A History Lesson on the Second Amendment

RUSH: You know, yesterday on this program we talked about Bret Stephens and his column in the New York Times, the former columnist for the Wall Street Journal, who is thought to be a conservative. After the column yesterday, a lot of conservatives began wondering what’s happened to Bret Stephens ’cause there’s nothing conservative about the column. Actually it was really kind of a loosely assembled almost like stream of consciousness rather than a crafted and prepared column. And it seemed something written in frustration.

He opens it up by admitting he is a conservative, he’s never understood this fetish that conservatives have with the Second Amendment, and halfway through the piece he says repeal it, just repeal it. If everybody means what they’re saying here about guns and control, just repeal the Second Amendment.

Well, we nuked it yesterday and dealt with it, but over at National Review, Charles C. W. Cooke was greatly bothered by this piece and wrote a post at the Corner blog that I want to quote from here. Not gonna read whole thing. But there is some excellent history in this, some excellent history that I will guarantee most Americans do not know about the Second Amendment.

“In truth –” and here’s where the history lesson begins, and tell me how many of you knew this when I finish. “In truth, the Second Amendment was not an “amendment” at all, for, unlike some of the subsequent alterations to the charter, it represented neither a change in policy nor a remedy for an error.”

Sometimes amendments, by definition, are changes. We’re gonna amend this to make sure speech is guaranteed, we’re gonna amend this, we’re gonna change it, gonna add to it. His point is the Second Amendment didn’t change anything, and it didn’t fix anything.

“Along with the rest of the Bill of Rights it was the product of a disagreement as to how to best protect freedoms that were generally considered unalienable.” The founders believed that rights and liberty came from our creation and not men, not government, not other people. And that’s what made them inalienable. Meaning, you can’t lose them. You can be deprived of them but you can’t lose them, they’re there always.

“For reasons outlined in The Federalist Papers, Madison believed that the power of the federal government would be constrained by its structure; if the central state had only a handful of carefully enumerated powers, he contended, it would not be able to exceed them.” And that’s in fact what the Constitution is. It enumerates what the government cannot do. It spells out what the powers are and none more. Now, the anti-Federalists disagreed with that. “They demanded,” as it’s written here, “a belt to add to the suspenders. The debate that followed was strictly structural — not a fight over speech or due process or arms, but over how best to ensure the maintenance of ancient liberty.”

This is what the Constitution is, a charter of liberty and how to maintain it. So any time somebody starts talking about getting rid of that part of it or that part, you’ve gotta really perk up and say, “No way. We’re not gonna sit here and let you chip away at our freedoms,” which is what the anti-Second Amendment crowd wants to do.

“Madison acknowledged this when introducing the Bill of Rights in Congress. The rights he had included, he made clear to his peers, were those ‘against which I believe no serious objection has been made by any class of our constituents.'”

In other words, the Bill of Rights was a listing of things that were not controversial. The Bill of Rights were things which he had heard no serious objection to by anybody — freedom of speech, freedom of religion. Nobody objected to any of them. So he said: “Let’s list them. Let’s enumerate them.”

“In encoding the right to bear arms among the set, neither Madison nor his opponents were innovating.” It was already the presumed natural way to live then at the time. They weren’t innovating, they weren’t changing anything, they weren’t protecting or guarding. They were just codifying the liberties and freedoms that were considered proper at the time. “They were channeling Justinian, Locke, and Blackstone, and ensuring that the people of the new country would enjoy a robust right to self-defense, and the auxiliary protections that enabled it,” i.e., arms.

“Surely, Stephens insists, if Madison could see the modern world he would change his mind. I must venture that the very opposite is true. Were he to pick up a history book today, Madison would be shocked indeed. But his surprise would be at the sheer scale and disgrace of the tyrannies that have scarred us since he died. The American Revolution was a beautiful and necessary thing, and yet if one were to have read the litany of complaints to a man in the Warsaw Ghetto, or in Dachau, or in the Gulag … he would have laughed in your face.”

In other words, there was real tyranny back in the day this country was founded, and to spell out these things would have made people in tyranny laugh because they were so simplistic. But that was their value. But his point, Madison would cringe if he saw the tyrannies that have come to exist in America. “Tyrannies” loosely defined.

RUSH: That history lesson on the Second Amendment and in fact the whole Bill of Rights is crucial; but the thing to note is that the Second Amendment was not a change, it was not an innovation, it was not abnormal, it was not unusual. It was simply a codification, if you will, of the thinking at the time as it related to the preservation of liberty, which is what the Constitution is.

It is a document dedicated to defining and guaranteeing and protecting the freedom of the people of the United States of America. It is not a document that tells the government what it can do. It’s a document that proscribes the government from doing things that would chip away at liberty. The Second Amendment people love to tell you that if the founders came back today they would be outraged at how many guns and they would demand that the Second Amendment being repealed.

And it’s actually just the opposite. What the founders would be stunned at — they wouldn’t be stunned, actually. They would be saddened. They expect it because of history and because of human nature, they expected governments to grow, including ours, theirs. They expected it to become oppressive. This is what human history was: oppression of people, tyranny, dictatorship, poverty. That’s the uniqueness of the Constitution.

So the truth is James Madison and these other founders who had a direct hand in either the Declaration or the Constitution would be aghast at the size of the federal government. They would be — catch myself again. They wouldn’t be surprised because they expected it. It’s what they were trying to guard against. They would be mad, angry, saddened, but not surprised.

The framers of the Constitution, their first thought, it would be clear that the Constitution was all the government could do and no more. Others decided they had better make those limits more clear, and that’s what the Bill of Rights is, the Second Amendment, the 10th Amendment, the first, all 10 Amendments are constraints on the government specifying how the government is limited in those fields. And the Second Amendment was not an innovation, it was not a change, it was not a reaction to something either popular or unpopular. It was simply a natural, it was a given, as all the others were.

Now, this isn’t taught anymore. And one of the reasons why is that many leftists think the Constitution is a horrible document because it limits people who believe in government first, second, third, and always. It is called a charter of negative liberties by many leftists because it doesn’t tell government what it can do; it tells government what it can’t do. And so from all the way back to on FDR we’ve had this concept of a second Bill of Rights that could spell out what the government could do.

Obama has even publicly stated his frustrations with the Constitution in this regard, as has Cass Sunstein, the husband of the lovely and gracious Samantha Power, and that’s the argument. It’s not true that the founders would freak out at the number of guns. They would freak out at the size of government. They would freak out at the reach of government, and I think they’d probably be shocked that the country remains somewhat similar to its founding, despite that.

Governments are not always benevolent. Unchecked a benevolent government will always without exception become a malevolent tyranny. If one reads the founding papers and arguments it is very clear that the “right to keep and bear arms” was to be a check on tyranny by government. Their was no discussion about the right to protect against criminal acts of other individuals as this was simply understood to be a basic right with no need of discussion.

The second amendment is all about stopping a tyrannical government.

The far left is a proponent of centralized power and rule by decree of “their wise benevolent” leaders. They know so long as we are armed they can not do this. That is why they want to take our weapons. They fear those weapons and should fear them.

NAZIs took the weapons and 6 million Jews died alone with another 6 to 8 million others “considered undisrables.”

Follow the below link to see the numbers which are many millions of those killed by government tyranny.
http://www.scottmanning.com/content/communist-body-count/

We are talking about 150 million people. That is why we have the Second Amendment. Those 150 million people did not have the “Right to Keep and Bear Arms.”

Our access to weapons does make the evil of Las Vegas easier to happen. The evil in Las Vegas is nothing compared to the evil of government unchecked.

The shooting stared when the Redcoats tried to confiscate the colonist’s armories.

Try that piece of history, Brett.6

And without the Bill of Rights, the Constitution would not have adopted.

As I’ve mentioned before, as very sad and horrifying events like what happened in Las Vegas last weekend or Sandy Hook or the Denver movie theatre or even Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989 are, it would take American and Canadian criminals along with those few mass tragedies many hundreds of centuries to equal the number of citizens disarmed by governments in just the previous one.

Somebody is kicking down the door to your motel room at 3:00AM.

As you rack in a load of #4 buckshot in your 12 gauge pump and prepare to ‘greet’ any interlopers (WHO SCATTER AT THE SOUND, BTW)—One contemplates AGAIN the “fetish” for the second amendment—
and finds it GOOD, VERY good indeed.

Hindenbug crashed & burned....no one blamed the dirigibles.

2 jets crashed into twin towers killing 3000....no one blamed the jet planes

Oklahoma city Gov’t bldg was bombed, hundreds died....no one blamed the fertilizer bomb

Trucks driven through pedestrian crowds in France & UK killed many innocents....No one blamed trucks

In 2014, 3827 people killed in USA by stabbing or beating....no one blamed knives of baseball bats.

Yet, EVERY time someone gets killed by a gun, the liberals ALWAYS blame guns FIRST!

Why?

The Left has a mental illness: A totalitarian psyche. Totalitarians do not want their subjects to resist their tyranny with guns. So, in every totalitarian political order, the guns are confiscated. The Left thinks pro-gun thinking is simplistic, but their lust for power gives them away. Our nation’s founders understood this lust for power and the evil nature of it. For, man’s creative power for survival must always be used to combat man’s endless power to do evil.

You sir, are a generous person via "#4 buckshot."

Being old school (born 1953) I'm a 00 buck kind of person.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_shell

Buckshot

The most commonly produced buckshot shell is a 12 gauge, 00 buck shell that holds 9 pellets. Buckshot is generally used for two purposes: self-defense and hunting medium to large game. Loads can be tailored through altering the size of the shot, pellet count, length of the shell, powder charge, and in other ways to fit individual weapons and purposes. For instance, loads of 12 gauge 00 buck are commonly available in 8 to 18 pellets in vendor-stated lengths from 2 3/4" to 3 1/2". On packaging, vendors state the length of the cartridge as expanded after firing. Before firing, the crimped cartridge starts off approximately one half inch shorter. Also, precise length varies depending on manufacturer and model. Reduced-recoil shells are becoming increasingly available. Low-recoil 00 buckshot allows the shooter to make fast follow-up shots, which may be needed in a combat situation. They are also useful for training shooters who are not yet used to the recoil of full-power shells.

My biggest fear, is that one day I may have to pull the trigger in my house, and the ringing in my ears, from the VERY LOUD shotgun blast, would never stop.

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