Tag Archives: freedom

Illinois and the 2nd Amendment

Posted on by
Reply

In a Just the News article concerning an Illinois district judge’s impending order declaring unconstitutional that State’s Progressive-Democratic Party-run government ban on a broad range of firearms and the requirement for citizens to register with that government those firearms they already possess, there’s this closing paragraph.

In federal court, four cases consolidated in the Southern District of Illinois have a hearing set for April 12. The state filed its response to a motion for a preliminary injunction Thursday arguing the ban addresses dangerous and unusual weapons the Founders of the US Constitution couldnt imagine in the 18th Century. Plaintiffs argue the law violates the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

Which leads me to ask: what would be more dangerous than privately owned artillery and sea-going combat ships? Yet those weapons were privately owned and contributed heavily to the war effort in our Revolution against another government that was, among other things, seeking to disarm us.

For the benefit of those Illinois Progressive-Democrats, here is the 2nd Amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Those personages should note carefully that there are no caveats in that short sentence. In particular, there is no caveat for “Arms of which Government disapproves from time to time.”

Gun Control and Racism

Posted on by
1

Jacob Gershwin opened his Wall Street Journal piece on gun control with this lede:

Historical, racist gun laws are taking on new relevance in legal battles over modern-day gun regulations, following a Supreme Court ruling that expanded the right to bear arms.

He followed up [emphasis added]:

In the 1700s and 1800s, states across the country passed laws to keep guns out of the hands of slaves, free Black people, Native Americans and Catholics. Such discriminatory gun restrictions would be unconstitutional today, but they have entered the gun-rights debate as judges look to apply the Supreme Court’s decision last June that said gun restrictions must be anchored in historical traditions.

Now, despicably, many Federal and State government “lawyers” are claiming that those old, ugly, and by-design racist and anti-religion—those Evil Catholics—are part of that historical tradition as they continue their efforts to disarm all of us average Americans, in toto. US prosecutors in front of an appellate court:

They [[those racist gun control laws] nevertheless show that the Framers understood that legislatures could make such judgments to categorically disarm groups of people deemed to be dangerous.

Dangerous groups of Americans like those of us who might want to demur from Government behaviors, behaviors like the IRS targeting conservative American political groups, like the Department of Justice targeting mothers disputing with local school boards as domestic terrorists, like the FBI targeting traditional Catholics (those folks again…) as right-wing extremists and “investigating” them.

What prosecutors like those so carefully ignore is that that prior set of laws, that prior “tradition,” was wholly erased from the American body politic—the honest body politic—by the Civil War, the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendments, and the recognition that all Americans are equal under American law—under all American laws.

For those persecutors prosecutors to argue that those racist gun control laws are somehow still part of our historical traditions is for them to ignore critical parts of gun control law history: the part that had post-Civil War South and too many jurisdictions in the North enacting gun control laws explicitly to disarm and keep unarmed and helpless black Americans—freed and newly freed—along with their white supporters against depredations, that ranged from rape through lynching, at the hands of racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists.

Those prosecutors are showing their own invidious racist bent.

Should be Good for Us

Posted on by
Reply

Russian President Vladimir Putin wants to start another arms race, which of necessity includes a technology race and a matching of economic strengths.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday that Russia would suspend its participation in the last remaining nuclear-arms treaty between Moscow and Washington, a vestige of the security architecture that has helped keep the peace for decades.

Despite the outcomes of Progressive-Democrat Party policies, we still have the strongest economy in the world, with lots of potential for getting even stronger, and we still have the largest economy in the world, with lots of potential for getting even larger. That feeds into our ability to innovate more rapidly than our competitors or our enemies, and so more rapidly in technology arenas, including weapons and cyber tech. And both our economic and technical capabilities potentiate our ability to produce existing weapons and the ammunition and logistics systems needed for them faster than our competitors or our enemies, and to more quickly develop new weapons and get them deployed in useful numbers.

We dissolved the USSR with that nation’s initiation of its late-stage arms race. Russia’s economic and technological establishment is even more fragile.

The People’s Republic of China? That nation is stronger than Russia, but not as strong—still—as the USSR was.

There’s this, too:

An entente between the two would replicate their Cold War anti-Western partnership with one significant difference, that Beijing rather than Moscow would be the dominant partner.

That prior entente was one in which the two nations routinely exchanged gunfire across their border, especially along the Amur River. One factor leading to those exchanges is the PRC’s—and Kuomintang China, and emperor-ist China and on back—longstanding holding that Siberia belongs to China and that Russia stole it centuries ago. This time around, the PRC is not only the dominant partner, it’s much more dominant than was the USSR in that prior arrangement. And the PRC still insists that Siberia is Chinese. Gunfire exchanges would be much more dangerous for Russia, although it would bleed the PLA, also.

That’s a risk worth taking seriously, but this is the much more likely outcome:

The prospect of the two great autocratic powers that dominate the Eurasian landmass moving closer together carries risks for Beijing. It would probably force European countries that now are hoping to maintain close commercial ties with China to move more decisively toward Washington, on which they depend for security. If that happened, geopolitical competition between the West (along with Asian democracies such as Japan and South Korea) and the Moscow-Beijing axis would solidify.

And that also would redound to the benefit of the US and to the West in general, for all the reasons listed earlier.

Bring it.

It Shouldn’t Matter

Posted on by
Reply

In a Wall Street Journal article centered on the US expanding our military presence in the Republic of China from vanishingly small to miniscule, there’s this meek remark from a “US official” regarding the training of RoC forces that that slightly larger presence would be carrying out:

One of the difficult things to determine is what really is objectionable to China. We don’t think at the levels that we’re engaged in and are likely to remain engaged in the near future that we are anywhere close to a tipping point for China….

Leaving aside the question of to which China this person is referring (the timidity of the Biden and so many predecessor administrations makes that transparent, anyway), it doesn’t matter what is objectionable to the People’s Republic of China regarding our presence in the RoC. The PRC has no legitimate interest in the goings-on with respect to the RoC.

Full stop.

Gun Control

Posted on by
Reply

Versus gun rights. And police.

Squatters keep occupying another’s property in Lynnwood, WA, and using it as a stolen vehicle trafficking facility and as a residence. A police SWAT team raided the property and made some arrests. The owner changed the locks on the building. Then the squatters returned and resumed operations and residence.

In response to the reoccupation, Lieutenant David Hayes of the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office (Lynnwood’s county) told Fox News Digital that ensuring the squatters don’t return is “largely on the property owner.”

This is what the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party mouthpieces are trying, functionally if not (necessarily) deliberately to prevent: a property owner defending her own property. A disarmed population via those gun “controls,” though, will be helpless against criminals and unable to satisfy their right and their obligation to defend their own property. Instead, they’ll be rendered entirely dependent on Government to for them rather than government’s (sic) local, county, and State police forces acting in assistance of the property owner.

In parallel with this, seemingly contradictorily, exponentially potentiating the police’s inability to support private citizens’ efforts, is the Left’s and Party’s ongoing—still!—efforts to defund and to shrink those same local, county, and State police forces.

It’s no wonder that whenever anyone in Party mounts an effort to disarm us, however seemingly mildly, there’s an increase in gun and ammunition sales.