— by Polydamas
We here at The Cassandra Times highly respect and admire former Judge Andrew P. Napolitano and have read his illuminating books with great pleasure. He is that rare jurist and attorney who is able to distill arcane legal ideas and present them in easily digestible form to those of us who are not attorneys, but are educated lay people. His latest column “The Right to Shoot Tyrants, Not Deer” (http://bit.ly/WDLXdY) explains beautifully the same underlying reasons for the Second Amendment that we have been preaching here every time that gun control advocates seek to disarm Americans after every gun massacre.
Let us first make an important point about the shooting of deer, as alluded to by Judge Napolitano. The gun confiscationists always intentionally oversimplify the issue by falsely presenting the false dichotomy “you don’t need a fully-automatic/semi-automatic/assault weapon to defend yourself from criminals or to shoot deer”. They purposefully mention only two of the underlying reasons for the right to keep and bear arms, protection from lawbreakers and hunting. However, they always purposefully omit the third and most important reason, having effective weapons to resist government tyranny.
President Barack Hussein Obama and Vice-President Joseph Biden are always careful to give lip service to the Second Amendment. They clearly know because they, themselves, are lawyers that the Second Amendment is not about crime control or about hunting. They learned about the Second Amendment when they were in law school. They know that, more than two centuries ago, our Founders fought a revolutionary war because they refused to be the obedient subjects of the tyrannical English King George III. When they established the United States, they did not want to deposit all power in the hands of a homegrown tyrant either. They expressly refused to give the government a monopoly on firearms. Instead, they trusted the American people with firearms similar to the firearms that the American military had.
When President Obama and Vice-President Biden and their sycophants in the media mislead the American people by omission of the third and most important reason for the Second Amendment, it is because they do not want the American people to know that third reason. They want the American people to meekly accept every government mandate — even the most tyrannical, overreaching, and burdensome — as inevitable and irresistible. Their continued power is sustained by the American people’s ignorance and sheep-like acquiescence.
Only a very tiny minority of gun control advocates will come out directly to the American people and admit that they only want firearms in the hands of the military and the police. Back, in 1995, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) admitted on 60 Minutes that her goal was “an outright ban”, for the government to pick up every gun, and for “Mr. and Mrs. America, turn ‘em all in”. (http://youtu.be/blXkl9YVoHo). However, because the outright prohibition and confiscation of all weapons legitimately scares Mr. and Mrs. America — or, at least, vast numbers of Americans — the gun control advocates will relentlessly and patiently push for gradual disarmament. They know that, if they move more slowly than they ultimately want, they can accomplish complete disarmament by means of ten thousand paper cuts while the American people are distracted with the latest Hollywood gossip or sports scandal.
To succeed with the gradual erosion of the right to keep and bear arms, gun control advocates count on the unfamiliarity with firearms of the average American who lives in the urban cities and in suburbia. The gun control advocates and their wholly-owned-and-paid-for collaborationists in the media created a new category of weapons in the minds of the public. They called them “Assault Weapons” as if an assault weapon cannot be a stick, a stone or a rolled-up newspaper. Into this category, they placed fully-automatic machine guns (a single pull of the trigger results in many bullets fired) which have been already strictly regulated by the federal government for the past eighty years since the heyday of Al Capone and Prohibition. Subsequently, the gun control advocates will proceed to define “Assault Weapons” more and more expansively, taking advantage of the average urban dweller’s unfamiliarity with firearms. They will throw into the category of “Assault Weapons” various semi-automatic firearms (one trigger pull results in one bullet) by falsely claiming that they are “machine guns”.
Because, other than the size of the weapon and the caliber of the bullets used, there is no inherent operational difference between a semi-automatic rifle and a smaller semi-automatic pistol, gun control advocates want the definition of the prohibited “Assault Weapons” to include semi-automatic pistols as well. Since the ultimate goal of gun control advocates is the complete disarmament of the American people, every time a deranged killer should use a previously non-prohibited weapon , that weapon will then be added to the “Assault Weapons” category. These gun control advocates purposefully use the terms “pistol” and “revolver” interchangeably. Hence, they will clamor to ban “Assault Revolvers” even though revolvers (firearms with bullets in a rotating drum) are a separate and distinct category of firearms. With continuous re-definition of arcane terms, we should not be surprised to hear soon about new and immensely dangerous categories of “Assault Weapons” called “Assault Shotgun”, “Assault Musket”, “Assault Bow-and-Arrow”, “Assault Sword”, “Assault Knife”, “Assault Bat”, “Assault Fist”, “Assault Words” and, finally, “Assault Feelings” and “Assault Thoughts”.
At every point along the road to their goal of the complete disarmament of the American people, gun control advocates will find plenty of Republicans and conservatives who will be happy to compromise with them. They may be the country club Republicans, the Chamber of Commerce Republicans, the moderate Republicans, the fiscal conservatives, the Independent Republicans, etc. The gun control advocates will seize upon every temporary ally to achieve every incremental prohibition. The Obama administration will be sure to jump into the fray and to bribe gun manufacturers with large government contracts in order to divide up and conquer the opposition.
The same constant redefinition and bureaucratic regulation by the federal government as well as equally meddlesome blue states can also be expected to take place with reference to magazine capacity and every other aspect of firearm ownership. Senator Feinstein will only be satisfied today with magazines with a 10-round capacity. Next week, however, she will demand magazines with an eight-round capacity. Today, gun control advocates only want to register, fingerprint, and submit to psychiatric evaluation anyone who owns an “Assault Weapon”. Next month, however, gun control advocates will get the Obama administration to pass an executive order that requires the owners of these “Assault Weapons” to list them on their Internal Revenue Service tax returns and pay a tax on them. Three months from now, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives (ATF) will knock on the doors of Americans at 6:00 a.m. in the morning to catalog and inspect the “Assault Weapons” and will confiscate any of them that is not completely disassembled and each such weapon is locked inside its own separate $3,000 gun safe. Six months from now, every American who will want to purchase a new firearm will be required to turn in three of his older firearms, pass a test by which he or she will have to recite the name and serial number of every part of the firearm to be purchased, and bring a written evaluation from each of 12 psychiatrists who will need to opine that the applicant does not seek to purchase the firearm to compensate for some perceived or real sexual inadequacy. In seven months from now, any firearm owner who has in his possession three boxes or more of ammunition with 50 rounds apiece will be required to allow surprise inspections by the Environmental Protection Agency to ascertain that an adverse environmental impact is not experienced by a new, previously-unknown species of mosquito.
Any list of new government regulations and bureaucratic entanglements is certain to be endless and will just whet the appetite of gun control advocates and officious government intermeddlers for more control. The American people who truly care about their natural and constitutional liberties must contact their elected representatives and the National Rifle Association. They must instruct their representatives that, other than having a national registry of the mentally infirm, there must not be any further compromise because, short of a revolution, every liberty that will be surrendered by them to the government will be a liberty forever lost to the people.
