From Brian Manlove, @brianem@social.quoverum.com, starting at this post.
1/ Post by Gregorio Enrique Sandoval, posted on the Thomas Sowell Foundation's Facebook page:
Remember what we did when the British, our then-current government, tried to take our guns away?
We shot them. With our guns.
2/ The Second Amendment was unanimously adopted to preserve our right and our responsibility to protect ourselves from enemies both foreign and domestic and to do exactly the same thing our founders did to any other government that tries to oppress us first by taking away our means of protecting our liberty, especially our own.
3/ Guns, with their implied threat of violence, are the principal and immediate means by which the basic institutions of society protect themselves both from free lance private criminals and from organized government types acting criminally against society.
Guns in the hands of law enforcement and the military are being used by proxies of the people to protect their own interests.
4/ But guns in the hands of private citizens are the means by which citizens make up for what the police are not able to do and what we would not want them to do: be present in such a ubiquitous manner that they themselves could pose a threat to civil life and liberty.
5/ A vast number of guns in the hands of citizens who know how and are ready to use them to protect their lives, liberty, and pursuits of happiness should be a constant reminder to goons like Swalwell and other Democrats that any attempt to act on their anti-Second Amendment rhetoric is an active request to the citizenry to show them in a personal and hollow-pointed way just why we have a Second Amendment.
6/ Some would oppose this basic concept on organizational or procedural grounds, asking questions like, "How would this actually work in practice? Would individuals be acting on their own or should there first be established an officially-recognized citizen body that can intervene between the actions of individual citizens and the various branches or institutions of the government in order to moderate and control the behavior of individuals and groups of individual citizens?"
7/ All of these questions are typical of government types with a mind toward tyranny who want to head opposition off at very early stages through organizations they, through infiltration, can gain control of.
8/ The way the Second Amendment is framed together with the debates prior to its unanimous ratification provide this answer to those questions, "Just as we, the free citizens, can never be sure just what kind of crap you guys will pull to deprive us of our liberties, so we will not define in advance just how we will organize ourselves to oppose you; for now let it suffice to say that whatever you do, we, like the Founders, will come up with unexpected, unpredictable, brilliant and clever ways...
9/ ... to kill you at times and places of our own choosing. So, if you want to live a long and happy life, then do what we tell you to do, keep your noses clean, and do not tread on us."
10/ Does that sound extreme?
Then take that as a measure of just how thoroughly you have been co-opted by the Left and turned away from liberty and toward servitude to them.
Political power in the United States should be based on the clear understanding that an attempt to use it to deprive the citizenry of their rights carries with it a Constitutionally-mandated death warrant.
"Power is in the barrel of a gun!"
11/ Some think Mao came up with that but he just plagiarized the Founding Fathers. The Founders knew that a citizenry that did not have the means and the will to rise up and kill those of their government that trespass on their liberties is a citizenry that will soon have neither liberty nor the means to defend it.
12/ This has been borne out many, many times all over the world since 1787 when the Constitution was ratified:
Red or yellow, black or white, defenseless folks are in their sights; tyrants love the disarmed people of the world."
So, basically, totalitarian regimes target three institutions: the family, the market, and religion.
13/ They do this for one very simple reason: they want to control every single aspect of society. And because this is their heart’s desire, they cannot allow any other source of authority to get between them and the individual.
14/ In a normal society, almost every aspect of an individual's life is defined by these three institutions. None of them controls everything in his life. None of them controls the others. But the totalitarian, whether the secular or the religious variety, aims to control every single aspect of society.
15/ An individual's life is a fluid interplay between his growing and changing needs, interests, and responsibilities, all of which are affected to varying degrees by his locale, other people, and these institutions.
16/ The child's life is dominated by his family. And later, when a parent, by the family dependent on him. There are good families, bad families, weird families, etc, but what they all have in common is that they provide the child's first experience with life and help to form his understanding and expectations of it. There is usually a strong component of loyalty and feeling of solidarity against a less-than-friendly world outside.
17/ The lives of all are dominated by the market--where they work, how much they get paid, what sorts of things they buy, the choices and ease of life based on the degree of job diversification, etc.
18/ A minor percentage of the population is heavily dominated by religion, such as those who work within a religious institution, the spouse and children of those families. A larger percentage actively participate on a weekly basis in the activities of their religion. A somewhat larger percentage participates yearly on major religious holidays. ...
19/ A smaller percentage may no longer be active but have grown up with their views of the world and their place in it shaped significantly by a religious tradition. A very small percentage has rejected religion or is openly antagonistic toward it.
20/ There is NO PREDICTING the quality or character of any family. There is NO PREDICTING the quality or character of any aspect of the market. There is NO PREDICTING the quality or character of any aspect of a religious institution. And there CERTAINLY is no predicting how these institutions will interact with each other or the effects they will have on any particular individual or how any particular individual will react.
21/ The most predictable things are 1) that they are not predictable, 2) that society will develop in unexpected ways that are entirely dependent on the accidents of interaction, and 3) that those outcomes are shaped by the individual and his goals based on his unique hopes for the future.
22/ Obviously the self-organizing nature of society and the market demonstrates that there is learning going on and that by analysis of outcomes following choices and that followed by informed choices that modify the previous choices.
23/ Families tell members of society who they are. The market tells members of society what is available for them to do or to acquire or to desire to acquire. Religion tells members of society why they are here and how they are to live within society.
24/ So when you see a group of mentally ill people who believe
1) that this self-organizing and self-regulating interplay between different loci of societal authority through the means of individual understanding and choice and voluntary interaction with others based on what any individual believes to be his own best interest is illegitimate for the primary reason that it does not conform to their expectations of "the way it spozed to be,"
25/ 2) that all fundamental problems plaguing society arise from this disjoint between reality as it is and reality as how they know it ought to be,
3) that decisive and bold action is required to take the reins of society to drive it toward the place where all will be made right, that place being where reality is forced to be exactly what they imagine it should be and where it operates exactly as predicted, once they acquire sufficient power and control and...
26/ 4) that any action is justified if it results in the fundamental transformation of society into what they know it should be,
then you are going to have these three major institutions of society attacked, redefined, hobbled, competed against, or destroyed.
Why?
27/ Because totalitarians are grandiose, insecure control freaks and cannot stand that anyone or anything should tell them to butt out.
Children in a totalitarian society belong to the state, not to their parents.
Markets are to be controlled in a totalitarian society because, as Marx saw, innovation in science and technology leads to changes that disrupt jobs and social structures, leading to uncontrolled and unpredictable changes and desires for novelty in products and services.
28/ Religion provides ultimate reasons why things are the way they are and those reasons don't include the machinations of totalitarian revolutionaries, whether the religious or the atheistic variety.
The totalitarians want to eliminate the lives led by billions and to replace them with something completely predictable and totally under their control.
29/ The only effective way of fighting them is to maintain superior strength and to eliminate them at every possible opportunity in the most effective way possible consistent with our Constitutional system of law and the prior and more fundamental requirements of self defense.
30/ Why such an implacable position?
Shouldn't one be willing to compromise?
You cannot compromise with anyone whose starting position is his desire for your death.
/ END