American Exceptionalism and Gun Control
America is unique among nation-states in that it is the only one founded on an ideal-- liberty. From its first colonial days, the people of America fled their home countries in order to find an existence without oppressive governmental control.
When the colonists could no longer tolerate the tyrannical control of a monarch on the other side of the Atlantic, they did the unthinkable: They went to war to overthrow the existing colonial government under the Crown of England. These men were (quite literally) revolutionaries, and they formed the first government of the United States of America, and drafted and ratified one of the most remarkable and perfect political documents of all time, which we now refer to simply as "The Constitution."
All of the philosophy of the founders of this great nation is encapsulated in the Constitution. It is the distilled essence of their wisdom and ideas on governance. It is more than the law of the land. The Constitution IS America.
The Constitution is a document that exists not to empower goverment, but to restrict it-- severely. The founders recognized that power is inherent within every person; that no person, by virtue of bloodline or any other cause, has any more inherent or natural power than any other. This is in direct contrast to the monarchies that were in place across Europe, where a king or queen inherited total power, and where the people had only those rights (more properly called privileges) that the sovereign (the monarch) decided to allow them.
The founders recognized that this was unjust, and that no person had any more right to rule than any other person. The new government they formed, as described by The Constitution, was one where specific powers were delegated to the government by the people-- the reverse of a monarchy.
Under the Constitution, the government had only those specific enumerated (listed) powers that the sovereign people (which was all citizens) allowed it. All other powers were and are strictly off limits to the federal government. Those powers not listed as belonging to the federal government are the exclusive property of the people-- or the states, if the people of that state should decide to delegate those powers to their state of residence.
In a monarchy, the people are the servant of the monarch. Under the Constitution, the government exists only to serve the people, who have delegated specific powers to that government toward that end.
The government described by the Constitution was a very radical thing when it was ratified. It still is-- and even though the republic is one that has spread throughout the world, the concept that rights, as well as all political power, is/are inherent within the people and exist independently of any government, is still a uniquely American idea.
This idea, as codified by the Constitution, has led to America's position as a beacon of freedom throughout the world, and is directly responsible for the country's growth from a piece of some other country's empire to the sole superpower in the world.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people that see the Constitution not as the distilled wisdom of the founders and the essence of everything that is America, but as a document that has quite a number of very serious flaws. And even though the Constitution has a very specific procedure for correcting such errors (the amendment process), there are those who wish to change its meaning without going through the necessary process.
The people who think this way are easy to spot. They're the ones who use a key phrase when they describe the Constitution: "A living, breathing document." These words are poison to the liberty within the Constitution, and anyone who uses them should be immediately suspected of being a usurper of liberty that belongs to the people whether or not the government recognizes that it does, or a person who has been duped by such a usurper into believing that the Constitution doesn't necessarily mean what it says, but instead means whatever the Justices of the Supreme Court decide it should mean.
It is the Legislative Branch that has the sole power to propose and enact laws, and to amend the Constitution. This power was delegated by the people to the Congress, and to the legislatures of the various states. The power to decide what the Constitution should mean belongs to Congress and Congress alone.
That's why the "living document" idea is completely, totally wrong. The power to reinterpret the Constitution and change its meaning was never delegated to the court at any level. The job of the Supreme court is to act as a referee when it is not clear whether a certain law passed by Congress was within the specific limitations imposed by the Constitution. A referee does not change the rules of the game!
What all this means is that the Constitution means exactly what it meant when it was ratified. Any amendments mean exactly what they meant when such amendments were ratified. There is absolutely not one iota of leeway in this. The Constitution was written by a group of men who had just overthrown their tyrannical government, and who instituted a new government with one purpose in mind-- to cripple the ability of that government to ever become tyrannical again.
It is self-evident that such people never would have intended for Supreme Court Justices, who are in fact agents of the federal government, to decide that the main limitation on the federal government's power doesn't mean what it says. If you read the many writings of the founders, you will see that the idea that the judiciary could change the meaning of laws or (heaven forbid) the Constitution was unthinkable to them.
What all of this means in terms of gun control is that not one of the many federal gun control laws is Constitutional. This is true even if the Second Amendment is ignored. In many ways, the argument about what the Second Amendment means misses one very important point, and that is that the federal government was never delegated the authority to regulate guns in any way, shape, or form.
The Bill of Rights was seen by the Federalists (the group of people who supported the Constitution) as unnecessary. Since the federal government had not been given the authority to establish a national religion, regulate free speech or expression, to regulate the bearing of arms, et cetera, it was held that a Bill of Rights specifically protecting these rights (which the people, sovereign as they are, did NOT delegate to the government) was repetitive and unnecessary.
Ultimately, the Bill of Rights was included as a compromise to convince the states which were uneasy to ratify the Constitution. If any of the founders had been able to predict the degree to which the federal government has usurped powers that it is not allowed to have, the Bill of Rights may have been longer than the unamended Constitution.
For much of the 20th century, there has been controversy about the meaning of the Second Amendment. (Before that, it was absolutely uncontroversial; it was universally held to protect the right of citizens to own and carry state of the art military firearms.) People who wished to limit or eliminate the right of the people to keep and bear arms began to argue that the prefatory clause limited the scope of the protection to actual militia service (which they have then described in various ways.)
What is a prefatory clause? Simply, it is the clause (the chunk of the single sentence that comes before the second comma) that acts as a preface. The other clause, the operative clause, is the one that actually does the work.
The Second Amendment is as follows:
"A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of the free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
The prefatory clause tells the reader why the Second Amendment exists: because the founders thought that a well-regulated militia (description of what that means below) was necessary to the security of a free state. While the inclusion of a preface in the Bill of Rights is unique, it is by no means unusual as far as laws go. It was common practice at the time to preface a law with a "finding" by the legislature that serves to justify the operative portion that follows. The preface didn't have any force of law itself; it was merely an explanation and a context for the law that followed.
To this day, many bills (proposed laws that have not yet been passed, if that's not already obvious) still contain a preface that describes the reason for the law. This is no secret to most of the people who disingenuously try to tell us that the Second Amendment is obscure or hard to comprehend. They want us to believe that it is obscure or murky in meaning so that we will accept the gun control schemes they wish to pass, even though the operative (legally binding) part of the Second Amendment is quite clear in stating that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Such usurpers have chided freedom enthusiasts for only considering the second (operative) clause of the Second Amendment when it comes to gun laws. They insist that the prefatory clause limits the bearing of arms to an official state militia, such as the National Guard.
This is wrong on many levels. First of all, the National Guard was not created until more than 100 years after the Constitution was ratified. The militia the founders referred to in the Second Amendment was the unorganized militia-- the whole of the people, excluding some government officials.
So even if the prefatory clause meant that only members of the militia could own guns (and it doesn't-- it's an explanation which has no force of law itself), it would still prohibit all gun control schemes, because all of us are members of the militia.
Recently, the usurpers have latched on to the "well-regulated" wording as a justification of gun control. That's wrong, too, because "regulated," at the time of the ratification of the Constitution, did not mean limited by a series of laws. Rather, a well-regulated militia would be well disciplined and competent with their arms (and the best way to accomplish that is to have those arms be the private property of the members of the militia).
The thrust of all of this is that the 2008 U.S. v. Heller decision was right insofar as it said that the Second Amendment does protect an individual right. While the usurpers have cried foul and accused the Roberts court of legislating from the bench (usurping the power delegated strictly to the legislature), it was clearly the only decision that could be reached by anyone who believes that the Constitution means what it says.
The fact that 4 of the justices voted against the Heller decision is direct evidence that they have no business on the bench at all; they are trying to amend the Constitution by judicial fiat because they don't like the right the Second Amendment protects. If they want to ban guns, there is a means by which the Second Amendment can be repealed-- and it's not by having the Supreme Court saying that it doesn't mean what it clearly says.
President Obama has made some statements, prior to his election, that ought to make every American very suspicious. He stated that it was unfortunate that the Supreme Court did not, in any of the civil rights related decisions of the past, allow for redistribution of income.
There is clearly nothing in the Constitution that allows the federal government to take money from someone who earned it and to give it to someone who did not. The founders would have been mortified by such a suggestion. The Supreme Court never put income redistribution in any of its decisions because there is no such mention of that power having been delegated to the federal government.
No person who respects the Constitution can possibly support the idea that nine justices, uneelected and not accountable to anyone, would be allowed to amend the Constitution in any way they please. The process for amending the Constitution is very difficult, and that was intentional. Certainly, there was no intent for it to be as simple as a popular vote of 5 of the 9 justices!
Further, it almost goes without saying that anyone who loves America and thinks that it means anything at all cannot condone the desecration of that document that defines all that America stands for. Anyone who wants to change the Constitution by judicial fiat is supporting an idea that is thoroughly unamerican and repugnant to all that America stands for. That would be true even if the thing that the usurper wished to "read into" the Constitution was something that was completely non-controversial and agreed upon by every American as just and right. If it is just and right (such as the abolition of slavery), then there should be no problem amending the Constitution accordingly!
What all of this means is that unless and until there is a Constitutional Amendment that repeals the Second Amendment AND grants the federal government the power to prohibit guns, all gun restrictions at the federal level are wholly unconstitutional. It doesn't get any simpler than that.
In my next post, I'll get more into the practical issues of why gun control is unworkable in America.
When the colonists could no longer tolerate the tyrannical control of a monarch on the other side of the Atlantic, they did the unthinkable: They went to war to overthrow the existing colonial government under the Crown of England. These men were (quite literally) revolutionaries, and they formed the first government of the United States of America, and drafted and ratified one of the most remarkable and perfect political documents of all time, which we now refer to simply as "The Constitution."
All of the philosophy of the founders of this great nation is encapsulated in the Constitution. It is the distilled essence of their wisdom and ideas on governance. It is more than the law of the land. The Constitution IS America.
The Constitution is a document that exists not to empower goverment, but to restrict it-- severely. The founders recognized that power is inherent within every person; that no person, by virtue of bloodline or any other cause, has any more inherent or natural power than any other. This is in direct contrast to the monarchies that were in place across Europe, where a king or queen inherited total power, and where the people had only those rights (more properly called privileges) that the sovereign (the monarch) decided to allow them.
The founders recognized that this was unjust, and that no person had any more right to rule than any other person. The new government they formed, as described by The Constitution, was one where specific powers were delegated to the government by the people-- the reverse of a monarchy.
Under the Constitution, the government had only those specific enumerated (listed) powers that the sovereign people (which was all citizens) allowed it. All other powers were and are strictly off limits to the federal government. Those powers not listed as belonging to the federal government are the exclusive property of the people-- or the states, if the people of that state should decide to delegate those powers to their state of residence.
In a monarchy, the people are the servant of the monarch. Under the Constitution, the government exists only to serve the people, who have delegated specific powers to that government toward that end.
The government described by the Constitution was a very radical thing when it was ratified. It still is-- and even though the republic is one that has spread throughout the world, the concept that rights, as well as all political power, is/are inherent within the people and exist independently of any government, is still a uniquely American idea.
This idea, as codified by the Constitution, has led to America's position as a beacon of freedom throughout the world, and is directly responsible for the country's growth from a piece of some other country's empire to the sole superpower in the world.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people that see the Constitution not as the distilled wisdom of the founders and the essence of everything that is America, but as a document that has quite a number of very serious flaws. And even though the Constitution has a very specific procedure for correcting such errors (the amendment process), there are those who wish to change its meaning without going through the necessary process.
The people who think this way are easy to spot. They're the ones who use a key phrase when they describe the Constitution: "A living, breathing document." These words are poison to the liberty within the Constitution, and anyone who uses them should be immediately suspected of being a usurper of liberty that belongs to the people whether or not the government recognizes that it does, or a person who has been duped by such a usurper into believing that the Constitution doesn't necessarily mean what it says, but instead means whatever the Justices of the Supreme Court decide it should mean.
It is the Legislative Branch that has the sole power to propose and enact laws, and to amend the Constitution. This power was delegated by the people to the Congress, and to the legislatures of the various states. The power to decide what the Constitution should mean belongs to Congress and Congress alone.
That's why the "living document" idea is completely, totally wrong. The power to reinterpret the Constitution and change its meaning was never delegated to the court at any level. The job of the Supreme court is to act as a referee when it is not clear whether a certain law passed by Congress was within the specific limitations imposed by the Constitution. A referee does not change the rules of the game!
What all this means is that the Constitution means exactly what it meant when it was ratified. Any amendments mean exactly what they meant when such amendments were ratified. There is absolutely not one iota of leeway in this. The Constitution was written by a group of men who had just overthrown their tyrannical government, and who instituted a new government with one purpose in mind-- to cripple the ability of that government to ever become tyrannical again.
It is self-evident that such people never would have intended for Supreme Court Justices, who are in fact agents of the federal government, to decide that the main limitation on the federal government's power doesn't mean what it says. If you read the many writings of the founders, you will see that the idea that the judiciary could change the meaning of laws or (heaven forbid) the Constitution was unthinkable to them.
What all of this means in terms of gun control is that not one of the many federal gun control laws is Constitutional. This is true even if the Second Amendment is ignored. In many ways, the argument about what the Second Amendment means misses one very important point, and that is that the federal government was never delegated the authority to regulate guns in any way, shape, or form.
The Bill of Rights was seen by the Federalists (the group of people who supported the Constitution) as unnecessary. Since the federal government had not been given the authority to establish a national religion, regulate free speech or expression, to regulate the bearing of arms, et cetera, it was held that a Bill of Rights specifically protecting these rights (which the people, sovereign as they are, did NOT delegate to the government) was repetitive and unnecessary.
Ultimately, the Bill of Rights was included as a compromise to convince the states which were uneasy to ratify the Constitution. If any of the founders had been able to predict the degree to which the federal government has usurped powers that it is not allowed to have, the Bill of Rights may have been longer than the unamended Constitution.
For much of the 20th century, there has been controversy about the meaning of the Second Amendment. (Before that, it was absolutely uncontroversial; it was universally held to protect the right of citizens to own and carry state of the art military firearms.) People who wished to limit or eliminate the right of the people to keep and bear arms began to argue that the prefatory clause limited the scope of the protection to actual militia service (which they have then described in various ways.)
What is a prefatory clause? Simply, it is the clause (the chunk of the single sentence that comes before the second comma) that acts as a preface. The other clause, the operative clause, is the one that actually does the work.
The Second Amendment is as follows:
"A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of the free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
The prefatory clause tells the reader why the Second Amendment exists: because the founders thought that a well-regulated militia (description of what that means below) was necessary to the security of a free state. While the inclusion of a preface in the Bill of Rights is unique, it is by no means unusual as far as laws go. It was common practice at the time to preface a law with a "finding" by the legislature that serves to justify the operative portion that follows. The preface didn't have any force of law itself; it was merely an explanation and a context for the law that followed.
To this day, many bills (proposed laws that have not yet been passed, if that's not already obvious) still contain a preface that describes the reason for the law. This is no secret to most of the people who disingenuously try to tell us that the Second Amendment is obscure or hard to comprehend. They want us to believe that it is obscure or murky in meaning so that we will accept the gun control schemes they wish to pass, even though the operative (legally binding) part of the Second Amendment is quite clear in stating that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
Such usurpers have chided freedom enthusiasts for only considering the second (operative) clause of the Second Amendment when it comes to gun laws. They insist that the prefatory clause limits the bearing of arms to an official state militia, such as the National Guard.
This is wrong on many levels. First of all, the National Guard was not created until more than 100 years after the Constitution was ratified. The militia the founders referred to in the Second Amendment was the unorganized militia-- the whole of the people, excluding some government officials.
So even if the prefatory clause meant that only members of the militia could own guns (and it doesn't-- it's an explanation which has no force of law itself), it would still prohibit all gun control schemes, because all of us are members of the militia.
Recently, the usurpers have latched on to the "well-regulated" wording as a justification of gun control. That's wrong, too, because "regulated," at the time of the ratification of the Constitution, did not mean limited by a series of laws. Rather, a well-regulated militia would be well disciplined and competent with their arms (and the best way to accomplish that is to have those arms be the private property of the members of the militia).
The thrust of all of this is that the 2008 U.S. v. Heller decision was right insofar as it said that the Second Amendment does protect an individual right. While the usurpers have cried foul and accused the Roberts court of legislating from the bench (usurping the power delegated strictly to the legislature), it was clearly the only decision that could be reached by anyone who believes that the Constitution means what it says.
The fact that 4 of the justices voted against the Heller decision is direct evidence that they have no business on the bench at all; they are trying to amend the Constitution by judicial fiat because they don't like the right the Second Amendment protects. If they want to ban guns, there is a means by which the Second Amendment can be repealed-- and it's not by having the Supreme Court saying that it doesn't mean what it clearly says.
President Obama has made some statements, prior to his election, that ought to make every American very suspicious. He stated that it was unfortunate that the Supreme Court did not, in any of the civil rights related decisions of the past, allow for redistribution of income.
There is clearly nothing in the Constitution that allows the federal government to take money from someone who earned it and to give it to someone who did not. The founders would have been mortified by such a suggestion. The Supreme Court never put income redistribution in any of its decisions because there is no such mention of that power having been delegated to the federal government.
No person who respects the Constitution can possibly support the idea that nine justices, uneelected and not accountable to anyone, would be allowed to amend the Constitution in any way they please. The process for amending the Constitution is very difficult, and that was intentional. Certainly, there was no intent for it to be as simple as a popular vote of 5 of the 9 justices!
Further, it almost goes without saying that anyone who loves America and thinks that it means anything at all cannot condone the desecration of that document that defines all that America stands for. Anyone who wants to change the Constitution by judicial fiat is supporting an idea that is thoroughly unamerican and repugnant to all that America stands for. That would be true even if the thing that the usurper wished to "read into" the Constitution was something that was completely non-controversial and agreed upon by every American as just and right. If it is just and right (such as the abolition of slavery), then there should be no problem amending the Constitution accordingly!
What all of this means is that unless and until there is a Constitutional Amendment that repeals the Second Amendment AND grants the federal government the power to prohibit guns, all gun restrictions at the federal level are wholly unconstitutional. It doesn't get any simpler than that.
In my next post, I'll get more into the practical issues of why gun control is unworkable in America.
posted by Porcupine Nine at 2:00 PM
1 Comments:
This is truly informative and educational, much appreciated. I have subscribed to you blog beacuse of this post.
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