Get Your Head Straight About the Second Amendment
BY Herschel Smith
1 month, 3 weeks ago
There is an X post in this link, but that’s not what interested me. The weird cacophony of comments were just as strange as anything I could have imagined.
I am an old man now. I’ve boiled away all the BS. Gun control is my litmus test. If you support gun control you are a fascist. Period. End of story.
If you support fascism there is already a party for you. The Democrats.
[ … ]
Litmus test you say?
“If you support gun control you are a fascist. Period. End of story.“
So you agree with me that Vladimir Putin is a fascist, good to know.
“Russian President Vladimir Putin has signed into law a bill tightening gun controls in response to a deadly school shooting earlier this year.
The law, signed into force on June 28, raises the minimum age for buying hunting rifles and long-barreled guns from 18 to 21.
It also provides for additional restrictions on owning weapons.“https://www.rferl.org/amp/russia-gun-ownership-law/31331101.html
It all goes downhill from there and apparently these commenters know each other (at least, over the interwebz) and one thinks he has something on the other. I’m glad I don’t deal with these commenters. I’d just delete them. I have no patience for things like that in my house.
Let me answer the question for you. Yes, if you support gun control, you are a communist. You may be a communist with a little ‘c’ who pretends to love liberty, or you may be a communist with a big ‘C’ who admits it all. But either way, you are a communist.
That’s why I didn’t like GWB who wanted to renew the Clinton era AWB. That’s why I didn’t like Clinton (among many other things). That’s why I didn’t like Obama (among many other things). And if Trump continues to make claims that he is the best friend gun owners have and then ignores our demands, I won’t like him very much by the end of all of this.
The same thing goes for Putin. I don’t like him because he is a gun controller (among many other things). Gun control is a signal issue that indicates to me where your heart is.
And note well that both the senate and the house let 2A advocates, sports shooters, hunters and gun owners down in their promise to undo suppressors and SBRs as NFA items. This will come back to haunt them.
I know that there is a flurry of lawsuits now over the NFA given the fact that there is now a registry without a tax which folks purport to violate other laws passed by congress.
So what? All a court has to do is decide that if congress this term had wanted to remove suppressors and SBRs from the NFA, or that they were worried about running afoul of other things they had done, they could have easily removed them from the NFA altogether or not rescinded the tax.
As it is, the $200 tax has stood for almost 100 years. Now that we’ve made it fair game, who knows what the democrats will do when they control things (as they are bound to)?
They’ve opened a can of worms by doing what they consider to be a halfway house. A court will never side with us, and even if so, the SCOTUS will never grant it certiorari. The Pollyanna posts and videos about how this is a win annoy me. It’s a fantastical and abject loss and failure.
Finally, I suspect John Thune was worried about losing the senate by exposing Cornyn and others as gun controllers. He doesn’t have his chamber in order, and I suspect that’s why he didn’t overrule the parliamentarian.
So before Elon or anyone else gets his head straight about the second amendment, we need to first focus on the senate and house, if there is really any further point to doing so. I suspect all is lost and there is no longer any purpose in politics. It’s all just one uniparty.
And we had a once in a hundred year chance to remove suppressors from the NFA. But you didn’t have your chamber in order. There are gun controllers among you that you decided to protect rather than do the people’s work. You served fellow senators instead.
— CaptainsJournal (@BrutusMaximus50) July 5, 2025
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On July 6, 2025 at 10:29 pm, Longbow said:
If the NFA is a tax measure, and they have just eliminated the tax, then what argument will they be able to make before any federal court, never mind the Supreme Court, that the NFA serves any purpose? Unless they finally want to be honest and say it is injurious the theSecond Amendmemt, which has been their intent all along.
I have been saying for several decades now, the NFA is a house of cards. Pull one card and the whole thing crumbles. The removal of tax payments from a “revenue generating measure”, removes any justification for the existence of the statute.
On July 6, 2025 at 10:45 pm, Dan said:
Yes. The subject of Gun Control IS a “litmus test”. And anyone supporting gun control is evil because gun control serves only ONE purpose. The ability of those in power to CONTROL the rest of us.
On July 7, 2025 at 8:30 am, TMF Bert said:
I have been saying for several decades now, the NFA is a house of cards. Pull one card and the whole thing crumbles. The removal of tax payments from a “revenue generating measure”, removes any justification for the existence of the statute.-Longbow
From a purely legal assessment you are probably correct.
Unfortunately, the government has proven time and time again beginning back in 1935 with us v miller that they will pull any tricks necessary to maintain their unconstitutional controls over the second amendment.
I predict that the outcome of a lawsuit over the registration will be a reinstatement of the tax by the judicial branch.
On July 7, 2025 at 8:52 am, Herschel Smith said:
The NFA may be a house of cards. That, of course, has nothing to do with what I’m saying or what a judge will find. Once again, remember Snope and the framework of the 2A in the context of the militia.
On July 7, 2025 at 12:10 pm, X said:
Sorry, but being for gun control makes you neither “communist” nor “fascist,” but a typical power-hungry politician. Indeed, communists like Fidel and Che and Mao and Lenin were all for armed peasants during the revolution. But once the revolution was over, it was time to turn in the guns.
The same thing happened in our own country, perhaps on a lesser scale but the principle was the same nonetheless: once the American elites seized control from the British, they didn’t want yahoos shooting at THEM. Shays’s Rebellion prompted the Founders to call for the Constitutional Convention which placed the control of the militias under the new federal government and created a standing army. When the Whiskey Rebellion took place a few years later, Washington sent troops to suppress it riki-tik.
In a lot of ways our “gun rights” are a sham. The government only grants you the privilege to own guns that they feel will not threaten then. You have to get the approval of the FBI to buy any gun from a dealer. You need to get the approval of the ATF to have any NFA item and you need to register it so they government can come seize it if you are not a good little boy. You are not allowed to CCW in government buildings.
That’s why they’ll never repeal the NFA. The government, both Republicans and Democrats, are protected by soldiers and cops who have access to NFA items that you are either forbidden to have, or only allowed to have as a privilege under the strictest scrutiny.
Gun control exists to protect the government and the elites from the people. It matters not whether you are in a “fascist,” “communist” or “democratic” country. “Democratic” England and “democratic” Australia have some of the worst gun control in the world. Gun control in those nations is no different than it was in fascist Germany.
On July 7, 2025 at 12:24 pm, Herschel Smith said:
@X,
You can be “sorry,” but you’re not right. There are “democracies” which are run by communists. The US is one of them. And if the typical pol is a gun controller, then by definition (my definition) he is a communist.
On July 7, 2025 at 12:56 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
Remember that the idea that fascism and communism are polar opposites politically, is one of the most-pernicious historical lies of the 20th century. Fascism and communism finally fought not because of how different they were, but because of how alike they were. Both ideologies are near-neighbors on the hard left of the political spectrum.
It is germane to note that all of the early fascists, including the founder of modern fascism -Benito Mussolini – were former socialists/communists. Mussolini himself regarded fascism as the final and best version of socialism. And in Germany what was the new ideology of the state called? National Socialism.
Both fascist and communist regimes in the 20th century widely practiced gun control.
Here in the U.S.A., Senator Thomas Dodd (D-CT) and his colleagues sponsored what became the 1968 Gun Control Act, which was modeled in part upon the gun control laws of the Third Reich. President Johnson, himself a statist through-and-through, signed it into law once it cleared both Houses of Congress.
Joseph Stalin, the brutal dictator who ruled the USSR with an iron fist for decades, once said “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?”
He is also infamous for saying: “Death is the solution to all problems. No man – no problem…”
Over in China, Mao Zedong said: “All political power comes from the barrel of a gun. The communist party must command all the guns, that way, no guns can ever be used to command the party…”
The late Professor R.J. Rummel, the renowned political scientist, spent his long career researching the phenomena of mass killing, democides and genocides. Amongst his many findings that have relevance to this discussion, he found that throughout history, when any political regime was preparing to subjugate or even wipe out its enemies, it nearly always disarmed them first.
Most historians and political scientists regard the Armenian genocide as the first of the modern era, since it was the first such event to be documented in the age of mass media, including newspaper, magazines and still and motion-picture photography.
Circa 1915-1921, the Muslim Ottoman Empire, slew some 1.5 million Armenian and Greek Christians in what is today modern Turkey and the Levant. Some years prior to the liquidation, the Ottoman sultanate instituted strict gun control. Thus, when Ottoman soldiers raided Christian and other non-Muslim communities, they faced little to no armed resistance whatsoever.
When they take power, communist regimes invariably seek to control the enforcement arms of the state, namely the police and the military. This is in accordance with Mao’s dictum, nothing more and nothing less.
On July 7, 2025 at 4:06 pm, Gryphon said:
The correct way to frame the “Litmus Test” about ANY ‘gun control’ is, IMO, extraordinarily simple – the Second Amendment ends with …”Shall Not be Infringed” which is, in Legal Terms, one of the most Absolutist Statements in that Document. It renders ANY and ALL so-called ‘gun control laws’ non-Constitutional, null and void.
Politicians who Enact, and thugpigs who ‘enforce’ non-Constitutional ‘laws’ are both ‘communist’ and ‘fascist’ because both political Terms denote Anti-Freedom concepts and policies.
On July 7, 2025 at 5:18 pm, MTHead said:
It matters not at all what you call them. Control by an elite groups is always the end. And from Gilgamesh to DJT, they’re all the same. Divide, disarm, destroy.
We eliminated a tax through reconciliation. So we don’t need a registry to administer the tax with 51 votes?
OK, what stops the commies from using 51 votes to replace the tax, and include all firearms in the NFA re-started registry?
All they have to do is have the same senate parl to say it’s just a tax. Which the commies will have no problem doing. And we will have set the precedence and fought it through court for them.
“The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”, were the chosen words for a reason.
It amends congresses power to tax as well as register, control interstate commerce of bearable arms.
That’s the fight. That’s what gun.org needs to fight in court right now. That congress never had those powers in the first place. As all those powers claimed by congress through the 34’NFA were amended by the 2A.
I’m I missing something? Cause this seems like grade school constitutional law to me.
On July 7, 2025 at 6:05 pm, PGF said:
Friendly reminder that the Second Amendment doesn’t mention guns. It refers to arms of all types; every terrible implement of war.
On July 7, 2025 at 9:20 pm, X said:
“I’m I missing something? Cause this seems like grade school constitutional law to me.”
Yes, you are missing the fact that the Constitution was torn to pieces by 1865 after Lincoln sent Gen. Sherman to burn an American city to the ground and terrorize the civilian population from Atlanta to Savannah.
“Constitutional law” has been pure sophistry ever since, utterly disconnected from the document of 1787 in which the sovereign states freely consented to create a national government of strictly limited and enumerated powers.
On July 7, 2025 at 9:36 pm, Frank Nobody said:
I agree— this is far worse than if they had done nothing. $1000 tax on cans next time dims are in charge? What about adding normal-cap magazines for $1000 a pop? AR lowers? $10K? Whatever. The republicans hath screwed us.
Maybe, maybe, maybe these suits will succeed, but I’m of your mind– the courts will never back us in this.
I’d sure like to be wrong.
On July 7, 2025 at 10:29 pm, Georgiaboy61 said:
“In the larger sense, however, the personal ownership of firearms is only secondarily a matter of defense against the criminal. Note the following from Thomas Jefferson: The strongest reason for the people to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against the tyranny of government. That is why our masters in Washington are so anxious to disarm us. They are not afraid of criminals. They are afraid of a populace which cannot be subdued by tyrants.”
~ Colonel Jeff Cooper, USMC (ret.)
On July 8, 2025 at 2:07 pm, MTHead said:
@X, Yup, you’re exactly spot on.
But what we know and what can be used in court in this matter are two different things. We’re trying to be civilized. We know the communist never have or will be.
But that’s not the argument the court is going to listen to.
At this trajectory we all know were going to be stepping off the porch. But just as our forefathers, we will try everything we can to get government to address our grievances peacefully.
2A is the most solid ground to stand on in my estimation. No matter the circumstance we find ourselves in.
On July 9, 2025 at 9:29 am, george 1 said:
This is just another case of the Republicans proving to be less than worthless. The President, the Vice President, the Senate Leader and the Speaker of the House all stabbed us in the back.
All of the above have set this up so we are in a more difficult position than we would have been if they had not done anything. IMHO that was done on purpose.
On July 14, 2025 at 2:28 pm, streamfortyseven said:
Actually, our Constitutional rights were enumerated in the Federalist Constitution of 1787 in order to be a check on the powers granted by that document to the Federalist-dominated government of that time, headed up by Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, both wealthy Wall Street speculators. The Bill of Rights, stringently opposed by the Federalists, was drafted by the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and George Mason, who viewed the Constitution of 1787 as a fundamental betrayal of the ideals set out in the Declaration of Independence and our first Constitution, the Articles of Confederation. Our problem is still the consolidated, centralized government created – without actual authority – in 1787. Have a look at some contemporaneous commentary here: “We the Aristocratic party of the United States, lamenting the many inconveniences to which the late confederation subjected the well-born, the better kind of people, bringing them down to the level of the rabble-and holding in utter detestation that frontispiece to every bill of rights, “that all men are born equal”-beg leave (for the purpose of drawing a line between such as we think were ordained to govern, and such as were made to bear the weight of government without having any share in its administration) to submit to our Friends in the first class for their inspection, the following defense of our monarchical, aristocratical democracy. … ” https://streamfortyseven.substack.com/p/just-for-the-record-antifederalist