It’s presidents like Barry and their overweening insistence on imposing their private opinions on the rest of us, by executive order if Congress can’t be pushed to do their bidding, that calls to mind the real reason for the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
It was not just about raising a militia, or about hunting for one’s supper, or even stopping a tyrannical government, but for the right of self-defense, a privilege theretofore guaranteed only to the aristos of the social elite.
Their modern descendants are trying hard now to reclaim the privilege for themselves alone via such excuses as mass murderers like the evil bastard who slaughtered the children in Newtown. He shot each child separately, one trigger pull at a time.
That’s the definition of semi-automatic, one trigger pull per bullet, the latest proposed excuse for gun control, though it’s a feature of weaponry that’s been around more than a hundred years. Revolvers don’t strictly meet the definition but they do the same thing, bringing a new round into ready position after each pull of the trigger. Just like the evil SOB’s military-lookalike, semi-automatic Bushmaster rifle. Only a lookalike.
But self-defense is the crux of this post. Denial of the right to the masses is well expressed in Count To A Trillion, a recent fine space opera by John C. Wright, whose sequel was released in December. Reading the sequel I realized I’d forgotten the first book and so I’m reading it again. Hence this passage I want to quote:
“But it was the fact,” the main character Menelaus Montrose is thinking about life on Earth in 2400, “that the people among the crowds outside [the castle] did not wear those sashes or baldrics…none of them could carry a weapon, drunk or sober. The members of the upper class…or soldiers in their employ or retainers in their service, only they could bear arms…The fact that this world was one where not all men had the right to self-defense was one he deeply resented. Resented? No, it was a hatred, so black and primal…”
And later on he has an epiphany, reading a censored history in electronic form, realizing how easy it is for a politico to alter electronic text:
“Montrose decided then and there that a full library, one made of old-fashioned paper books with bindings, the kind that cannot be electronically re-edited by anonymous lines of hidden code, was just as much a necessity for a free man as a shooting iron….”
It’s as fashionable as ever these days to complain about our fractured, contentious society, a meme I remember hearing in slightly different form as a child way back in the dark ages of the 1950s, and it was even so back in the late 1700s when the Constitution was written.
This time, however, the dispute is over the increasing power of government, particularly federal government, and the megalomania of presidents like Barry, whose support for gun registration and other forms of control is forcing more and more of us to decide that we do not want to live in a world where only the elite can bear arms (or hire it done for them) and ebooks can be altered by sellers at their or a government censor’s whim.
UPDATE: If Illinois Dems get their way, self-defense with guns will be a thing of the past there. Except for the aristos, of course, who’ll be exempted in one way or another. Wait and see. And the criminals will be armed as always, naturally.
THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER 