Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
I've been holding back for a long time, readers and friends. This subject makes me angrier than any other and raises my blood pressure, which, at my age, I can ill afford. However, now that we're well into the process of seating another Supreme Court Justice -- one who declares that she upholds the law as originally written -- it is long past time to apply a little of this originalism, this textualism, where the Second Amendment is concerned.
The District of Columbia v. Heller was hailed far and wide as a landmark Supreme Court case because it allegedly established that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own and carry weapons. It was, in fact, a terrible decision that invented a Constitutional government power, out of whole cloth (as critics insist Roe vs. Wade invented the right to an abortion), to interpret and regulate the individual's right to keep and bear arms -- which means that it is no right at all, but a privilege generously granted by the state. No such power exists. No such power can possibly exist, given the recent violent experiences and the frame of mind of the Founding Fathers.
These men had just fought a long, bloody revolutionary war against the most powerful empire in the history of the world, a revolutionary war that they had astonished everyone -- including themselves -- by winning. The ludicrous contradiction written into current law, demanding that the government must first give you its permission to acquire the means to protect yourself from the government, is stark insanity.
It is likewise the left's idiotic conceit (wilfully constructed) that the Second Amendment was only written to protect the right of the people to keep and bear smooth-bore, single-shot, muzzle-loading muskets, the arms that happened to be in circulation at the time the Bill of Rights was written. They deliberately overlook the fact that the Second Amendment was actually written to maintain parity between the weapons of the military, whatever they might be, and those of the civilian population, in order to preserve civil liberties against missteps by a government grown hostile to freedom as ours mostly is today. Inventive futurists like Jefferson and others would have appreciated that weapons were changing even as the amendment was being written, acquiring rifled barrels, multiple chambers, and different forms of ignition. The Second Amendment today, properly read, supports unsupervised civilian ownership of fully automatic M-16s and AK-47s.
Read the damned amendment. Look up the dictionary meaning of the word "infringed". It "means sneaked up on". It means "nibbled away at". It means "tampered with, even a little bit." Every single, solitary gun law in this country, federal, stsate, and local, is, itself, completely and inarguably illegal. And since the self-stated purpose of the amendment is to protect and defend "the security of a free State", it is treason.
It is an utter fairy tale that machine-guns were outlawed in the 1930s because gangsters were accustomed to employing them. (Investigation shows that the Thompson .45 famously used in the St. Valentine's Day massacre was probably wielded by a cop.). Machine-guns were outlawed because proto-communist President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt was deathly afraid of a coup. One had already been tried against him, he had narrowly survived an assassination attempt, and he greatly feared that more of the same was coming. Back then, even the most treasonous collectivists realized that simply banning automatic weapons would be illegal, so they enacted crippling taxes against them, understanding that the power to tax is the power to destroy. Sadly, machine-guns in civilian hands might have prevented the death and destruction of the 2020 summer riots.
It is time for organizations like the National Rifle Association, Gun Owners of America, the Second Amendment Foundation, and others to stop fiddle-fooling around. Decade after decade of bargaining and appeasement have utterly failed to work against the enemies of freedom who want us to be their slaves. Follow the lead of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, instead, the heirs of the only people to confront naked tyranny in their own homeland.
The very existence of an abomination like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives constitutes an infringement against the bright of the people to keep and bear arms. It is exactly the same as assigning Nazis to protect synagogues.Recent moves against "bump stocks" and the refusal to legalize silencers are proof that Donald Trump is receiving very bad advice about the Second Amendment from within his own ranks and needs somebody wiser and better-informed to school him on its history and purpose.
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Award-winning novelist and essayist L. Neil Smith is a retired gunsmith and auxiliary police officer, Publisher and Senior Columnist of L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise and the author of over thirty-five books. Look him up on Google, Wikipedia, and Amazon.com. He is available, at professional rates, to write columns, articles, and speeches for your organization, event, or publication, fiercely defending your rights, as he has done since the mid-1960s. His writings (and e-mail address) may also be found at L. Neil Smith's The Libertarian Enterprise, at JPFO.org or at https://www.patreon.com/lneilsmith, to which you can contribute, directly. His many books and those of other pro-gun libertarians may be found (and ordered) at L. Neil Smith's THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE "Free Radical Book Store" The preceeding essay was originally prepared for and appeared in L. Neil Smith's THE LIBERTARIAN ENTERPRISE. Use it to fight the continuing war against tyranny.