I was just reading the weekly gun thread over at Ace's and saw this paragraph:

The very same leftists who believe requiring voter ID is the modern day equivalent of poll taxes and literacy tests, even when the ID is provided at no charge to the same people who curiously manage to be able to deftly navigate the welfare benefits maze, support all sorts of "reasonable" "common sense" restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms. And these restrictions have an effect contrary to the one they purport to ... in MA crime rates soared after politicians made it harder for law-abiding citizens to get guns.

One of the unspoken aspects of all this is that the primary purpose of the Second Amendment is to guarantee that the people of this nation have the means to rise up in revolution in case the government becomes too tyrannical. Neither side of the gun debate mentions this, because the lefties (the fans of tyranny) don't want to give anyone ideas, and the conservatives don't really want to, either.

But it's true. Remember the context of the period in which the Bill of Rights was passed: the American colonies had just won a revolution against a British government which was viewed as having become too tyranical, and the early stages of the war were fought by men using weapons they themselves owned. (The Minutemen, right?)

It is the ultimate check on a system that is loaded with checks, most of which have by this point failed. (The commerce clause being the worst example of that.) It is the ultimate balance: the citizens balance the government and have the ability to resist it if need be.

That's the real reason lefties hate it. It isn't about crime for them, either, and the fact that crime goes up when private ownership of guns goes down, doesn't bother them. Lefties believe that a benevolent dictatorship is the best form of government and they want to implement it here. (Recently it has begun to be received wisdom on the Left that the US Constitution is old, outmoded, and should be replaced.)

But they know they can't really do it as long as tens of millions of American non-lefties own firearms. And they hate it.

It isn't guns in the hands of criminals that they most fear. It's guns in the closets of law-abiding fellow citizens who don't happen to be Progressive.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 12:57 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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