Come Out With Your Hands Up!

The massacre of
twenty-six individuals at the Sandy Hook school in Newtown, Connecticut on
December 14th by
mentally unstable (and reportedly autistic) Adam Lanza has again pushed the
buttons of anti-gun and gun control advocates. Senator Diane Feinstein has
promised to introduce more stringent gun sale regulation in Congress the first
day of its new session in 2013, while President Barack Obama, exploiting the
photo and sound-byte opportunities, went to Newtown to shed his crocodile tears
and alluded to "meaningful action" to ban all guns.






The calls for
stricter controls on automatic and semi-automatic weapons sound more like the
baying of a wolf pack as it closes in on hapless gun-owners and the Second
Amendment right to own and bear arms than it does outrage over the crime.



But, what are gun
laws, those that permit, and those that prohibit? Such laws are intended to
"prevent" individuals from going on shooting sprees.



"Preventive"
or "preemptive" law is the legal offspring of Positive Law, which,
simply put, is legislation passed to correct perceived social wrongs or
inequities. Positive law nullifies natural law, which, in today's and
yesteryear's context, is based on the requirements for an individual to live as
an independent, rational being. The Constitution is based on natural law. The
United States has absorbed many tons of positive law in the way of welfare
state legislation that has made the Constitution nearly superfluous. Natural
law has been under assault for over a century.



Positive law
presumes that men cannot be trusted to handle a butter knife – never mind a gun
– without harming themselves or others. But if a man murdered or maimed another
with a butter knife, then, in today's disintegrating culture, in which mob rule
and demagoguery trump individual rights, there would an outcry against the
legal sale and possession of metal butter knives.



Metal butter knives
would be replaced by legal mandate with plastic knives – until someone
successfully murdered with a plastic knife. Plastic knives would be substituted
with paper clips, or credit cards.



Sound ludicrous? Or familiar? Take
a look at the warnings one can find on toy packaging, or on Styrofoam coffee
cups, or even automobile advertising. These are legal devices adopted to
forestall the enactment of positive laws against producers – not that they will
protect them against the draconian imposition of, say, EPA regulations.



The only consequence
of a butter knife law would be that, because he was not able to easily procure
a butter knife with which to attack others, the killer would settle for a tire
iron, or an ice pick, or a machete. Virtually any hand-held thing can be used
as a weapon. Even a book, or a pair of scissors, or nail clippers. Guns are
merely a more efficient means to kill.



Positive law is the
law of the welfare state, of assuaging the feelings, envy, and fears of the
perceived dispossessed, of providing for assumed entitlements, of subsidizing bitter
failures and losers. Positive law is focused on victims and the
"needy," not on individual rights. According to positive law, natural
rights are an illusion or are offensive; instead, entitlements and government-granted
dispensations are "rights."



 The Second
Amendment has been interpreted by liberal judges and leftist writers as an
antiquated proviso no longer applicable in our "modern," "progressive,"
and "complex" society. But the Second Amendment was intended to be a
safeguard against an intrusive, force-initiating government. That was its chief
role. In the Founders' day – and for over a century after it – using a firearm
against marauding Indians or bands of criminals was taken for granted as the
unquestionable natural right of citizens. Let us examine the wording of the
Amendment that was ratified by the states and authenticated by Thomas Jefferson:



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.



What is a
"well regulated militia"? It can mean two things: A force of armed
citizens directed by a state that wishes to remain free; or private militias
consisting of armed citizens who wish their state to remain free.



What means
"being necessary"? It means that citizens must retain the power of
retaliatory force, or otherwise remain helpless against initiated force.



What means "the
security of a free state"? A secure free state is one that has won its
independence from an invader or from an overbearing, over-reaching central government.
(In America today, there are no such "free states," they have all
become de facto departments of the
federal government.) But, suppose the free state has been taken over by
statists? Then retaliatory force is necessary to return the state to the status
of a free one.



What is the
"right of the people"? It is the natural right of individuals or organizations
of them to defend and preserve their natural rights to life, liberty, property
and the pursuit of happiness in a free state. See the Declaration of
Independence.



What means "to
keep and bear arms"? It means the right of private citizens to own arms
and to use them, when necessary, to defend one's other liberties against the initiated
force of criminals, of gangs of outlaws, or of governments.



What means
"shall not be infringed"? This clause does not pertain to criminals. Criminals,
unless they are creatures of the state brought into being by fiat laws and
prohibitions (such as drug cartels), do not systematically "infringe"
on one's rights. It means that only governments
can systematically infringe on one's liberties, including the right to keep and
bear arms, by arbitrary, fiat law.



That is the plain,
simple, and literal interpretation of the Second Amendment from the perspective
of recognizing and defending the sanctity of individual rights.



Individual rights,
however, are now viewed, if not with suspicion, then with outright hostility. This
is the inevitable consequence of a welfare state. One man's right intrudes on
another's "welfare," and in a welfare state committed to preserving
and expanding the number of things it allows or dispenses in terms of welfare,
genuine natural rights are gradually and incrementally violated, nullified and obliterated.




AWR Hawkins, in his
Breitbart Big Government article on the Second Amendment of December 15th,
"The 2nd Amendment is Hard to Change, as Our FoundersIntended," stressed the fact that under the Constitution, a movement to
repeal any amendment must originate
with the people, not with the government.



The move to propose or repeal can
begin with the American people, with a majority of the populations in two
thirds of the 50 states voting for the amendment or its repeal. However, even
if the people do this, the push to propose or repeal still has to garner
two/thirds House, two/thirds Senate, and two/thirds of all 50 state
legislatures.



Opposing this safeguard
against mob rule and government force is the argument presented by the current
champion of mob rule and government force, a man who likes to govern by
executive edict and decree: Barack Obama.  Speaking at his "let no massacre go to
waste" moment in Newtown, Obama growled, in between quivering vowels and
syllables,



"We
can't tolerate this anymore….These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must
change….In the coming weeks I'll use whatever power this office holds to engage
my fellow citizens … in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like
this," he said.



Obama
offered no specifics as to what type action he might take or legislation he
might seek to address these incidences of violence.



Tragedies? Not
mass murder? Tragedies are accidents,
or errors of knowledge or action committed by good people. Mass murder is conscious
and deliberate. Lanza didn't go to the Sandy Hook school to commit a
"tragedy." However, Obama's use of the term "tragedy"
serves a useful, collectivist purpose: it connotes a dysfunctional society responsible
for the actions of individuals. You, a
faceless cipher in society, are responsible for the "tragedy," and so
must endorse stricter gun controls laws, if not a total ban on the private
possession of all firearms, whatever their make or caliber. You must help prevent and end these
"tragedies." If you continue to shout about your Second Amendment
rights, you must be as unstable and
disturbed as Adam Lanza and can't be trusted with owning a gun, and will be
responsible in ex parte for the next
"tragedy." Get it?



"This
is our first task, caring for our children. It's our first job. If we don't get
that right, we don't get anything right. That's how, as a society, we will be
judged," Obama asked. "And by that measure, can we truly say that, as
a nation, we're meeting our obligations?"



The
president added: "I've been reflecting on this the past few days, and if
we're honest with ourselves, the answer's no. We're not doing enough. And we
will have to change."



In short, you must change. You must submit to the wishes of the
White House and Congress and Senator Feinstein and Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New
York, and all the rest of the wolves, and surrender the right to defend
yourself against….? Well, that culprit goes unnamed. They're not suggesting against
the likes of the Adam Lanza's of the world. You
must deliver yourself to the mercies of every random nut case who finds a gun
and count on the authorities to arrive in time to "prevent" your
death. But, then, someone name me a time when the authorities did arrive in
time to prevent a single killing in a
school, office, or factory.  



Obama's true and frank position on the Constitution was revealed in 2001,
during a radio interview.



… [T]he
Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and
of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that
extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it
wasn't that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that
were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as it's been
interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the
Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can't do
to you. Says what the Federal government can't do to you, but doesn't say what
the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that
hasn't shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement
was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think
there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing
and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition
of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we
still suffer from that."



In short, the courts are too slow and cumbersome and tied to procedural niceties
to effect any populist legislation. Obama and Congress and his passel of czars
are ready and willing to effect "meaningful" change on their own and
bypass the courts, in terms of "political and community organizing and
activities on the ground" that can create voting blocs that will bring about
"redistributive change."



But the Second Amendment can't be "redistributed." It can only be
excoriated, scuttled, and scrapped. Then we will live in a "just"
society in which mass school killings will have been "prevented" –
until the next one. Individuals with criminal intent will by nature flout any
and every law to get what they want. That is what being criminal is all about.



And there will be more such killings, regardless. Commenting on the Sandy Hook
school massacre and the cultural sickness that is guaranteed to produce another,
Robert LeChevalier noted:



It's too terrible to dwell on the
concrete details, which have become far too commonplace. I only note that it
was inevitable, and more is on the way.



It's a terrible fact that when the philosophy of a culture becomes utterly
irrational, it infects everything. People become utterly irrational when
they come to embrace utterly irrational ideas. I've remarked multiple times
that the Left has become borderline psychotic, and I mean it….



The effect of irrational ideas infects everyone who subscribes to them. What
makes the Left's ideas so pernicious, especially those of the so-called
"post-modern" Left, who are something of the apotheosis of worship in
the Cult of Unreason, is the insidious nature of the un-integrated, unreal
ideas they advocate -- ideas developed ultimately with no regard for reality,
but not merely no regard -- open, defiant contempt for reality. The ideas they
uphold are utterly unintegrated from any rational context by intention, with a
brooding leitmotif of loathing for any kind of order to existence, and for any kind
of human existence….



The effect of irrational ideas
has to ripple down through a culture. Putting aside the vocational aspects, our
schools today are dedicated to one proposition: destroying the minds of
children. The most successful products of our schools now grow up warped and
disfigured mentally, in possession of some knowledge here and there -- table
scraps for emaciated minds -- but largely shriveled mentally, their cortical
folds flattened and disfigured by rabid commitments to random eclectic notions
bearing no connection at all to reality.



Adam Lanza was a product of modern education. And anyone who has tried to
engage a young person in critical thinking is usually astounded by how brainwashed,
lobotomized and conformist such people are. They have been turned into the ventriloquist
dummies of the Left. It is fruitless to have intelligent conversations, or even
"national debates" with them. Their only worlds are in their Ipads, TV
screens, and video games. Reality doesn’t interest them. Reality is what they
want it to be. Teacher said so. They are lost.



Only one politician spoke intelligently on the issue of citizens carrying
arms: Texas Representative Louie Gohmert.  He was interviewed by Chris Wallace on Fox
News on December 16th:



The segment with Gohmert began
with footage of Eric Holder saying we need to discuss who we are as a nation,
talk about the freedom and rights we have, and how they can be used in a
responsible way. In other words, he wants to talk about gun control. Rep.
Gohmert’s response, which brought up Fast and Furious, was priceless:



“Well I think coming from him
that’s really important to note coming from a man who’s in a department that
forced the sale of guns to people that would bring about the death of people
like Brian Terry and there should be national outrage about Mexicans, our
neighbors, 200 or more that have been killed by the guns his department have
forced to be sold, so he’s right. And Sen. Durbin is right but the conversation
we’ve got to have has got to have everybody open-minded. I mean, we all react
emotionally that’s why we’ve all shed tears…”



That was a slap in the faces of Attorney General Holder and Obama. If Obama
were truly concerned about "tragedies," he would have fired Holder
long ago and recommended to Congress that he be criminally charged with aiding
and abetting murder and massacres. But, that won’t happen.



Wallace then brought up the
Aurora movie theater massacre and Gohmert making the argument in its aftermath
for more people to carry weapons to prevent a similar situation from happening.
Wallace asks: “Do we really want folks in movie theaters, and shopping malls,
and schools, armed?



Gohmert responds: “Once we have
this actually open dialogue about the situation you find out…every mass killing
of more than three people in recent history has been in a place where guns were
prohibited, except for one. They choose this place. They know no one will be
armed. You know, having been a judge, having reviewed photographs of these
horrific scenes and knowing that children have these defensive wounds, gun
shots through their arms and hands as they try to protect themselves and
hearing the heroic stories of the principal lunging trying to protect…Chris, I
wish to God she had had an M4 in her office locked up so when she heard gun
fire she pulls it out and she didn’t have to lunge heroically with nothing in
her hands, but she takes him out, takes his head off before he could kill those
precious kids.”



Doubtless Gohmert will be getting a lot of hate mail and hate calls for
suggesting that the principal, who died charging Lanza with her bare hands,
should've been armed with a gun that would have ended Lanza's real-life
Dungeons and Dragons elimination game before more children were murdered.



Then the obligatory question by
the media: Why do people need semi-automatic weapons? Wallace says these are
weapons created for law enforcement, for the military, but why does the average
person need these “weapons of mass destruction”?



Gohmert: "Well, for the
reason that George Washington said: A free people should be an armed people. It
ensures against the tyranny of the government if they know that the biggest
army is the American people, then you don’t have the tyranny that came from
King George…."



The White House has
set up a "petition" that has received tens of thousands of signatures
from people who want him or Congress to "engage" them in "preventing"
further "tragedies" by making the Second Amendment a dead letter. They
all believe in "preventative"  or "preemptive" law. Or Positive
Law.



Or the law of an
executive and government with unlimited powers to disarm the public for the
"public good." If they get their
way, they will have taken one more step closer to authoritarian government, which
is but a rung below totalitarian government.



The republic? Neither
Obama, nor Congress, nor a big swath of the people, want to keep it.