Right To Bear Arms

"The Second Amendment exists as the final check and balance on government against the usurpation of the other nine Amendments in The Bill of Rights, along with the text of the Constitution itself.

In fact, it is the precise existence of The Second Amendment, standing as originally written, that is our best guarantee that it will never need to be used.

Each time we permit The Second Amendment to be diluted, chipped away at or otherwise tampered with we come closer to the day in which we will need it and not have it.

History is replete with examples; Hitler's Third Reich began with the mandatory registration of all firearms, which was readily agreed to by the citizens "for the common protection." That was shortly followed by confiscation, literally door-to-door, with a few resisters being publicly shot. Having secured essentially all of the civilian firearms Hitler was then of course free to commit the rest of his evil deeds with little chance of the people rising up against him (they tried anyway, many times, all of which were failures and most of which led to death by summary execution of the protagonists.)

Nor is it always The State that takes advantage when firearms are confiscated; a more recent example is in Australia, where a lunatic in 1995 shot 35 people. The uproar resulted in a complete ban of all semi-automatic weapons, leading to their confiscation and destruction.

Unfortunately violent crime increased; within 12 months of enactment of that law armed robberies were up a whopping 44 percent, and there was a 300% increase in homicides in one Australian State (Victoria.)

Two years later, in 1998, South Australia had recorded a 60% increase in robberies with a firearm.

So much for gun bans actually managing to decrease the number of bad guys with guns!

The logic here folks should be obvious:

If I am willing to commit a violent felony, whether it be rape, robbery or murder, I have already decided to ignore the law prohibiting this conduct and inflict intentional harm on other people. As such we are now reduced to one simple question: do the intended victims of these crimes have a right to fight back with the only device known to man that equalizes the strength of assailant and defending citizen, or are the intended victims of such a criminal expected to simply "lie down and take it"?

If it is your wife, daughter, grandmother or niece that is the intended victim of a 250lb drug-crazed rapist are you willing to tell her that she is prohibited by the law from defending herself with the only device known to man that will render her 120lb mind and body the precise equal of that assailant?

Note that this decision - one that would be hers and hers alone - does not mean she will win in such a confrontation. Rather, it is a question of basic human rights - do you, or do you not, have a personal right of self-defense against a felonious thug who intends you great bodily harm (or worse.)

Yet this question - one that should be at the forefront of your cognitive process in this debate - is a secondary beneficial side effect to the very reason we have a Second Amendment.

The primary reason The Second Amendment exists is to prevent Auschwitz, and all that came with it, from happening here, and the unfortunate truth is that the annals of recorded history prove that it is only a right of personal arms possession that prevents it. If you doubt this see Switzerland - both in terms of it's violent crime rate and history through two World Wars."

Excerpt from Karl Denninger's musings dated 4/11/09