A Response to Anti-Second Amendment Gun Haters on the Left
President Barack Obama pauses while making a statement on Wednesday’s mass shooting in San Bernandino, Calif., in the Oval Office of the White House, left, while law enforcement, right, searches for a suspect in a mass shooting at a social services center Wednesday in San Bernardino, Calif. (Photo: AP /Evan Vucci/Chris Carlson)
In the wake of the terror attack in San Bernardino, Calif., President Obama and Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley all immediately called for gun control. They left the more pressing question of what makes some human beings want to kill other human beings who don’t share their religion for the more intellectually honest and capable to answer.
They opted instead to advocate for taking away my God-given right to defend myself, my family and my fellow Americans.
Without fail, the usual tyrant-loving sycophants in the media began to push each other over to see who could grab their water buckets first.
Mark Joseph Stern, who “covers law and LGBTQ issues” for the uber-left website Slate, suggested “we need to reconsider what liberty means” in the wake of San Bernardino because his “right to safety outweighs” the Second Amendment.
“Perhaps that was true in 1868, when the 14th Amendment was ratified,” Stern writes of the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision upholding the Second Amendment as an individual right, as it was intended. “Perhaps that was even true in 2010—a year with fewer mass shootings than every year since. Is it true today?”
Stern goes on to cite the response to an opinion written by Justice John Paul Stevens, the same thankfully-retired liberal hack who recently proposed restricting gun rights and free speech, as well as other rights explicitly protected by the very Constitution he once swore to defend. For him, “we must balance ‘respect for the liberty of the individual’ against ‘the demands on the organized society.'”
What Stern and those who agree with him desperately need is a lesson on American citizenship, and all that comes with it.
Thomas Jefferson said a citizen “has no right in opposition to his social duties,” meaning with those rights comes certain responsibility. Only those willing to do what’s necessary to preserve them, truly deserve them. In other words, there is no God-given right that the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God have not also paired with an equivalent duty or obligation.
It’s true we have all agreed to give up certain rights enjoyed in a basic state of nature for a limited degree of security. That’s the essential social compact that gave birth to government. But in the American social contract the duty to preserve our right to life and security is ultimately ours and ours alone, not government’s.
Stern and other statists want to shirk their duty, forfeit liberty, and yet still insist they deserve security. Because Stern is either too ignorant or just too weak to preserve his security by exercising his Second Amendment right, he wants to subcontract his duty to the government. Thus, he wants politicians to force us to forfeit ours.
That’s not going to happen. Ever. At least not without a fight, a real fight the left is not prepared to wage and most certainly cannot win.
I, and frankly millions of others, are sick and tired of cowardly, latte-sipping weaklings dumping the fruits of their bankrupt ideology on liberty-loving Americans and our Constitution. They want us to forsake a document for the very authoritarian-natured institution it was designed to protect us from, which is responsible for more human death than all the last century’s great wars, combined.
It’s called democide. Google it.
In the real world, you can never have total safety in any society, and that’s particularly true of a free society.
I have a beautiful wife, who gave me two beautiful children. Though my wife is more than capable, I will defend our family and community if needed because it is my duty to learn how to effectively and my right to obtain the necessary means to do so.
I intend to teach both my children of their duties and rights, and suggest Stern and other leftists do the same.
When we have these debates, we must move the national discourse beyond the narrow and simplistic attributes to personhood that don’t at all differentiate a citizen from what our Founding Fathers would consider an old world subject. A subject, or one who subjects his or herself to a sovereign in return for a service–in this case it is security–puts a demand on society. That would be the demand Stern is talking about.
A citizen, if they deserve and want to preserve this gift of liberty, contributes to society. If we were serious about responding to domestic terror or even inevitable incidents of a mad-man or woman with a gun, then let’s teach each other and learn from one another about how to become more capable and aware citizens.
I would be remise not to point out the fact that the left’s plan to repeal the Second Amendment won’t even stop mass violence. The left’s argument is getting so Orwellian that both President Obama and Barbara Boxer made totally delusional claims in the wake of the attack.
“Sensible gun laws work. We’ve proven it in California,” Sen. Boxer said, apparently not realizing that the attack transpired in her own state, where gun laws are among the strictest in the nation.
“I say this every time we’ve got one of these mass shootings. This just doesn’t happen in other countries,” claimed Obama, while speaking in gun-free Paris.
In 2015, as John R. Lott recently noted, France unfortunately suffered more casualties from mass public shootings than the U.S. has suffered during the entire Obama presidency (508 ). Yet, the president boldly made that claim in Paris, where just two weeks before terrorists still managed to obtain banned firearms and shoot unarmed, defenseless subjects who don’t have the Second Amendment rights American citizens have.
“There have been at least 351 mass shootings so far this year. Mothers, daughters, brothers, fathers, sisters, husbands, and wives are being slaughtered every day by guns,” Stern writes to inject emotion into his intellectually feeble and otherwise inadequate legal argument. “Their blood is being shed in the name of liberty.”
No, their blood was shed most frequently in gun-free zones among citizens ill-prepared to exercise their rights because, as I’ve stated, too many Americans no longer understand what it takes to earn, deserve and preserve liberty. How many mothers, daughters, brothers, fathers, sisters, husbands, and wives would’ve survived if we did?
(Editor’s Note: Food for thought below. It is indeed a lesson on American citizenship, and more.)
[mybooktable book=”our-virtuous-republic-forgotten-clause-american-social-contract” display=”summary” buybutton_shadowbox=”true”]
