Monday, November 12, 2007

"No One" Can Protect Your Rights?

Seen on The High Road this morning...

Nothing nor no one can protect your gun rights *if* the majority of "The People" don't want you to have them. SCOTUS could come up with the most favorable ruling on the meaning of the 2A, and a large enough majority of citizens could make the 2A go away through constitutional amendment.

I must beg to differ on that point. It would seem to me that if the Second Amendment were repealed outright, our gun rights could still be protected. We'd just have to resort to, shall we say, other measures, from civil disobedience right on up to "voting from the rooftops" if those we elected to lead us resorted to more Waco- and Ruby Ridge-style jack-booted thuggery. Those rights would still be protected, of that I have no doubt...we'd just have to resort to extraordinary measures to ensure we kept them. But now that I think about it, it's not really that extraordinary -- or at least it shouldn't be. As Thomas Jefferson said,
"God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. ...And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance?"
It would be interesting to see what the country would be like today had the Civil War not put the American people off the idea of armed rebellion every couple of decades. But I digress. Our rights can still be protected. They might just have to be protected with blood. As Jefferson went on to say:
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure."