| Online: | |
| Visits: | |
| Stories: |
| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
The Second Amendment Is Not About Crime
Freedom Outpost
There is only one reason to be a defender of the Second Amendment, the same reason the Framers had when they wrote it: fear of an overbearing government. As Thomas Jefferson said, “The strongest reason for people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.”
Of course, those opposed to gun ownership will respond that there is no tyranny in government. The answer to that is governments all over the world within the last 100 years have killed more than 262 million of their own citizens. See R.J. Rummel, Death By Government (Transaction, 1997).
Most Americans are unaware of this sinister aspect of modern history, which Rummel calls “Democide,” and when they find out, a common response is denial, then after ten minutes on the internet, amazement. Many such innocents then insist that it can’t happen here. The simple answer to the can’t-happen-here idea is that anything can happen anywhere, and it’s not as if this slaughter was centuries removed from us or limited to a single country.
Many on the left will dismiss the need to protect against overreaching government merely because they believe the more power the government has, the better, for it has been their experience that only big government is likely to deliver what they cannot get otherwise. They do not believe big government capable of oppression. Such people will never recognize the validity of gun-rights arguments.
But others on the left, considering the blatant lethality of many modern governments, may be less sanguine about the nature of government, and it is these people, who when they are told of the reason for concern about gun rights, may for the first time appreciate the possible validity of the argument.
Reposted With Permission
