Dec 27, 2012
There is a destructive, delusional meme spreading like a virus among many misguided Americans. It pushes the idea that government can pick and choose which rights codified in the Bill of Rights it wishes to recognize or discard on any given day.
This delusion is predicated on the concept that if a popular majority can be emotionally whipped into a frenzy over one particular right, then that right can simply be discarded and stricken from the Bill of Rights.
But no such power exists to discard any portion of the Bill of Rights, at least not without proper ratification by three-fourths of the fifty states. There is no such power found solely in the federal government. There is no such power placed solely in the executive branch, nor in Congress, nor in the White House.
The Bill of Rights describes a set of individual rights and liberties which are not granted by government, but recognized as DIVINE rights given to use by our Creator. Because government never granted the rights in the first place, it has no authority to take them away.
"The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to "create" rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting." - William J Brennan Jr.
The individual liberties described in the Bill of Rights cannot be infringed, nor deleted, nor overridden by popular opinion... not even loudly screamed opinion. America is not a nation ruled by the tyranny of the mob. It isn't even a democracy -- it's a republic, where certain inalienable rights describe the protection of each individual, even if that individual is the lone voice of sanity in a majority gone mad. The Bill of Rights protects individuals from the tyranny of mob rule -- a phenomenon that routinely rears its head in any society where historical illiteracy is rampant and the masses are lulled into a state of complacency by charismatic but dishonest leaders.
It was the extended amendments attached to the Bill of Rights that outlawed slavery, guaranteeing individual freedom to those of African descent even in a time and place when the majority of voting citizens believed slavery was socially acceptable. And it was the Second Amendment that put firearms into the hands of those recently-freed slaves, ensuring that they could defend themselves against attackers of any color through the powerful expression of armed defense (aided by the laws of physics and certain materials from the table of elements, notably lead).
Another amendment beyond the Bill of Rights granted women equal voting rights in an age when the majority believed women should not be allowed to vote. It was the Bill of Rights that decriminalized prohibition, ending a dark era of mass criminalization of everyday citizens who suffered under the oppression of government law enforcement gone bad.
Yet today, incredibly, many African-Americans and women are actively assaulting the very document that first secured their own freedoms. They now wish to take their freedom and power and use it to enslave someone else by revoking other people's rights under the Bill of Rights. This is the ultimate social betrayal, and it is a powerful demonstration of the principle that those who do not respect freedom for others do not deserve it for themselves.
The Second Amendment is not negotiable
The Right to Keep and Bear Arms -- much like the Right of Free Speech -- is not negotiable. Its protections are not subject to the whims of majority opinion, nor the screaming demands of hyperventilating media personalities. All the social media trolls and opinion writers in the world can comment all they want on the Second Amendment, yet the individual right to keep and bear arms remains immutable.Just like the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment is not negotiable. No Governor, Senator or President has any power whatsoever to banish the Second Amendment, and any who attempt to oppose it only brand themselves as criminal traitors to the United States of America. Any active effort to eradicate the Second Amendment outside of law -- without going through the proper process of state ratification for Constitutional amendments -- is, by definition, an act of sedition against the United States of America and its people.
Ironically, many who viciously attack the Second Amendment do so by invoking their free speech protections under the First Amendment. Yet they seem blind to the realization that the First Amendment itself is only made possible by the Second Amendment which balances power between the People and the government, ensuring that the individual right to bear arms serves as a check and balance against the monopoly of violence every government inherently seeks.
Disarmament of the populace is always the first step to depriving them of their civil rights and human rights. Without the right to bear arms, there is no right to free speech, no right to due process, no right to trial by jury and certainly no right to be secured against unreasonable search and seizure. A government with a monopoly of force is a government that respects no boundaries and honors no limits.
Grasping this point requires competent thinking, which is why so many who now flourish in America on the popularity of pop culture idiocy fail to understand it. It is intellectually lazy to blame gun rights for violence, requiring no depth of thought or reason. Only someone of higher awareness and possessing the aptitude for multi-layered thinking can realize the critical importance of distributed firepower in stopping government violence against the People. As Ron Paul recently said, "Government security is just another kind of violence."
Ron Paul gets it. He understands that an imbalance of power in the hands of government inevitably leads to mass violence waged against the People. Those who are currently screaming for the population to be disarmed do not realize that in seeking to prevent one kind of violence (school shootings), they are unleashing a far more disastrous and horrifying violence by allowing the government to monopolize physical power over the citizens. This is a mistake that has been repeated throughout history, often at the cost of tens of millions of destroyed lives. Click here to watch my short video documentary that lays out these facts in more detail.
The Second Amendment was put in place precisely for the purpose of making sure that future Americans would not fall for the same mistake yet again. That's why it is the second highest amendment, right after the right of free speech, indicating its crucial priority in the enumeration of sacred rights that must be protected at all costs.
