You'll Have No Rights without 2nd Amendment

It is the very linchpin of American Democracy.

Do you think you would have the right of assembly? Or the right of being safe in your home and among your effects? The right to really say what you want?

You see, no other country does.

France? Nope! Great Britain? Nope! Canada? No! China? Hahahahaha! I make joke!

These governments have a right to walk into your home, tell you that you can't rally or tell them to go to HELL without consequence. And sometimes dire consequence.

Europe even brands speech as "Hateful"!

Can you imagine? And they call us in the U.S. "Uncouth".

The early British invaders of the North American continent took over the place because they had guns and the Indians, for the most part, did not. Now it is said that this still might not have been enough had it not been for European diseases that the indigenous population had no defense against but one has to believe that having guns helped a great deal.

Guns also helped win the United State's independence from Great Britain. The significant part about this was that the British had flintlock smooth-bore muskets and the new Americans had...flintlock smooth-bore muskets. The British had cannon, lots and lots of cannon. The Americans had cannon too although not nearly as many but the SAME KIND of cannon and many of an equal size.

The armaments that both sides possessed at that time were, allowing for the disparity of economies and quantity, were essentially of equal technology.

And in this crucible of rebellion the reason for the 2nd Amendment was forged.

To insure that there isn't a disparity of arms of the people in contrast to the government.

Now lets face it, back in the days of the very crude flintlock non-rifled musket, it wasn't all that easy a thing to shoot someone. To avoid a flint splinter in the eye, soldiers often aimed and then turned their head to fire. Also, without "rifling", the spiral grooves gun makers later cut into the inside of a rifle barrel to make to bullet go straight, the bullet could go lots of places other than it's intended target. My theory on why the young George Washington wasn't killed at the opening of the French and Indian war at Fort Necessity, where he was a sitting duck, is that the French were probably AIMING at him.

Now here we are today with the most accurate armaments time has yet to bestow. Guns are now capable of killing a number of people quickly. But the disparity between what the citizen has access to vs what the military has at their disposal has widened considerably. 

But that gap hasn't widened to the tipping point as long as we still have access to semi-automatic weapons.

So it isn't a surprise that these are declared enemy number one even though they've been around since 1885. Yes, it's a part of our history but it's not SETTLED history. The fight to keep the right to bear arms is the fight of the people vs the government itself. Not for armed revolution, but to always have the option.

The U.S. Constitution would not have been ratified by the people without the inclusion of these rights since suspicion of a federal government was high. And knowing what we know and seeing what we've seen...

There's still plenty of reason to be distrustful. 

Give Teachers Right to Carry

Nikolas Cruz, the boy who killed 17 people at the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL, whom everyone who knows him stated is mentally ill, seems to have never been clinically diagnosed as such and therefore would never have shown up on a “do not sell a gun to this person” list.

In order to keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill, they first have to be identified and certified. Given the shameful and woeful state of public mental health facilities in the United States since the 1980s, expecting this to happen is an unrealistic expectation. Bringing back these facilities would, in my opinion, be public money well spent but even if that were to come about, it will take decades to re-establish such facilities.

As we now know, with so many people who were positions to do something who didn't, it makes no sense to pass more laws since people didn't pay any attention to the one's already in place. A law isn't going to protect you.

And as we have seen, neither are the police. 

The glaring fact of the matter is that Nikolas Cruz was perfectly legal to buy a semi-automatic rifle anywhere in the state of Florida. 

And people think this is a gun issue.

School Security Guard

Mr. Aaron Feis, the MSDHS football coach who selflessly made the ultimate sacrifice and took the bullets intended for his students, was also referred to as the school's security guard. It is evident that he was an “unarmed” security guard.  

If Mr. Feis was armed and trained to use a firearm, this situation MAY have played out differently. I don’t know how much warning Aaron Feis had about the location of Nikolas Cruz but instead of only being able to resort to throwing his body in front of the students, he could have also been ready to take down an armed student with his own firearm. 

This scenario does raise more questions than it answers like if Cruz knew that Feis was armed and if that in itself did not deter him, he could have just made it a point to seek him out and shoot him first and then continue with his shooting spree. We will never know. 

What it Will Take

When seconds count, the police are minutes away.

If there were people who were armed, either a school teacher or paid detail or guard, would this still have happened like it did? If he knew that there were armed people at the school, would Nikolas Cruz still have gone in?

So say Aaron Feis, armed and aware of Mr. Cruz coming down the hallway, shoots him and ends the conflict right there?

Or he doesn't even have to hit him, just keep Cruz at bay until help arrived.The headlines change: “Brave Teacher Halts Student Killer”. There’s no predicting such a result but we know what did happen. It’s now history.

As we have seen over and over again that our law enforcement forces cannot stop an armed assault on a soft target like a school, a bike path, a public mall or any place that people gather.

Leftists Don't Want to Hear it

The Young Leftists who are now campaigning to outlaw guns don't want to hear an alternative to taking away the guaranteed right of gun ownership. Perhaps due to their standard, sub-standard public school education, they know nothing and care nothing about the U.S. Constitution's Bill of Rights, a delicately balanced document that guarantees the rights they enjoy in this country and to say anything they want. And the linchpin in the Bill of Rights is the 2nd Amendment, without which none of the other amendments, including the 1st, are worth a penny.

I’m so sorry these bright young kids with an expectation of safety have had to take in a harsh reality of life so soon and seeing people they know gunned down and killed. But there was plenty that could have been done in their community to have at least given them a chance at avoiding such a catastrophe and was not done.

We can go on about passing more laws prohibiting access to guns but how will that stop a person without an arrest record or mental illness diagnosis? They're going to clear a background check. The information has to be IN the computer for it to be effective. 

The Leftists cling to a failed ideology; That guns are bad and that they should just go away. "Just ban them" they say. Like they are going to magically go away if people aren't allowed to have them. The Muslim Terrorists have guns and they aren't supposed to either. Go tell them they aren't allowed to have them and find out what they have to say about that. 

Blaming Gun Manufactures 

This door swings both way. You want to hold gun manufactures "accountable" when someone abuses one of their weapons but make no mention when someone uses a similar weapon to successfully defend themselves and other. That's right, people can and do defend themselves in this country way more often than you hear about. There's a reason for that. The media won't champion such a thing since it works against their anti-gun narrative.

Devin Kelley, the guy who shot up the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Spring, TX was stopped by an armed citizen. 

Allow Teachers to Carry

I think you will get more teachers volunteering to carry a gun today than you would have last month. Fighting back is loads better than only being able to use your body as a shield. Anybody with a brain is going to realize that there's no future in that.

Schools are the ultimate soft target and until we change that, scenes like Columbine and Stoneman Douglas are likely to continue. Guns aren't going away so the wisest choice is to be prepared.

So be prepared. 

Guns: The Price We Pay For Freedom

The politicizing started only seconds after the shooting stopped. The “Ban the Guns” crowd mobilized like a SWAT team and the airwaves buzzed with the media call for A-C-T-I-O-N!
It’s all so appalling. In one breath they said that children died and in the next they played politics.

The two arguments are: “Guns are bad and no one should be allowed to own them.”  versus: “ The gun is not the crime.”

“If the shooter didn’t have a gun, those people would be alive now. If there was an armed person there to stop the shooter, those people would be alive now. “

Whichever you believe, the certainty of our world is that guns do exist and they aren’t ever going away. If you can’t get one here, you will get one from someplace else. Guns smuggled from China or even the world’s second largest supplier of the world’s arms, Russia, would find their way into the American market. The law of Supply and Demand will make it so. What have we ever really stopped from coming across the border? 

The South American drug cartels smuggle loads of guns into the United States while they are bringing drugs. They use the guns to protect their illegal drug networks. A case could be made that the government itself is driving the illegal gun trade since they have made certain drugs illegal. Literally thousands of people in the U.S. are killed each year due to shootings connected to the illegal drug business. As I recall, much of the shooting stopped when the Prohibition on alcohol was lifted back in 1933. This is somehow different?

Then there is the matter of citizen gun ownership being the 2^nd most important Amendment to the U.S. Bill of Rights.  It is widely said that the 2nd Amendment guarantees the 1st. Where would any of the rights laid down in the Bill of Rights without the means to defend them? There are over 5 million firearms manufactured and sold in the United States. Millions more are imported for the North American market.

A ban on guns is an unrealistic approach to this gun crime in America. Now what?

I heard a criminologist report that the United States averages 20 mass shootings per year. A mass shooting is described as a shooting of 4 or more people. We the public do not hear of many of these shootings.

And we very seldom if ever hear of the people who successfully defending themselves and others with guns but it happens all the time. We wouldn’t want that to become a national trend now, would we?

But guns in America are a double edged sword. They keep the peace, they break the peace. They can save and they can vanquish. They can drive an enemy before you or a friend. They forged a new nation on the North American continent. They are inanimate, unthinking tools, they cannot choose.

There was a time in this country that every town had a place to shoot and a boy started with a BB gun and received his first 22 cal. rifle at the age of 12 which was precisely the age I shot my first rifle at Summer camp. There was gun education, gun clubs, shooting teams and people who taught you how to be responsible with guns. Those were the days where America’s wars affected everyone’s lives and the nation united in their prosecution and where American sharp shooters turned the tide of battles. Every hear of Sargent York?  

Now most kids grow up knowing nothing about guns, their safety or the responsibilities that come with them, they’re only told that they are just BAD. This is the standard, substandard education they get these days. They don’t have to own one but they should know all we can teach them about them, their history, what they can do and the laws governing them. Ignorance is fear.

And if you think all the English ever did with them was shoot Indians then you’re in the wrong place so Stop reading and get off my page!

The British marched on Lexington for what? To get the guns and powder stored there and guns continue to be the first thing sought out when people’s faith in their government falter. People immediately grow suspicious and start hoarding guns at the first hint of another government anti-gun “Crusade”.

Instead of trying to ban guns we should work to keep guns out of the hands of people who we know shouldn’t have them; the mentally ill, the loners, the criminal. We should remain vigilant to point out the isolated and disenfranchised among us who, with murder in their hearts, wish to harm others with whatever means at their disposal whether it be a gun, a knife or a bomb.  It is no secret that we have closed many mental health facilities in this country and on the state level, Michael Dukakis closed down and dismantled the mental health facilities in Massachusetts in the 1980s and the result was that many of these people ended up in rooming houses and on the streets.

We need an engaged and educated populace to be alert to the dangers of our nation. Nothing has changed except that people should get their noses out of their iPhones and be cognizant of what’s actually going on around them. To speak to each other and not take warning signals for granted.

This will go farther than the empty tears of yet another conniving President, the empty words from overstuffed Congressional suits or another fruitless and wasteful attempt by government and their partisan press at a ban on guns. 

But knee-jerk reactions are really all that politicians are good for these days, aren't they?

Sure beats trying to actually think through an issue to solve a problem. 

Surveillance Drones and the Right to Privacy

The proliferation of surveillance drones and the legal right to use them will be the next hotbed of legal wrangling. Recently it was reported that a PETA-like (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) organization named SHARK (Who Gives a Rats Ass) put a private surveillance drone in the air over a privately owned plantation that was going to have a pigeon shoot. Now I don’t shoot pigeons myself and consider the critters more or less “rats with wings” but if someone wants to organize a pigeon shoot on their own land with presumably their own pigeons, as a Libertarian I would have to say it’s their right to do so.

But during this event was coined a new maxim: "Never bring a drone to a pigeon shoot." because after SHARK broke up the event by their presence, they launched their drone anyway and SURPRISE, somebody on the property in South Carolina shot the fool thing out of the air. The culprit was never found or identified. Now SHARK wants to make a federal case out of the incident which I think is a good idea but for a different reason.

I don’t think SHARK has much of a case but I do think the Broxton Bridge Plantation near Ehrhardt, S.C., the real victim in this affair, certainly does. Can anybody just fly a surveillance drone over my property? Isn’t this a form of harassment? This incident is an open and shut case of invasion of privacy.

Can my neighbor hover a drone over my house to see if I get the morning newspaper in my underwear? This is a hypothetical question of course because who reads a newspaper anymore? But the question is a valid one. Who has the right to fly over my house? Technology will eventually allow everybody to have a drone and I suppose I could probably cobble one together myself with a small camera and one of those toy helicopters they sell at the local Mall. Perhaps I can catch the woman next door sunbathing in the nude. Wait, I’ve got to make a quick run to the Mall, I’ll be right back!

Anyway, I see a new legal frontier that should give many an underemployed ambulance chasing lawyer the chance to finally pay for that private school education that they promised their wives they’d pony up for the kids. The establishment of boundaries and certain “fly-over” rights will need to be established. How can what SHARK was doing be construed as perfectly legal? If so, I should be able to fly my freshly purchased Mall “Heli-drone” over my local Police Dept. Or perhaps over my local Town Office building on a Friday to see who cuts out early. Perhaps I can even catch some local town workers sleeping on the job. This sort of thing cuts both ways.

Of course, government can just establish rules for itself which is what will most likely happen first. THEY are already exempt from laws banning talking on the phone while driving so it stands to reason that they would ban drones over “Town Property” even though it was bought with taxpayer money and should be technically construed as “Our Property”. But such is the rule of our overbearing and obtrusive government. Rules and laws are now for others and not for them.

But at any rate, this issue will have to be addressed at some point in the not too distant future. There should and will be challenges to the supposed legality of flying a drone and the rights to privacy one expects on their own property.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some flying to do.