supporter of the Constitution be concerned? After all, the Supreme Court, in the 2008 Heller decision has ruled that the Second Amendment does speak to an unalienable, fundamental and individual right to keep and bear arms, a right applied to the states in the 2010 McDonald decision. What’s the worry?
Gun control advocates never give up. Congressional gun grabbers have simply closed the files on their “assault weapon,” “large capacity magazine,” “comprehensive background check,” “closing the gun show loophole,” bills that have spectacularly failed, but they haven’t deleted them. When they think the time is ripe, or merely when it is politically advantageous to throw a bit of red meat to their base, those bills will be resurrected.
They never give up because they know that they can never impose their entire totalitarian agenda as long as free men and women are allowed to keep and bear arms. The most power-mad and malicious among them think in exactly those terms, but rarely, if ever, speak them outside of select company. They manipulate their brethren that consider themselves morally and intellectually superior laborers for social justice, people working tirelessly for the benefit of the common man unable to know what is best for him and unable to appreciate the brilliance, inherent superiority and endless altruism of his betters. They too share the goals of the gun control agenda, but think they are building a better world. The fact that they are enabling the worst predators in our–or any–society, either escapes them, or they see it as a necessary step toward the greater social good.
Gun Controllers are at work even though their arguments don’t specifically seem to be about gun control. There are strategies and trends those that wish to retain liberty should keep in mind.
Named after two Columbia University sociologists, this 1966 strategy essentially suggests overwhelming current governmental systems and bureaucracies, causing chaos and economic collapse. Then the peasants will gratefully accept whatever “solution” the Progressives offer to “save” them. These are always solutions no sane person in normal circumstances would so much as consider. The strategy has been studied and adopted by the Left, and used wherever possible.
The Fast and Furious debacle is an obvious application of the strategy. It appears that the Obama Administration, likely led by Attorney General Eric Holder, hoped that allowing thousands of weapons to be transferred to Mexican drug cartels would result in such a slaughter on both sides of the border that the public would rise up–with appropriate rabble rousing from the Administration and progressive activists–and demand assault weapon bans and other gun control initiatives. To further that goal, the government made sure large numbers of semi-automatic rifles were allowed to fall into the hands of some of the most vicious killers on the planet, and a substantial slaughter did result, and continues to this day. Unfortunately for gun controllers, honest federal agents blew the whistle at great cost to themselves, and the public didn’t fall for it. The Obamites continue to stonewall the Congressional investigation into Fast and Furious.
Even so, the Cloward-Piven strategy remains a mainstay of the Progressive movement, and a vital tool of gun controllers.
Immigration Amnesty
Mr. Obama is promising an executive order amnesty by Christmas. Best estimates suggest he will essentially pardon as many as 8 million illegal immigrants. Quite apart from the social, health, national security and economic catastrophes this would cause, it would have a very direct impact on the Second Amendment.
The ultimate goal of such an amnesty is vote-packing. Mr. Obama and the progressives intend, with a single stroke, to invent out of whole cloth 8 million or more new Democrat voters entirely beholden to the Democrat party for welfare, education, and every other necessity of life. Most are no or low skill, poorly educated people. With the stroke of a pen, Mr. Obama hopes to create an immediate and permanent Democrat majority.
This is particularly dangerous to the Second Amendment because such an influx will bring not only disease–as it already has–but a substantial criminal element, which is another manifestation of the Cloward-Piven strategy. It remains to be seen whether the public would accept disarmament and the promise of government protection, or see self-reliance as a greater guarantee of safety. If Mr. Obama’s scheme succeeds, what the American public wants won’t matter. America will become a much larger Detroit, but its downfall will be much more rapid.
A great tragedy is that many of these immigrants are people seeking a free, relatively safe place to raise their families, a nation where they don’t face daily threats of extortion or random maiming or murder, a nation where they have far greater freedom and at least potential opportunity. Few of good will could fail to sympathize with them.
That their very presence in such large numbers, and their cynical manipulation by Progressive politicians will go a long way toward making America resemble the hell-hole nations they left is a horrific irony.
The danger is that these are people used to having no Second Amendment. They do not expect to possess the tools necessary to effectively protect their lives. That is not, to them, and unalienable right; they’ll be grateful for whatever privilege the government extends. Progressives will do their best to ensure those attitudes never change and they remain dependent on government largess. That largess is, of course, tax dollars.
Court Packing
Mr. Obama has already seated more than 200 very leftist jurists on the Federal bench. Federal judges enjoy lifetime appointments. They leave only by impeachment, retirement, or voluntary resignation. The judges of the lower federal courts can do enormous damage.
But Republicans now control the House and Senate. They’ll keep judges that won’t honor the Constitution off the bench! No. They won’t. Many Republicans are easily fooled. They don’t think long term. They will approve many of Mr. Obama’s nominations as they already have.
Even if Mr. Obama becomes sneakier and appoints judges that claim to believe the Second Amendment is “settled law,” as Supreme Court justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan did, once on the bench, their true beliefs always manifest.
Should a justice of the Supreme Court that decides cases based on the law and the Constitution die or retire during Mr. Obama’s remaining two years, he would surely nominate a stealth candidate that would say all the right things until confirmed, but act as a partisan progressive once on the court. In that case, the Second Amendment, as well as the Constitution itself, wouldn’t last long. At best, the Constitution would be paid occasional lip service, but it would no longer be the law of the land, and the first portion of the Bill of Rights to be gutted would be the Second Amendment.
Lawlessness
The aforementioned dangers assume that Progressive gun grabbers will actually honor the law and work within our republican system of government. This takes time. President Obama has already amply demonstrated that he cares nothing for the rule of law. He has made it plain that he intends to rule by executive fiat for the remainder of his term and to hell with the Constitution, the Congress and the American people.
Combine lawlessness with people that are determined to eliminate any threat to their rule, and there is nothing they will not do to get their way. The only thing that will slow or stop them is the credible threat of armed resistance. Such people often make fun of small arms, claiming them ineffective against modern weapons. They know better. That’s why they are desperate to take every handgun and every semiautomatic rifle.
The President, the IRS, the EPA, and the Department of Justice are just a few of our federal politicians and agencies that have repeatedly demonstrated contempt for the Constitution and the rule of law. As communists are socialists in a hurry, our current crop of progressives are closely emulating Communists. As Mr. Obama has often said: “we can’t wait.”
Once a politician or bureaucrat gets away with stomping on the rights of a citizen, or ignoring the law, the power is as addictive as crack cocaine. As Lord Action said: “power corrupts; absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.” Soon, they no longer bother to even pretend to follow the law.
Don’t imagine that federal agents will refuse to violate the rights of citizens. Some will, but not enough, and those coming to your door to seize your firearms won’t be bothered by such quaint concerns as honor, decency or the law.
Thomas Jefferson said: “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” That is our burden, the price we must pay. Arguably, never have Americans faced the dangers they face today on many fronts. Never have the protections of the Second Amendment been more important, yet never have the efforts of those that would obliterate those protections been so sophisticated and relentless.
Progressives recoil in mock indignation and horror when patriots remind them that the Second Amendment was written as a warning to tyrants. It recognizes the inherent right of the American people to overthrow tyrannical government. Denying that historical and human rights reality is unpatriotic and un-American, not recognizing it.
We may have won a brief respite from overt gun control efforts, but the covert war never slackens. The stakes are nothing less than individual liberty and the preservation of western civilization. Unfortunately, we sometimes fail to recognize that.
Benjamin Franklin, too, was right: “They that would surrender essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Mike’s Home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.
http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2014/11/mike-mcdaniel/deserve/
