The Second Amendment and the Abstract, Surreal World of the LIberal & the Law Professor

It was utterly fascinating, a display of bloviating balderdash unequalled even by some of our fearless leader’s latest twaddle (a man talking about maintaining tax cuts and finding ways to assure people who made loans far beyond their means at the same time he demands more funding by federal inflation of a twelve billion dollar a week war sounds like raving to anyone not in the same addled condition as the speaker). The following day, if that weren’t enough, a Democrat Party spokesman delivered a response to the president’s nonsense – more nonsense.

The democrats, too, will decrease taxes!

My god, people, it’s not only incredible that anyone in government would have the colossal, the Brobdingnagian, chutzpah to utter anything so obviously false, so thunderously shouted-down by history, it’s incredible that even a public as “Pearl Harbor – isn’t that a shampoo?” stupid as this one would so much as endure to such insulting, sewer gas, cynicism. The Democrats will cut taxes while they go on funding the indescribably asinine occupation of Iraq.

Folks, the war in Iraq is being “funded” by inflation. There is no money to pay for it. “Inflation” – among the most evilly cynical euphemism ever coined - is nothing more or less than a tax. When the menagerie of morons otherwise known as Congress “appropriates” (look the damned word up – it’ll do you good) money to fund George W. Bush’s perfidious boon-doggle, it is raising your taxes! When the government spends money it doesn’t have, and you have to make the I.O.U. good (lord – how many ways do I have to say it?) you are being taxed. Without representation! The federal debt – inflation – is already ten trillion dollars ($10,000,000,000,000)! With the cost of Iraq as planned by John (“Whatever It Takes”) McCain, that figure will reach a number in excess of all the money spent on this nation’s military from 1946 to the end of the Cold War (a little over fifteen trillion dollars).

There isn’t the slightest – not a scintilla of one – chance that the economy of the United States can support that (do the #$%&@*! Numbers!).

But yesterday’s “debate” (get another thing through your heads: we don’t have debates in the U.S. anymore – we have speeches with the opposing sides on the same stage or at the same table) staged by the Heritage Foundation was low theater, comic opera. The topic was that of the Washington, D.C. v. Heller and the Second Amendment matter. The three principals were all touted as experts.

Of course.

The “experts” all – pro and con the right of the individual to keep and bear arms - averred that the U.S. Constitution “grants” certain rights. As one who until not so long go could recite verbatim from start to finish, including all twenty-seven amendments, the U.S. Constitution, and has read as much of the history of the U.S. as any man or woman alive, I would, were I ever to become a contestant in one of these Abbott and Costello affairs, point out that the Constitution does not grant rights. The Constitution recognizes and guarantees certain of the individual’s rights. In fact, it guarantees all of them, whether enumerated in the Constitution or not. It says that the very purpose of government is to protect, defend, and guarantee those rights. It has no authority – it does not claim authority – to grant or limit (infringe, in this specific instance) the god-given rights of every human being.

"Can the liberties of a nation be secure, when we have removed the conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?" --Thomas Jefferson

And here, last night as again and again of late, we have a panel of jackasses discussing rights “granted” by the Constitution.

That, moreover, it happens that the right in question is the most fundamental of all rights, the one right enjoyed by every living thing – the right to defend its life – is more significant than most will have the knowledge required for recognizing it. For the human being, to be deprived of the right to defend one’s life is to be a slave. There is no rational way to dispute that point.

But this coffee-klatch of “experts” seemed totally unaware. It was as though the subject was the monopoly-money object of a child’s board game, a sterile exercise in the hyper-theoretical having nothing to do with the real world and life therein. While I have long wondered at the convolute, twisted, and spastic reasoning of persons debating the meaning of the Second Amendment, the minimalist mental meanderings enunciated in yesterday’s “debate” by, for instance, one Mr. John Payton (who represents the NAACP as amicus curiae in the case) were, for instance, utter balderdash historically: the Second Amendment was aimed at perpetuating slavery (is everything whites do or have done aimed at abuse or belittlement of blacks?).

The argument of yet another of those Harvard Law Professor types – actually, this one is a law professor at Roger Williams University - one Carl Bogus (I’m not making that up; the bogus argument this time was, indeed, a bogus argument) was among the most obtuse, abstracted, and historically detached I’ve ever heard where the subject of gun ownership and the law so related is concerned. Basically – if anything that abstracted and nebulous can be considered to have basis – Bogus argued that the framers of the Constitution intended to “grant” – that word again - the right of the states to create militias.

Bogus also says that people who dislike having to continually defend their right to keep and bear arms have never really wanted the matter decided – it would give them nothing to bitch about, but that is just more of the same irrelevant and immaterial, non sequitur argument that has become de rigueur for the left wing where matters like this are concerned. The argument, of course, seeks by a variation on the logical fallacy known as begging the question to ignore a right existing long before the U.S. Constitution, or any constitution, and to establish a U.S. Constitution and government somehow empowered to grant human rights.

“Tell a lie often enough . . .”

But Bogus’ main assertion has to do with the “question” of the Second Amendment as a guarantee of an individual or collective right. Scholars, lawyers, and the courts, he argued, have long viewed the Second Amendment as “granting” only a collective right. Well, he’s right about that. As none other than Thomas Jefferson observed, government can only be counted on when it comes to usurpation. It always grows, never diminished.

"Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny."

But how many times have we heard that “collective right” argument? About, I would guess, as many times as we have heard government swear it will lower taxes. What we haven’t heard – it’s likewise as rare as truth, integrity, and faithfulness in Washington, D.C. - is something I’ve always wondered about; more, it’s something that has always made me doubt the sincerity of all parties to the argument in question. Another of those “nobody is this stupid” cases.

First, let’s suppose that the “well-regulated-militia”-means-no-guns, just-militia folks are right. The Founding Fathers didn’t want the people to have their own guns. Suppose you’re a state governor in the last half of the eighteenth or nineteenth century about to “provide for the common defense” (or didn’t you happen to remember, Mr. Bogus – Roger Williams Law Professor, sir – that that’s what militias were all about; I notice you didn’t once mention that particular clause of the Constitution about which you are so expert).

You call up the militia. Good for you. Except these people don’t have any guns. Worse, most assuredly, they don’t know how to use a gun, either. They’ve never been permitted to own one, much less use one.

Assuming – as I trust I am entitled by the circumstances to do – that none of the liberal-minded, anti-gun folks (people like the Roger Williams Law Professor, that is – wouldn’t want to think he’s a hypocrite, now would we?) has every owned or used a gun, let me suggest an analogy more likely to elucidate for you.

Let’s assume you want to put up a building. You’re Amish, for instance, and you want to have a barn-raising. But none of the people you call to for help has any tools. It’s against the law. And, since the folks have never been permitted to own tools, they have never used tools. The crowd you’ve conscripted doesn’t know a hammer from a saw, a brace-and-bit from a flat iron or a rolling pin.

Ever watch a guy who’s never used a hammer try to drive a ten-penny spike? Swing a ten-pound hammer to drive a post? How about a planer to trim a door for fit? How about a plumb line or a carpenter’s square or a level?

Lots of luck with your barn, and your “well-regulated” work crew.

But here we are again. Here we are wandering and groping around in the nebulous, abstract, and vacuous world of those who get their reality from a book, a law library, a television set, or a computer. One thing those who live actually in the real world can always tell immediately is that people like Payton and Bogus do not live in that world. They’re invariably like our feckless leader the other day, holding forth on how he’d really like to have gotten into combat.

I pause to let that sink in.

You think I’m kidding? Have you forgotten that this is the same patrician fop who said he understood how the little people felt? Anyway, here’s the quote: "I must say, I'm a little envious. If I were slightly younger and not employed here, I think it would be a fantastic experience to be on the front lines of helping this young democracy succeed. It must be exciting for you ... in some ways romantic, in some ways, you know, confronting danger. You're really making history, and thanks."

The son-in-law who sent me that observes that one Paul Riechhoff, an Afghanistan vet who authored the book “Chasing Ghosts,” was on the television show where that quote played. I’m told – it certainly doesn’t surprise me – that you could see the soldier’s disgust when he observed, “This is just the kind of thing people say who've never served in the military."

And it’s the kind of understanding of a Constitution written by men with their “lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor” on the line a hyper-civilized and pampered, petty intellectual pantywaist like Payton or Bogus would have. People like the lawyer and the professor live in a world made entirely of words – that abstract world I mentioned. To people like these, everything verbally possible is actually possible (remind anyone of Iraq?).

Try – if you have never in your life been in a really dangerous, even lethal, fight, don’t bother - to imagine men like the framers of the Constitution living without guns – or, for that matter, tools of any kind. With hostile savages known then as Indians everywhere, and with all manner of ravening wild animals also about everywhere, imagine any of the Founding Fathers or the men of the time being willing to surrender his weapons, leaving to another his personal safety and that of his family, and choosing to wait for a posse (or “militia”) to be formed.

Discussions – faux debates – like this one are ludicrous - “frivolous” in the coinage and jargon of the lawyer and his courts. To pretend an issue where the right of the individual to defend his life and that of his woman and children is concerned should be seen for what it is – an attempt at the most base, the most contemptuous, and rapacious of all human crimes. Slavery.

For an individual who may not defend himself has been reduced to a state lower than that of an animal – and no one doubts that animals have the right to defend themselves.