The reason the Second Amendment exists, in the words of 19th century jurist and scholar Joseph Story, is to prevent “unprincipled and ambitious rulers [from] subvert[ing] the government or trampl[ing] on the rights of the people.” The people are the ultimate check on the excesses of the central government.
But you’d never know that by listening today’s leftists, who piously insist that the Second Amendment protects a collective right, and only the police and military may keep and bear arms.
In light of the above, the tenor of current political rhetoric is all the more bizarre. As I write this, the much hoped-for, much-feared Donald J. Trump has just taken the oath of office and become America’s 45th President. The left is still freaking out about it in the most childish ways, exemplified by a ten-year old boy who started a fire just so he could say “screw our president!”
They’re exhibiting the same reaction they’ve been having about Mr. Trump since 2015; he’s a fascist, and will be the worst President we’ve ever had, including the execrable James Buchanan and all of those others who gave the last full measure of political devotion giving succor to the peculiar institution of human chattel slavery in that calculus. No, it isn’t just leftists, either:
The worst human being ever to enter the presidency, and I include all the slaveholders.
— David Frum (@davidfrum) January 20, 2017
Some of these dedicated anti-Trumpers are now styling themselves the “Resistance”, as if they were a musical feature in a South Park subplot.
Look, I voted for the guy, and while he’s certainly flawed, (as all men are,) and although some his rhetoric is a bit fiery, there’s no evidence that he’s actually a nascent dictator.
But, if you really think he is, what the hell are you doing bragging about how the next time your 2004 VW Jetta Sportswagen TDI needs an alignment, you’re not going to take it to Pep Boys?
Why are you holding hug-in support meetings where you drink eggnog and “chill” and talk about your feelings?
For heaven’s sake, why are you screwing around with coloring books and moaning about NEA funding if you really believe the spawn of Lucifer is now occupying the White House?
The Trump presidency is laying bare the obvious contradictions in what passes for American progressivism. The old leftists, the ones who didn’t mess around wearing Che Guevara t-shirts, but instead grabbed a rifle and fought alongside men of his ilk, the ones who knew that political power came from strength, would have started fighting already. They’d know they might lose (as they did across most of Latin America, for example,) but the contest would be on.
Modern American progressivism, however, is a philosophy that enshrines personal weakness and victimhood; the virtues of passivity, asceticism and virtue-signalling, where changing the color of one’s social media avatar or posting a picture with hand-written homilies are substitutes for doing something real. It’s the portrait of a disarmed people.
That’s how you end up with articles about the so-called “antifa” “resistance” leadership that wastes whole paragraphs moaning about how Trump is going to appoint “another Second-Amendment fundamentalist – a judge who will back a constitutional right to own military-style assault weapons” to the Supreme Court.
Does the left even listen to its own rhetoric? They’re getting themselves riled up because “Literally Hitler” has just become president, and in their fevered imaginations (a/k/a the New York Times), he’s about to start rounding people up into camps. But instead of grabbing a gun and heading for the hills, they’re quaking in their boots because a few gun control laws might be rolled back.
Give me a break! The modern left wouldn’t even be a speed bump for “Literally Hitler”.
Those of us who have the mindset, training, equipment, and inclination to do so will be keeping our powder dry and watching President Trump’s words and deeds very closely. Of course, he’s promised to fight for some causes we believe in, which — oddly enough — would protect civil liberties like the right to keep and bear arms for all Americans. Leftists included.
That’s not exactly fascist behavior. It’s also better treatment than we are getting from alleged civil liberties activists who insist on making enemies of gun owners for their own sporadic three minutes of base-rallying hate.
But don’t worry, if The Donald or anyone else really does go over the line, at least some of us will be ready to do the actual work, to make the actual stand, to take the actual incoming fire, and pledge our actual lives, fortunes and sacred honor to defend liberty from actual tyranny.
Yeah, we might fail, especially if the full might of the nation were arrayed against us. But there’s more to a long guerilla struggle than merely winning set-piece battles; that’s something that successful insurgents fighting a powerful enemy like George Washington, Ariel Sharon, and Võ Nguyên Giáp all understood. It’s for that chance that the Founding Fathers made sure that we’d always be able to have our “military grade” rifles within arm’s reach.
In the unlikely event of a real emergency, America’s Constitution gives us the chance to grab our rifles and stave off tyranny. One thing is for sure: disarmed people who call themselves “progressives” in America today would never do that.
NOTE: Some minor spelling/grammar changes were made by the author on 2017-01-22.