As per usual in the aftermath of a shooting, the debate is over what restrictions should be placed on gun ownership. And even gun rights advocates essentially concede the point that there should be restrictions – the only thing being debated is what sort of restrictions there will be. We have to get away from that. We must, that is, start insisting that words mean what they mean and that written law is obligatory. Because we’ve allowed words to be twisted and permitted the written law to be optional we’re in the mess we have today. Time to take that stand: draw that line.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
Our liberal friends like to concentrate on the first four words: asserting that firearms ownership is tied to militia, with the National Guard, essentially the Army reserve, being now the only legitimate place to bear arms. But that is just obvious drivel – anyone reading the sentence can see that the author was merely explaining the reasoning behind the amendment…and the militia is not the National Guard: it is, essentially, all adult citizens capable of bearing arms. It most emphatically is not the military – that is why it says “militia”. The Military is a permanent force raised and armed by the State. The militia is an ad hoc organization of self-armed civilians called into service in an emergency. Very different species! But even if you want to assert that the Militia is now the Military, you can’t get around the last fourteen words – the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed. Even if the author meant to write that you have to be in the Militia to bear arms, the sentence doesn’t assert anything like that – but it does clearly state that the right to bear arms is something that government can’t infringe upon.
Infringe is an important word here – because it means to transgress, to violate, to invalidate, to encroach upon. The author could have used all sorts of words here, but he choose “infringe” because he wanted to make clear that there were no circumstances where you could deny the people the right to keep and bear arms. The government, per the Second Amendment, can do nothing to prevent or even so much as hamper the ability of the people to keep and bear arms.
No exceptions! It doesn’t say “shall not be infringed, once you pass a background check” or “shall not be infringed, except in a gun-free zone” no “shall not be infringed except for reasonable safety regulations”. It says shall not be infringed and then, literally, period. End of sentence. Nothing to add, retract or modify. We’re done here: the government cannot infringe upon the people keeping and bearing arms.
Now, lets move on to the next very important word in the sentence: arms. What is an “arm”? Well, it is anything you choose to arm yourself with. It doesn’t say the right to keep and bear muskets. Nor the right to keep and bear swords. Or keep and bear arms as long as they aren’t too lethal. No, it says “keep and bear arms.” It secures our right to keep and bear anything you wish to use as an arm – as a weapon. The author could have been specific but he wasn’t – he merely wrote the word arms. Even if in the author’s mind something else was meant, the word “arms” means what it means: it means weapons in general. Anything from a Swiss army knife to a thermonuclear device.
Hey, Mark – you’re not saying that the people can keep and bear nukes, are you?
I’ll bite: yes. Technically, you have a right to keep and bear nuclear weapons. Now, in practical terms, the chances that any person will obtain the necessary materials, skills and funding to build a nuclear device is nil. But the way the Second Amendment was written does not provide any exclusions. You might want exclusions in there. The author might have thought there was still exclusions in there. But the words of the law – which is what we must adhere to – makes no exclusions. It says “arms” and that people can keep and bear them.
In practical terms, what we’re really dealing with in keeping and bearing arms is arms that one person or, at most, a small crew of people can maintain, deploy and operate. And to drill down further, 99.99% of the time we’re going to be talking about small arms. But small arms does include things like automatic weapons, grenade launchers, anti-air and anti-tank missiles. And it must include those things because the clear intent of the author was to ensure that the population, without exception, was able to be armed sufficient to shoot back at an oppressor. It isn’t like no exceptions are placed into the Constitution. There’s lots of them in there – heck, even habeas corpus, the primary legal defense of free people, has exceptions. Arms do not. And the people who enacted and ratified it could read. They knew what they were doing. They were members of government who were ensuring that their fellow citizens could shoot them if they got out of hand. They were, of course, a much braver bunch than our current Ruling Class…and I’m pretty sure they had our current Ruling Class in mind as they wrote and ratified.
But aside from the crucial need to shoot oppressors, there is a larger issue at stake here: the rule of law. For many decades now, we have allowed the Ruling Class to say the law says something it doesn’t say and/or ignore what the law clearly says. The whole mess we have right now was allowed to happen because of this practice of law becoming really just whatever the bosses wanted it to be at the moment. It can’t be that way. Well, it can’t be that way in a Republic. You want that sort of thing, get yourself a monarchy where the King can decree suddenly that the law now says this or that. For us, the law says what it says and it won’t say anything different until we change it via Constitutional means. No short cuts. if you don’t like what the Second Amendment says then you can’t just ignore it and start infringing on keeping and bearing arms. If you want to place restrictions on keeping and bearing arms the only path you have is via Amendment: you’d have to change the law.
And that is the way it should be and must be because we must get back to Rule of Law. If we want to live in a Republic then the law, even when its stupid, must be enforced. After all, we made the law and must be bound by our own actions. It is the only way to safety. We’d be safer under the most draconian but strictly enforced laws we made than we can be under the most liberal legal regime that has people ignoring the law when it suits them. If I know I’ll have my head chopped off for doing A, I won’t do A…but what am I supposed to do when whether or not I’ll get my head chopped off for anything depends on the whim of an official? Because for a free people, in the law lies our only safety.
Blogs For Victory 
Basically, what it is, the right to keep and bear arms is to prevent people from abusing our rights, even from our own government.
I know it won’t get much press, but this is how it’s supposed to be…
https://share.newsbreak.com/16kaat1u
That lady, she saved a lot of people by doing what she done. Sadly that was not the case in Uvalde.
Yes, that story is getting no coverage. It’s the wrong narrative. (1) a woman (2) legally carrying a gun (3) intervened as a citizen, not waiting for government to come take over and (4) stopped a massacre.
There’s just nothing there to appeal to the Left, which is to say to the Agenda Media
To me, the gun is least important factor in this equation – the most important factors we should be focused on is the fact that there was no Mom or Dad in the home, the care taker was drug addicted, he had gender issues thanks to the media, he was isolated and not in school thanks to our government, and he was radicalized thanks to our social media companies, and someone gave him thousands of dollars to buy the weaponry – so why are we talking about the gun?????
and someone gave him thousands of dollars to buy the weaponry
That is not being widely publicized. Most articles just say he had two AR-15s and then go on to talk about how evil the AR-15 is. The primary weapon, a Daniel Defense DDR-V7 AR-15 costs $1,870.00 to $2,057.00 depending on configuration, and it’s being reported that he had two AR-15s plus holographic sights that run another $500 – $700. Where does an 18-year-old kid with no visible means of support get that kind of money. This whole sordid event smells of government involvement.
You’re 100% correct. This is January 6 on a more evil scale brought to you by our government
Update: Tucker reported tonight that authorities also discovered that the Ulvade shooter also had 60 30-round magazines for his AR-15s worth close to $1000 and 1,600 rounds of ammo worth another $1000. Depending on how expensive his 2nd AR-15 was, he likely had between $6 and $8,000 worth of guns and ammo. He worked part-time at a Wendy’s drive-through.
None of these events surrounding the shootings pass the smell test. And if you don’t think the government is capable, think Waco, TX
And the only applicable question to what arms citizens have a right to is – does the government have them? If the answer is yes, then the next answer is yes and citizens should have those weapons. Because that is why the second amendment exists.
Until Sandy Hook, I don’t think an AR-15 had ever been used in a mass shooting. It’s not an ideal weapon to use in close quarters like a classroom or a church. You can get a 30-round magazine for most popular semi-automatic handguns, and ten 30-round Glock 17/19 (9mm) magazines are a lot easier to carry than ten 30-round AR-15 magazines. But an AR-15 is a lot scarier looking than a Glock 17 and a lot easier to demonize as a “weapon of war,” even though no military units that I know of use them. The Virginia Tech shooter in 2007 used two semi-automatic pistols, a Walther P22 (.22 caliber) and a Glock 19 (9mm) to kill 32 people and wound 17. So, as Cluster says, “it’s not the gun.”
There are more people murdered with a hammer in any given year than with an AR-15. That alone makes me think at least some of the mass shootings have been, shall we say, helped along by someone in government or by an NGO sympathetic to the Leftist agenda. I’m not one of those who thinks Sandy Hook never happened, but I’m reasonably sure it didn’t happen the way the media/government said it did. One of the really suspicious aspects of most mass shootings, IMO, is the fact that virtually every mass shooter sent up all sorts of red flags prior to the shooting. Authorities knew about them well in advance, the Parkland Florida shooter being the best example. Most of them wouldn’t have been all that difficult to manipulate.
Book IX of the Mirrors Series was going to be a particular, one-off book (which is about 40% written) but then as Book VIII came to an end, I found a loose end and in tying it up a whole, new book was born – the new Book IX, working title “Home World”. As it implies, this story has our heroes back here for a significant portion of it. And, man, I’m having some fun with that! Taking a look at America with the eyes of Lontarians (good and bad!) is an interesting exercise. Because, of course, they can see the good and the bad…and the bad is astonishing; shocking, really. Completely out of place…and in the book, being exploited by bad actors.
And to that, Cluster is dead on – you’re right that each one of these mass shootings has bizarre aspects which make you wonder how they really happened…but the bottom line is that we’re programming people to become these shooters. Most don’t take the programming, but enough do…and the Ruling Class has its pre-selected Narrative once one of these bombs goes off. They just have to wait for it…and, of course, ignore them when they first get on the radar.
They don’t care about lives, that is the most important thing to remember – people in favor of abortion to birth left on decency a long while back.
And as it turns out, reportedly the gun shop that sold the weaponry was involved in Obama’s 2009 Fast & Furious that directly resulted in the death of border guard Brian Terry.
https://nypost.com/2022/05/30/shop-where-texas-school-shooter-got-gun-was-linked-to-cartel-case/
Everything has changed for me since 2020, and I am now sadly realizing that our government is evil, and compromised by a domestic and global cabal of elite who seek a one world government and are willing to kill innocent people to achieve it. Keep your weapon close, locked, and loaded because it’s only our 2A that is holding them back.
By the way, Canada just outlawed handguns.
Saw this posted at the NYT:
“Going out while you are symptomatic, even when you have a negative rapid test, is dangerous to others,” says Aaron Carroll, who writes about Covid-19 and health policy, in a guest essay. “Going to work ill isn’t a show of strength, it’s a sign of a sick system.”
Who the F**K are these people?? I can’t live in a world of irrational fears.
Actually, I kind of agree with this guy, though not in the overheated virtue-signaling Covid Panic Porn way he represents.
Take away Covid and the word “dangerous” and the nonsense about a test and whatever he thinks he means about a “sick system” and you still have the fact that a lot of people smugly brag about how they never take a sick day while infecting everyone else in the office.
You’ve know Smugs like this. They always show up early because they think this means they are special, somehow, and brag about it. They go to work sick, and brag about that. Everything they do is presented as something that shows how superior they are.
The thing is, in this case it’s one Smug complaining about the possibly invented bogey man of other Smugs.
More than a lot of people though don’t have the luxury to stay home and many people over the generations have gone to work a little banged up. Catching the flu is not an occupational hazard. It’s a life hazard.
Rolling black outs, food shortages and gas lines await us this summer. It’s going to be a miserable summer, brace yourselves.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/05/one-largest-egg-factories-us-torched-middle-night-amid-outbreak-fires-food-processing-facilities-across-nation/