The Democrats, led by President Barack Obama and Senators Diane Feinstein (D, CA) and Chuck Schumer (D, NY) want to “discuss” gun control and make it harder/impossible for us to retain our 2nd Amendment rights. But this would make us more like Europe, and that’s a Good Thing, isn’t it?
Here’s what Europe is blathering on about in re the Newtown mass murder.
[The Newtown massacre] is once again the unavoidable result of a national culture…. Once again, the United States is debating its gun laws, even if the discussion is likely to be short and inconclusive. But the real thing that must change (though it hardly will), is the misunderstanding that America’s formative myth of “freedom” allows for weapons to be as widespread as smart phones.
And from Süddeutsche Zeitung, this:
Their [Republicans and the gun lobby] opposition to almost any kind of gun control borders on political complicity in murder and manslaughter.
And from Die Welt, this, even as they “recognize” the legitimacy of private ownership of guns:
A country-wide weapons registry would make sense. … [A]t least a ban on semi-automatic weapons, such as the one that existed during the administration of Bill Clinton, makes sense.
And from Stuttgarter Zeitung, this:
[T]this variety of martial liberalism is a relic of a bygone era that no longer fits in the time.
Never mind our Creator’s endowment of rights and the expression of them in our Bill of Rights. The latter exists to facilitate our satisfaction of our individual endowment of obligations, which includes our obligation to help each other enjoy those inalienable rights. Which demands an ability to defend ourselves and our fellows by force of arms, if necessary, not only against other members of our compact and intruders from outside it, but also against an overweening, overly intrusive government that is a necessary evil and not the fount of our rights, responsibilities, and freedoms. Which in turn demands a 2nd Amendment that explicitly acknowledges our inherent right to be adequately armed for executing that self- and mutual defense.
Disarming us, as even the Süddeutsche Zeitung understood elsewhere in its editorial, cannot have prevented such mass murders. Disarming us would not disarm the criminals, or the insane, or the criminals who would use the insane. Progressives dismiss this as ridiculous, a catch phrase, but it is no less a truth for that.
Nor has the threat receded in a modern, dangerous world, as the Stuttgarter Zeitung so innocently hopes. Thinking so is dangerously naïve.
Government has no need to know what its employers have in our possession. Fishing expeditions, which include a national gun registry with its associated limits on the purpose for which we might be permitted to possess and use a firearm, and of which restrictions on what we are in the end permitted to own are a subset, are at once an early step in the erosion of freedom and a textbook example of why another requirement was written into our Bill of Rights: the need for a separately court-approved search warrant before our government might pry into our private affairs. A government that assumes, a priori, that its employers are dishonest is a government that, even more so, cannot be trusted.
What those who idolize Government, those who truly think that government is the origin of our rights, responsibilities, and freedoms—rather than an unfortunately necessary tool for helping us preserve our individual liberties and satisfy our individual responsibilities—do not understand is that these are truly individual; our liberties and obligations are individual and are inherent in us as individuals. Thus, we cannot wish them away onto another entity for preservation or satisfaction. They cannot be divorced from us any more than our lives can be.
In the end, the only ones who want to disarm a population are those in Government with guilty consciences about their own designs on liberty and those who truly believe that freedom flows from Government and not from God. Both sorts are dangerous.