Let's Have an Intelligent Conversation About Guns
The 2nd Amendment does not mean what you wish it to mean. It means what it says.
Also at AMERICAN THINKER - by Andrew G. Benjamin
The compliant legacy media and woke academia have made it almost impossible to discuss the Second Amendment and most other subjects, for they’ve corrupted sensible, rational thinking, education, revised history, ignored reality and the law, and inverted new meanings to words. Until we clear away this plethora of fog and falsehoods and return words to their legitimate meanings, we cannot have an intelligent conversation about guns.
First, let’s be clear about what a gun is or is not:
A firearm is a tool just like a crown stapler.
A crown stapler puts holes into objects nearby.
A firearm puts holes into objects farther away.
Both are useful tools for the purposes they were designed.
GOVERNMENT “BUYBACK”
This term refers to the government “buying back” firearms it never owned. In a world where words have no meaning and meanings cannot be described with words, the government can “buy back” a product it never sold.
These firearms were legally transferred between private buyers and sellers exercising their right to engage in lawful commerce. In firearm transfers, both parties in good faith, within free-market norms, exchange a legal commodity for which both have paid taxes (sales and income). The transfer complies with local, state, and federal laws under free commercial understandings between willing adults.
Lawful transfers express another universal norm: The non-expiry date of the license that the Constitution bestowed on every American citizen and his descendants in 1791, when attendees at the Constitutional Convention unanimously ratified the Second Amendment. From that moment, the business of gun and ammunition sales and purchase, according to the Founders and most normal Americans, was none of the government’s -- or your -- business.
Your approval and voice in the matter was no longer required.
Government “buybacks” raise other fundamental questions:
How can the government, acting for its convenience and benefit, predetermine the price it intends to pay a seller for goods the seller does not wish to sell?
Is private property still private, or does it belong to someone else?
Where do you draw the line between what government can take at the will of bureaucrats whose salaries We, the People pay, and your desire to keep your private property - what is yours - to yourself?
Whose business is your private property, your home, your car, your wristwatch, anyway?
How can a government “buy”back a firearm that a citizen will not willingly sell?
“REASONABLE GUN LAWS”
Reasonable gun laws to restrict the legal use of firearms mean what gun controllers say is “reasonable.” Reasonable could be any restriction, including confiscation or taxes on weapons, ammo, fees on licensing, and mandatory “education” that costs the firearm owner over $500. That hundreds of millions of Americans find the gun controller’s definition of what is reasonable to be “unreasonable,” is for another essay.
“GUN VIOLENCE”
The disingenuous phrase “gun violence,” among a plethora of meaningless ideas from the gun controllers (whose bodies are more valuable than yours, and are, therefore, protected by guns), is an epic step on the road to tyranny. It links guns to violence and violence to guns - as if these two were, in fact, interlinked. It posits that guns have agency and minds of their own. Guns commit crimes (gun crime, gun violence) and engage in violence by their mere existence. Using this formula, hammers, knives, blunt objects, bricks, crowbars, and fists also engage consciously in violence, but there are no problems with their existence, nor are there calls for regulating them.
Mohamed Lahouaiyej Bouhlel owned a prayer rug, a Q’uoran, and a mind marinated in hatred for his fellow men who prayed to other gods. On July 14, 2016, Bouhlel murdered more victims by truck in a single incident than any U.S. mass shooting ever had.
Nice, France -- Limane Lyes is a bus driver by trade, and his first thought when he saw the truck careening down the Promenade des Anglais was that either the driver had fallen asleep or that the brakes had failed. Then he saw the truck deliberately zig-zagging to target families as they tried to flee his trajectory.
“It looked like a combine harvester, it looked like a killing machine.” Lyes, a 31-year-old from Nice, told The Associated Press on Monday, four days after surviving the Bastille Day attack.
Within a few minutes, Bouhlel murdered 86 people for Allah. Driving his truck as a weapon, he repeatedly screamed “Allahu Akhbar!” out his window as he mowed down innocent children. The carnage according to his religion had nothing to do with violence. It had to do with peace. And religion.
The Religion of Peace that used “aircraft violence” on 9/11 to peacefully demolish downtown New York and the Pentagon. For Allah.
The violence in France cannot be connected to trucks, as in “truck violence,” or “knife violence,” for the knives Muslim Uyghurs used on Chinese citizens in Xinjiang. (Note: That some Muslims commit jihad does not justify the Chinese response with concentration camps, slave labor, and genocide.) The self-unaware media see only one kind of violence: Gun violence. Not the knife violence or truck violence that men of bad breeding in America’s nihilistic ghettos or the Islamic world regularly commit.
We’ve heard from the Democrat Jihad Squad about Jewish-Christian extremism and Jewish clingers hanging on to their guns and Bibles to defend their tiny strip of homeland, Israel. We never stop hearing about White Supremacy at the “Insurrection of January 6th.” That’s where a black police officer (aka, the black face of white supremacism) murdered an unarmed white woman who did not threaten anyone. Her crime? She happened to like the president the black officer did not like.
Meanwhile, there’s this:
Lower Manhattan, New York City -- On October 31, 2017, Sayfullo Habibullaevich Saipov drove a rented pickup truck into cyclists and runners for about one mile (1.6 kilometers) of the Hudson River Park‘s bike path alongside West Street from Houston Street south to Chambers Street in Lower Manhattan, New York City. The vehicle-ramming attack killed eight people, six of whom were foreign tourists, and injured eleven others.
After crashing the truck into a school bus, Saipov exited...He was shot in the abdomen by a policeman… A flag and a document indicating allegiance to the terrorist group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL-DAESH) were found in the truck....
Saipov was an Über and truck driver.
Saipov’s guns didn’t commit violence. His truck performed Allah’s will.
He didn’t need government’s permission to buy a truck. Or a Q’uoran. Or an ISIS flag.
Truck violence has nothing to do with any of the two events described. Yet, using the Democrat’s understanding about gun violence, Saipov murdered eight people with a violent truck. The other gent, 86. Nevertheless, Democrat nitwits led by other Democrat nitwits Joe Biden, Obama still pulling the strings, Pelosi, Schummer, the Jihad Squad who regularly utter nonsense about “Gun Violence” and Zionists, and the U.S. media redefining the meaning of “is,” said nothing about “Truck Violence.”
Constitution 101, Second Amendment
“St. George Tucker wrote the first systematic commentary on the U.S. Constitution and stood as one of the preeminent constitutional scholars through the 18th century. Tucker called the right of self-defense the “palladium of liberty.”
The right of self defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible.
The Second Amendment was drafted and ratified to prevent the federal government doing just that.”
For Democrats, the gangbangers in Democrat-governed ghettos across this fine nation, and the global Islamic Jihad, guns commit violence. The thugs, deviants, and antisocial psychopaths cited who voted for Obama, Clinton and Biden, never commit violence. Guns committed the violence. Guns walk out of their closets, load themselves, drive to malls, workplaces, and schools with signs “THIS IS A GUN FREE ZONE,” and liberally and progressively empty themselves into innocent people while going postal.
They then drive back home for a martini and a session on the prayer rug. Kitchen knives go out into the streets of London and Xinjiang. They even behead women at America’s meatpacking plants.
Maybe kitchen knives should be serial numbered, just like guns, with blade impressions logged for forensics records in a national database overseen by gun-banner Michael Bloomberg who is surrounded in three shifts 24/7 by six armed bodyguards. 18 bodyguards with 36 guns.
You see, Mikey understands with utter clarity what most Democrats don’t: his life is more valuable than your life. His life is worth saving. Yours and your family’s are not. Nancy Pelosi’s, Barack Obama’s, Hillary Clinton’s lives are worth defending. Yours?
Perspective:
2020 GUN DEATHS, the entirety of the USA: 44,000
2020 KNIFE ATTACKS, LONDON, UK (just in one “safe” European city that allows no guns): 16,000! And you believed the anti-gun rants in the global media? You did?
What stopped the Jihadi truck violence cited above (and innumerable others throughout the world) was gun violence. Gun violence, or the threat of it, saved the lives of those not yet murdered by truck and knife violence 2 million times across this land every year. In China and London knife violence was stopped with guns that became violent - with “gun violence.”
These guns were in the hands of Nice’s, New York’s, London’s, and Xinjiang’s violence-prone racists -- aka, policemen (and in many cases in the U.S., private citizens) who were not yet defunded by the cited gun-banning politicians surrounded by bodyguards with assault weapons.
Progressive politicians keep repeating Barack Obama’s demand, “Let’s have an intelligent conversation about guns.”
Tell us Dear Progressive, was that conversation intelligent enough for you?
© Andrew G. Benjamin is in finance, real estate and equities, a former advisor to New York City mayor ‘s office (Subcommittee on Taxation, Finance and the Budget). Benjamin wrote extensively about politics, transnational and domestic, intelligence and military affairs, security and strategy, economic issues, Mideast, terrorism, technology and high end audio.
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