If the Anti-Firearms Adherents Universally Applied Their Standards

There are some central arguments used by those proffering gun bans as the solution to prevent such horrific murder sprees like the latest such grievous attack at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. We wondered what our world would look like if their central arguments were to be applied universally across the entire spectrum of modern life. Some of these arguments will immediately be observed to be absolutely unthinkable and insane. The truth is that the arguments as applied to gun ownership is just as absurd as any of the other examples we will list in this article, it is just that firearms have been vilified so severely that they are viewed with fear of their ability to harm rather than respect for their ability to protect.

We often hear the argument that the Founding Fathers wrote the Second Amendment at a time when the most advanced firearms were muskets and thusly their intention was simply to allow people to own single-shot weapons. The Founding Fathers did not intend for citizens to own assault weapons, machine guns or any paramilitary weaponry. First thing is that the Founding Fathers included cannons under the Second Amendment which changes the attitude and view they took drastically. Cannons are of a class of weaponry referred to as crew served weapons which means that a group of troops with definitive and separate functions being shared by each member of the team in order to load, aim, and effectively fire the weapon. This would imply that the Second Amendment would allow a much wider range of weapons than are currently legal. Some of the additional weapons that would be made available under this broad interpretation intended by the Founding Fathers are mounted heavy machine guns, anti-tank rocket launchers, mortars, and even artillery. But what would it look like if one were to restrict other rights to be restricted by what the founding Fathers had available in their day and its accompanying society?

Let us look at Freedom of the Press. To the Founding Father the press was the printing press or the hand written bulletin. According to the Founders the people had the right to printed newspapers and the posting of bulletins at the town hall community board. These rights that we now place under the First Amendment’s Freedom of the Press are greatly removed from the original written word and have been included as understood as being in agreement with the intent and how the Founding Fathers would define Freedom of the Press if they were to make such an amendment today. But if we apply the musket rule, then Freedom of the Press only protects the printed or written word and does not apply to any of the electronic media. Freedom of the Press could not have included film, radio, television, the internet or any other electronic form of media as such was beyond the scope of the press in the time of the Founding Fathers. I realize that this argument appears to be ludicrous but much of the reason that it seems so ridiculous is because we have been told that the Founding Fathers would necessarily have included all forms of the press, defining press as media, that exist today as it was the spirit of the terms Freedom of the Press and not the literal letters of the law. So, Freedom of the Press includes radio and television even though such items were unthinkable when the First Amendment was written, but the only weapons that are protected under the Second Amendment are those which are minimally more sophisticated or modern than the weapons available to the public at the time of the Founding Fathers.

Also in the First Amendment there is the right to Freedom of Assembly. Freedom of Assembly was defined at the time of the Founding Fathers as citizen groups which could meet in person and should they live in disparate areas, then they could meet in their individual areas and then send a representative to a central meeting much as the separate states had committees that met to discuss the Constitution as it was written and ratified and sent representatives to a central meeting which included all the representatives of the separate states. So, the Founding Fathers obviously meant that citizens had the right to assemble and associate in person in groups at a physical location. They did not mean, imply, or even hint at such things as on-line virtual meetings, SKYPE, community calls or any of the plethora of electronic meeting offerings. There must be a limit to this freedom such that it only applies to face-to-face meeting in person and not via electronic mediums. The further proof of this is reinforced by the fact that the Congress, both the House of Representatives and the Senate, hold their meetings face-to-face in Washington DC despite the availability of electronic options which would allow for these representatives of the people to remain in their home areas and meet electronically with a dedicated twenty-four hour a day link of the separate offices allowing for continuously available means for contact. The Founding Fathers were only referencing people holding physical assemblies in a building or place with a definite location to be dedicated for such meetings.

Then there are the guarantees in the Third Amendment against quartering soldiers in one’s house without the consent of the owner. It is probably obvious that they meant abode of any kind or character but then again in the days of the Founding Fathers a home was a simple house with even the most lavish of homes not exceeding three floors and possibly a cellar. The Founding Fathers could not have foreseen huge apartment buildings standing forty, fifty, or more stories tall having the capability of housing an entire brigade of troops providing them with a central location. There were no condominiums in their day and rental housing was almost nonexistent. Where exactly this protection would cease to apply might be up for debate but it must be seen that the Founding Fathers could not have meant this to apply to all living quarters in existence in a modern city. Perhaps the government, in the guise of saving money, should take up the modern interpretation of the Third Amendment and see if there might be some manner of residential buildings in which they could station troops. This would have to save the government money as they would no longer have to spend on upkeep of bases and base housing.

We could take other guarantees from the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and turn their intent and meanings on their heads by the imposition of absurdities which are merely refusing to apply these freedoms liberally to include technological inventions that have transformed our societies since 1800. Our freedom to move is not limited to horse drawn conveyance but to include vehicles, even large tractor-trailer rigs. But when we come to the right to keep and bear arms we are told that the Founding Fathers could not have seen the advances in weaponry that have taken place since they wrote and the Bill of Rights was affirmed on December 15, 1791. How can we believe that the Founding Fathers could have anticipated that weapons would suddenly explode in their manner of lethality, fire rate, types of projectiles, method of propelling the projectiles, the rapidity of rate of fire, or any of the numerous other improvements made in firearms since early 1792? There existed no previous vast improvement in weaponry previous to the last two-hundred years or even since the dawn of time. The human race had not progressed to the point of the muskets used by soldiers and the populace around 1800, those types of weapons had been available since the dawn of civilization, right? What? These weapons were a relatively new invention and had replaced the crossbow which replaced the long bow and the sling which replaced or complimented the sword which replaced the club which was preferred over a large rock. But the Founding Fathers were of such limited intelligence that they were full in their knowledge that weapons had advanced to their pinnacle of inventiveness. How could they have seen that weapons would become even more lethal with time as such had never happened before in their knowledge. Really, they were that limited in their vision of what the future might hold. Why do I find such hypocrisy to be an insult to the Founding Fathers and to my intelligence? That would be like claiming that our current lawmakers could not imagine that there will be laser and directed energy wave weapons in our future.

Beyond the Cusp

Gun Ban Whiplash Coming from Anti-Gun Progressives

The sides are being drawn and the arguments built with a generous assist from the Progressive mainstream-media along with anti-gun, anti-freedoms and anti-right NGOs with full intent of doing compromising damage to the United States Constitution. Even the spate of recent shootings in malls and movie theaters before the horrid event at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut had not raised the ire and expectations of the anti-Second Amendment forces to the point where they had visions of making the United States just like much of Europe with strident anti-gun laws in addition to the other areas where it appears that Europe is the perfect model that our government is attempting to emulate. But with the death by the most vile and heinous actions by a deranged and sick mind beyond the ability of most people to grasp and get their mind around is now going to be utilized by people who almost appear delirious in their anticipation of an opportunity to finally force their weapons restrictions on the rest of the country almost standing on the corpses of these children. They have not even been placed in the ground and their eulogies given and the mourning begun to wane and these vultures are already swooping in and taking advantage of the raw emotions of the moment. This is nothing more than a sick and revulsive opportunism using the tragedy of twenty innocent young children having been gunned down by a young man with deep mental problems who experienced something in his life that triggered his violent and hideous acts that resulted in the carnage of which we have seen too many photos and now our raw emotions are being leveraged to pass laws before reason and normalcy returns allowing for rational, logical, fully thought out debate to be possible. This is pure exploitation of the deaths of these children and is a more ghoulish perversion of the national mourning than polite and respectful people would ever consider allowing, but these people are willing to use any serious crisis and refuse to allow such to ever be wasted.

If people want to make sure catastrophes and crisis such as what happened at the Sandy Hook Elementary School from ever reoccurring, banning guns will not suffice and it would be more effective and equally effective to outlaw severe anger. It would be more effective to incarcerate people who have a likelihood of turning violent due to mental disorders, especially if they go off their medications. But that is no longer an option thanks to many of the same Progressives who are now decrying this tragedy and demanding we ban firearms and have argued starting in 1955 and continuing to the present that the vast majority of those we consider to have some form of mental illness or instability would be better served if allowed to live within our society, as being isolated in an institution removed them from examples of normalcy, making their opportunity to find role models impossible. They brought psychiatrists, psychologists and numerous other “experts” to testify that closing the mental institutions and other such facilities and placing the patients from these places into society where they would find role models and have to learn to cope with reality. The legislators were told that the institutions only served to guarantee that those with mental illness and related difficulties if left in institutions would likely never be cured and thus we were doing a great disservice to these unfortunate people by leaving them in a situation that simply reinforced their conditions and disallowed for recovery. The idea was put forth that if we simply treated these people as outpatients they would continue to receive the same level of supervision and care as they would in a State institution and even in the majority of the private institutions and their living in the real world would restore them to a normalcy unavailable in the accursed institutions. As a result, since 1960 we have closed in excess of 80% of the houses and institutions which held the mentally ill, mentally challenged, and the absolute psychotics and others who suffered from some form of mental troubles of maladjustments.

Some of those who were returned to the real world and were just dropped into society ended up living with relatives or others who attended to them and made sure their medications were kept up and that they visited their counselor, psychiatrist, or other care professional on a regular basis and were present to note any changes in their behavior and could arrange additional care when necessary. Others ended up in less appropriate conditions including a number who ended up being homeless and off of their medications and fell through the cracks and were no longer monitored. This is currently getting worse as President Obama has the Department of Justice applying a strict interpretation of the  Supreme Court’s Olmstead decision forcing states to work with the Department of Health and Human Services to move even more patients from being institutionalized into outpatient treatment programs. Needless to say, not just allowing but forcing the deinstitutionalization of people with mental disabilities and the placement of them into the society in an attempt to give them a more encouraging setting that would allow for easing their transition into societal normalized lives will have some failures which can have disastrous consequences. But woe be the anti-firearms proponents to even mention that this could possibly be a contributing factor. It is not the troubled individual who is the problem to these fanatics; it is a half-pound of metal formed, cast, bored and machined without a brain or any compulsions of its own that grabs these mentally unbalanced people and drags them into a target rich environment and makes them shoot people randomly and even possibly repeatedly.

The final item is the locations that these shooting take place. They happen in schools, movie theaters, malls, and other places where absolutely nobody except officials of the state, sometimes referred to as police, are permitted to have a firearm on their person. These bans include even those who are licensed by the state to carry a concealed firearm in public and force them to become as unarmed as everybody else who decides to make use of these premises. For reasons that escape my limited abilities in logic; I have never ever heard of one of these shootings taking place at a gun store or a gun range. I wonder why that is?

Beyond the Cusp