Good Guys with Guns Part 2

By Patrick Hall

Of course, in our Post-Modern deconstructionist wisdom, lavishly dispensed within the education system for decades, we all know that good and evil are meaningless social constructs.  

 Let me share a little secret with those sincere students and all the manipulative politicians with their well-armed security details.  Crazies, criminals, and free-range Islamic terrorists won’t adhere to gun control laws or other restrictions. This is because, and wait for it!  They are crazies, criminals, and free-range Islamic terrorists.

Like most young people feeling their protest oats, they are passionate about what they believe and act upon.  Like all of us in our youth, we measured the rightness of a cause by the sheer emotions we felt. Regrettably, many adults populating Progressive causes “feel” this same way.  This way of “thinking” by many Liberal Progressives (mostly Democrats) is an unfortunate result of growing up within an Oprah Winfrey-like cosmology.  A cosmology that single-handedly cornered the market of ideas by confusing emotions and feelings with cognition.

No matter how crying and heartfelt, emotions will not protect these students or anyone else.  Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Barrack Obama, and other politicians with their gun-toting security details know this. Politically, they are also aware of why let a good tragedy like students being slaughtered in gun-free zones go to waste. Politicians recognize they can easily exploit this youthful idiocy to disarm legal gun owners while at the same time putting an end to that terrible anachronism known as the Second Amendment.  After all, everyone knows that the Second Amendment was only authored by the Founders so we could kill our quota in deer, squirrels, and other such tasty critters. Or maybe the Second Amendment was designed for “militia” purposes. This solipsistic homily preached for eons by the ACLU and Liberal Progressive Democrats completely ignores the fact that the term militia, as understood at the time, didn’t mean some para-military group. According to Paine and Adams specifically, the militia was the people. Their right to protect their persons was the first and foremost reason for the Second Amendment.

I recently ran across a Facebook/META posting regurgitating one of the Progressive Left’s favorite reasons why those racist Founding Fathers instituted the Second Amendment. It was to protect themselves from slave revolts.  Never mind the very real specter of Great Britain wishing to recapture their wayward colonies, which was almost realized during the War of 1812. Events up to the Civil War period, Britain still entertained such thoughts.

In the writings of Jefferson, Paine, and Samuel Adams, in particular, this was one of the progenitors of the Second Amendment.   More importantly, even a cursory review of the Founders' mindset shows they didn’t trust an all-powerful central authority or government.  
One of the unspoken tragedies of today’s America is that many of us have lost our fear of government. It was once embedded in the political DNA of many Americans, the belief that government is, at best, a necessary evil.

The Founders didn’t just “haphazardly” place the Second Amendment right after the first to make it easier for us to hunt tasty animals. They wanted to protect future generations against government overreach or outright tyranny.  In addition, as made glaringly evident in the Publius, gun ownership is a requisite for our safety.  To quote Thomas Paine, “Arms discourage and keep invaders and plunderers in awe. Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of their use”.  Echoing a similar theme, Jefferson and Paine, students of the 1689 English Bill of Rights, succinctly understood “laws that forbid the carrying of arms, by the common man, disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.”

Postscript - The Dangers of Perfection

Democrats, Liberal Progressives, and Neo Socialists/Globalists like Barack Obama have always sacrificed the good for the perfect. For example, they do it in their evaluation of society when they proselytize that America is a systemically racist or misogynist nation. Words that have lost all meaning because of their overuse.  If the cultural left and Progressive Democrats wish to understand real racism or misogyny in action, ask a Coptic or, for that matter, any Christian community living in most Middle Eastern countries. Ironically, it is only those so-called Islamophobic and money-grubbing Jews who run the only Democracy in the region that provide a haven from the murderous hegemony in far too many Arab countries.

Concerning our Founding Fathers, they were not perfect men. The political left’s insufferable tendency to want to kill the message because of some perceived flaws of the messenger speaks more about their social and political immaturity than an objective analysis of the Founders, free from the left’s current-centric view of history.   The Second Amendment, the Constitution, and our entire way of life were crafted by imperfect individuals with faults or original sin.   The mendacious history that is omnipresent in our nation's schools does not recognize that despite the individual failings of these men, they set in motion a cultural-political teleology that would catalyze such events as the Civil War, confronting Jim Crow, women's suffrage, and the “real” Civil Rights Movement under Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Without their original message and constitutional aptitude, the history of our Republic would’ve been decidedly less corrective.  

Most level-headed Americans would admit that we have suffered from a prickly historical debate in which we got some things wrong along the way.  But someone once said that the unique thing about America, its history, and our Constitutional Republic is that we could always be counted upon to do the right thing eventually.

The Founders fashioned a document that extracted the best in the long history of Western socio-political thought. They constructed a way of governance that was worth sustaining and, if necessary, fought to maintain.  Many of those calling for an unexamined curtailment of our constitutional freedoms, such as enumerated in the Second Amendment, would do well to remember that these ideas are only one generation away from extinction.

 But then again, maybe that is the point of all the protest and hatred toward the Second Amendment manifested within Liberal Progressive Democrat polity.