Posted on 01/09/2013 6:55:16 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
The renewed debate over gun rights that has followed the massacre of elementary schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn., has included scrutiny over why gun advocates believe they need a right to bear arms. Among the reasons: Many advocates believe that individual gun ownership helps preserve American liberty, making government fearful of trampling on rights of its citizens. If government goes too far, the argument goes, Americans have the right to revolt by force.
Is that argument correct? Or does it belong to fringe gun enthusiasts? Joel Mathis and Ben Boychuk, the RedBlueAmerica columnists, debate the question.
Joel Mathis
Does the Second Amendment guarantee a right to armed rebellion? Who cares? We Americans are heirs to revolutionaries, men who pledged their fortunes and their honors to each other to break away from a repressive empire and start a new country — one whose rhetoric of freedom and liberty that has required most of the last two centuries to come to fruition in the lives of most of our fellow citizens.
But even in the midst of revolution, the Founders were also cautious.
In the Declaration of Independence, they asserted the right to "alter or abolish" governments in favor of new forms more likely to serve the happiness of the people. Such moments, they warned, are exceedingly rare...
(Excerpt) Read more at redding.com ...
Thr right of armed rebellion is a right that free men reserve unto themselves.
AMEN!
It is more than a right, it is a duty.
both writers sound a bit amateurish.
they also dismiss the basic question easily.
let them have their own state, like california, where they can go nuts with any un-Constitutional idea they want. They only law is that none of them can leave that place.
Rebellion?
Against the U.S. Constitution? NO Way.
Against the abuse of limited powers under the Constitution by elected officials? Hell Yes.
TJ (God bless him) always believed that the citizenry should be able to hold off the Soldiery.
It wasn’t about insurrection it was about citizens being able to stand against a corrupt government.
The people should have stood against FDR — now we MUST stand against bho.
The Founding Fathers were Insurrectionists.
There’s that one (in)famous Jefferson quote about the Tree of Liberty...
...which is getting mighty thirsty.
To the headline: hell yes!!!
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
let the west coast and the north east and Il go on their socialist merry way so long as they take their illegals, feces lovers and loons from the left with them.
I for one will not lose wink of sleep but thye better not be coming down here ever once their new country fails
Amen, amen, amen. We're still suffering because the people didn't stop that fascist swine from over running the Constitution.
evil exists when good men do nothing.
They have the media for sure but to hell with them.
Nixon got in trouble when he hinted that if the President does something, it makes it legal, and he was wrong. What happens when those in power act treasonously, and their treasonous AG won’t ‘protect and defend’ the Constitution? We have turned things upside down: Those in power are are the treasonous ones and those who turn against them, or are even critical of them, are considered treasonous for not going along. Whew!
>>evil exists when good men do nothing.<<
Please do not take this clarification personally, FRiend. Evil exists, no matter what we do. The 2008 and 2012 elections are hard and sad proof of that.
Evil THRIVES when good men do nothing. Once evil has the high ground, good men must work harder to keep it contained.
Of course you have the right of rebellion and the tools as well. The right comes from God and the tools are in your gun safe.
Some insectoid legal drones argue that magically the right to rebellion (resistance to tyranny is obedience to God) was emasculated by the Constitution. Its structure provides for exclusively non violent civil actions like voting, appeals to the court, the legislature or the executive to come to the people’s aid depending on who was doing the oppression.
But there is an escalation embodied in that very varied framework of checks and balances.....
Soap Box
Ballot Box
Jury Box
are the constitutional means, BUT
The soap box may one day be silenced or subverted to wokr for the powers not the people(can you say NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, NPR)
The ballot box can be stuffed, over run by illegal votes or even illegal voters....corrupted to a lynch mob democracy as where 3 wolves vote to have the sheep for dinner. Democracy, what we are NOT...but the way we are being run.
The jury box can be emasculated by judges ordering the jury to judge only the facts and not the law....as we remember many an English/American revolutionary tussel was started when juries kept turning loose “guilty under the law but not before God” defendants.
& OMG......cartridge box...only effective if the people have arms in sufficient quantity and or sufficient quality to enable a sizable portion of them to set things right.
Our rights are simple and natural. Life. Liberty. Property or just pursing happiness as you see it. Rebellion is a derivative right to protect and recover the fundamental rights whenever they are abridged and all other recourse exhausted or perverted.
Tommy Jefferson summarized 1,000 years of hard won liberties wrestled back from the craven claws of monarchy over 1,000 years very well. He both assets it aggressively, while depicting it’s natural moderation to not be used lightly.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, —That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
Who can even ask with a straight face if we retain the right of rebellion when all other avenues are exhausted.
Of course we do. Of Course we do. The greatest minds of Western man....and the Lord God himself say so.
Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.....but that does not include life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness as you see it. Else, Satan need only subvert the government of weak men....and win the world.
FORBID IT ALMIGHTY GOD! Patrick Henry.....you gotta love that man, too.
I think our fathers answer this question:
“Are we at last brought to such a humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms in our possession and under our own direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?”
— Patrick Henry, 3 Elliot Debates 168-169.
“Guard with jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect everyone who approaches that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force. Whenever you give up that force, you are ruined.”
— Patrick Henry, Virginia’s Convention to Ratify the Constitution 1788
“... but if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people, while there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in discipline and use of arms, who stand ready to defend their rights ...”
— Alexander Hamilton
“The people the people are the rightful masters of both congresses, and courts not to overthrow the constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert it.”
— Abraham Lincoln
“When the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually.”. . . I ask, who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers.”
— George Mason - Virginia’s U.S. Constitution
ratification convention, 1788
“Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power.”
— Noah Webster of Pennsylvania An Examination
of The Leading Principles of the Federal
Constitution, Philadelphia, 1787
“...what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.”
— Thomas Jefferson to William Smith, Paris
11/13/1787
I have been thinking the same.
All libtards on one side of the fence and the rest of us on the other or it’s civil war. I won’t live in Obama’s f’d up world!
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