“I never thought I had a need for that type of hyper-high-capacity automatic weapon. I like to shoot, I like to go out and hunt. I like to go out sport shooting. I do all that. But I’ve never felt I needed something of that magnitude,” he said.
[ … ]
Manchin said that red flag laws “do work as long as there is due process.”
That’s the whole point, Joe.
Red flag laws are themselves a violation of due process. You can’t pick up the broken glass and make it okay.
Via WRSA, this discussion was seen. A few quotes from it, and then some remarks.
he’s yet another member of team “let’s create a state powerful enough to give me everything i want without realizing that such a state is also powerful enough to take everything i have.”
(or worse, knows this full well but presumes that it is he and his who will be wielding the whip hand and doing the taking and determining “the collective good.”)
but his argument is far more revelatory than i suspect he realizes and in it we may see both his incomprehension and the nasty shark smile of a desire to dominate by violence.
note that he cites “society” and “democracy” but not the rights that prevent democracy from devolving into that most vicious and inescapable of tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority.
and one sees glimmers of how chris sees the exercise of political power’s manifestation: to threaten violence to demand that the state do things for you. and this is telling. for the true reason for an armed populace has nothing to do with that. it is, in fact, the precise obverse.
the purpose of an armed populace is to PREVENT the state from doing things to the people against their will.
So far so good, and we can’t find anything with which to disagree.
where chris and many others like him go awry is that they do not understand rights. rights established under free contract may be positive, but just societal rights are always negative.
they state: i possess agency and so long as i am peaceful and do not violate the rights of others to such agency and property i am to be left alone to do as i will. nothing more. (but certainly nothing less)
chris and other big statists like him seek to enshrine into society some set of “positive rights” such as a right to education or to healthcare or to housing.
such rights are always and inevitably antithetical to the actual liberty of a republic because a positive right demands that others perform services or cede property to you whether they wish to or not.
this violates their basic (negative) rights to personal agency.
[ … ]
so here is the thought experiment:
if the rights of the individual are paramount, so must be the individual’s right to protect them.
to argue otherwise is to place the prerogatives of the state above the rights of the people.
and that is tyranny.
try to imagine a situation in which we the people fully cede a monopoly on the capability of effective defense against the state and still retain the ability to exercise our “right and duty” to “throw off such government and provide new guards for their future security.”
what real fundamental argument can one make that the state must have the power to subdue its people by violence and that the citizenry must be prevented from possessing the power to resist such predation?
try to imagine what such a state would look like and how you as a citizen could possibly trust it.
I take him to be a classic libertarian. He says, “where chris and many others like him go awry is that they do not understand rights. rights established under free contract …” And neither does the writer, I claim.
The contract is between the people. Rights are not established in that contract. Rights are recognized in the covenant, along with stipulations, blessings and curses. Those curses (setting up a new system of government) are outlined in the very founding document of the country.
The writer makes some legitimate logical points when he observes that we should try to imagine what an all-powerful state would look like and why we should trust it. However, he goes badly wrong when he says “what real fundamental argument can one make that the state must have the power to subdue its people by violence and that the citizenry must be prevented from possessing the power to resist such predation?”
That’s an easy answer. The philosophical question of ‘The One and the Many” has been debated for as long as mankind has existed. Recall the discussions of Parmenides, Socrates and Plato on the state, nature of reality, philosophers as kings, and other related topics.
The writer has no answer except to say that individual liberties are paramount. We’re left with one side singing “nah nah nah nah boo boo, I’m right and your wrong, and this is my view.” The other side repeats the song, and we’re back where we started. Competing world and life views.
I am not a libertarian. I am a Christian. I honor the Lordship of Jesus, who is The Christ, the only sovereign of heaven and earth. Individual liberties are not paramount. The collective is not paramount. Only the law-word of God is paramount.
Rights and duties come from the Almighty, and from nowhere else. They come from God, and God alone. He is the only sovereign and potentate.
I strongly recommend R. J. Rushdoony’s book “The One and the Many: Studies in the Philosophy of Order and Ultimacy.” But in lieu of having this at your fingertips (you should order it), here he gives a very brief primer on his views of government. Sphere authority. Vocation, family, church, neighbors, etc., etc., with the state being only one of a number of governments over mankind, and not the ultimate authority.
He points out that the word sovereign is nowhere located in the founding documents, a statement that surprises the judges before whom he has testified as an expert witness in defense of home schooling, as the founders were studious to avoid it.
Two sovereigns cannot coexist. If you want to listen to a 30 minute summary of Hegel, the roots of statism, the notion of the state as sovereign, the failure of the church, and proper government of man, you can do no better than this audio. It will be the best 30 minutes you’ll spend this week.
Karl Rove is one, but did you really expect otherwise? Say, why is anyone still talking to him anyway?
Here’s another. Maybe after hearing this the voters in South Carolina will have finally had enough and primary this jerk. It’s as if he really doesn’t understand what state he’s from.
I also stand ready to work across the aisle to find common ground – something that was absent from President Biden’s address to the nation.
That sort of telegraphing of intentions is common among mass shooters, said David French, an editor with the conservative publication The Dispatch who recentlywrote in support of red flag laws.
French, who toldMorning Edition he keeps an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle at home, said that red flag laws would be more effective than a ban on such weapons.
Such a ban wouldn’t work, French says, because “it’s a virtual impossibility — there’s tens of millions, 20 million maybe or more of them in circulation right now.” Such a ban has little support among conservatives, he said, unlike red flag laws.
Does it surprise anyone that sellout and collectivist David French supports red flag laws? French claims himself to be a Christian – I have seen no evidence.
If he is, why wouldn’t he speak to the main issue of the day, i.e., the weakness, tepidness and lethargy of the churches, of the rejection of the Almighty in the public square, failures in parenting (because of the above), government failure at proper parenting (because that’s not in the province of the state), and the moral wickedness of the society? Perhaps because of cowardice?
A law cannot possibly make up for the lack of a moral rudder. Guns have always been ubiquitous in America. School shootings have not. You do the math.
If there is no God, there is no baseline of fact from which right and wrong are delineated and defined. You end up with 300 plus million definitions of good and evil, each according to a sin-filled human and their self-righteousness. Under this humanism, peace among men will never be achieved.
The central assumption of leftist thought is that if you control the society, you can also control the character and conduct of every person who has been raised in it. Every leftist policy flows from this idea. Government becomes god and can, given political omnipotence, give us utopia.
All we have to do is give up our individuality, our rights, and our faith in anything else.
[…]
The problem of evil is an old one. It can come from many directions. But our society is particularly vulnerable because its elites can no longer even grapple with the concept.
They’ve created a society in which evil thrives because they are incapable of recognizing it.
Texas police are now saying that the armed school officer who was first reported to have engaged the gunman in a firefight was not on campus when the shooting started.
That’s convenient. So is the timing; end of school year, don’t need the building for a while. Joe “Gun Free Zone” Biden says to raze the building.
Trudeau introduced Bill C-21, which the prime minister’s office said “puts forward some of the strongest gun control measures in over 40 years,” noting a rise in gun violence.
[ … ]
If passed, the legislation would make it no longer possible to buy, sell, transfer or import handguns anywhere in Canada.
Trudeau added that the Canadian government will require long-gun magazines to be permanently altered so they can not hold more than five rounds and ban the sale and transfer of large capacity magazines.
In May 2020, Trudeau ordered a ban on 1,500 assault-style weapons, including M4, AR-10 and AR-15 rifles …
For our friends to the North, you’ve got a fight on your hands, but you knew that anyway after the trucker revolt. Trudeau is no doubt feeling his oats after he got the government to do his bidding on financial pressure against truckers and their supporters.
The “conservatives” are probably too outnumbered to stop this.
One Republican senator and one Democratic senator are hoping they can find some common ground on gun reforms that will garner enough Republican support to pass the 60-vote threshold in the Senate …
Republican Senator John Cornyn and Democratic Senator Chris Murphy will meet virtually on Tuesday to “see if we can agree on a basic framework” about how to go forward on gun legislation proposals, according to an aide to Cornyn. An aide to Murphy confirmed the senator “is participating in tomorrow’s meeting and will be holding meetings throughout the week.”
[ … ]
“So red flag laws are on the table. Background checks, expansion and on the table, as well as things like safe storage of guns. I think we can get something done, but we don’t have a lot of time.”
3 years, 3 months ago
