Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
I’m a big believer in the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights. It’s why I’m a Second Amendment advocate. The way I see it, our Founding Fathers put together a document that did a pretty good job of limiting the government and securing our rights.
Too bad it’s ignored, such as the push for gun control.
But with frightening regularity, there comes someone who seems to act like they held a seance with the Founding Fathers and knows that their past words in support of the Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms would go out the window.
The tragic shootings in Nashville, with children and staff at the Covenant School being killed, demands action from Congress. But so many times we have seen Congress do nothing after gun violence.
If America’s Founding Fathers could have traveled in time to today, they would be horrified to see these mass shootings in our schools and communities. They would also be shocked that the Congress has done so little to stop these tragedies.
The Founding Fathers, if they could have foreseen the terror of today, would surely have revised the Second Amendment. They would urge us to implement gun control today.
There must be some limitations on the right to bear arms of the Second Amendment. There must be gun control including banning assault weapons. As the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once wrote “Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.”
First, while I respect the late Justice Scalia, he wasn’t a Founding Father. Injecting his comment, one often taken drastically out of context, isn’t making the case.
The author here, like so many others, claims the Founding Fathers wouldn’t have supported the right they literally fought and bled for if they could see the bad things happening today.
Yet they offer no evidence for such a claim. Nothing in their writings of the time suggested they were in favor of forfeiting the right to keep and bear arms simply because people could do bad things.
In fact, that claim flies directly in the face of something one of our Founding Fathers said explicitly. Thomas Jefferson said, “I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery.” That tells me that yes, he’d look at what we see today, and while he would mourn those lost lives, there’s little reason to believe he’d suddenly want to restrict people’s rights.
The Buckeye Firearms Association has a very handy list of other pro-gun quotes from our Founding Fathers, none of which suggest even a hint of support for the idea of gun control.
See, what the author has done is convince himself of a fiction, that the Founding Fathers are whatever he wants to believe them to be. Further, since so many of us look to them for guidance on matters of policy, he somehow hopes he’ll suddenly be the one to trick us into supporting gun control.
That’s really not how it works. You can’t just say, “They’d support me,” then just expect people to shrug and accept it.
Let’s also remember that in the time of the founding, private parties owned artillery and equipped their own private warships–letters of marque were a thing, after all–which could lay waste to people in numbers even the much vilified AR-15 couldn’t.
If they were willing to trust the American people with that, then just why would you assume they’d suddenly support gun control? The fact that you just really, really want them to isn’t enough.
Yet this is what passes for reasoning, apparently.
https://bearingarms.com/tomknighton/2023/04/01/founding-gun-control-n69106