Gun Control, Virginia Tech, and Answering Brady Campaign's Helmke: Stop Hiding The Ball Of Citizen Authority.
By John Longenecker (05/03/07)
In a May 1st announcement, The Brady Campaign To Prevent Gun Violence pronounced a gun violence epidemic in this country (again), and vows to hold officials accountable for not enacting more severe restrictions on a civil right.
Every year, many more extensive numbers are hurt by knifings, rapes, robberies, beatings, chokings, multi-assailant attacks and, of course, heartbreaking child abductions. All of these continue without guns on the part of the thug or the victim. For all of Helmke’s efforts, he will never succeed in writing a law that stops handgun violence as his non-profit’s purpose, since many crimes are . . well, gunless, and because most gun homicides [roughly 32,000 out of 45,000 annually] are crime-on-crime. [see www.FBI.gov]
Gun control takes more than the gun from the law-abiding taxpayer: it interferes with constituent legal authority to act in self-defense when facing grave danger alone when seconds count. It worked that way at Virginia Tech as well as it works in other campuses and postal workplaces, and certainly as well over the years in the United Kingdom, the Philippines, Australia and other nations where their criminals don’t observe the law any more than ours do. Proven to be against the public interest, in fact, this purpose decidedly isn’t good for a non-profit entity advocating it.
Helmke’s May 1st statement says that we should be ashamed that we allowed this to happen. What do you mean ‘we,’ Kemosabe?
It is not good for individuals to be forced to choose between felony and funeral, and this is where Helmke’s purpose leads: the choice of being armed and illegally so versus being disarmed and dead… as in school shootings. Or make it a non-issue by lifting gun bans.
But voters will also hold candidates accountable for disarmament laws which leave them helpless at home as much as on campus or workplace. Felony or funeral?
Gun control today discourages and even punishes your current citizen authority. Where the head of a household wishes to make his/her best informed decision always on how to plan household safety, the Brady ilk hides the ball. It withholds the facts that police have no duty to protect you, that police are allies with honest gun owners, that police appreciate the individual as the first line of defense, and that nobody can take your place as that first line of defense.
This hiding the ball has to stop as long as an entity claims to operate in the public interest, and that includes the public trust of a university. It is not in the interest of the public to disarm the honest, to interfere wholesale with personal safety of the student body, to interfere with a civil right on top of that, and to talk people out of their authority to act when facing grave danger alone. Zero-tolerance: brilliant, huh?
Taxpayers don’t find violence, it finds us, and to demand we disarm is to stand for the insult that we are the troublemakers in society.
Time for a history Lesson for the universities: The second amendment wasn’t written about guns: the founders could care less that the future would have nuclear weapons, AK-47’s, acoustic suppressors or automatic weapons: all the founders were concerned with was what they had enough of — abuse of due process — and which they could certainly foresee in any age, any era, in any government, including their own. Get it, now? As the government of the time, the law applied to them, too, and that's how we know further their original intent. The second amendment is absolute not on guns, but on the subject of abuse of due process of taking the guns when it says shall not be infringed. You can't legally do it. Not even a little.
Furthermore, the second amendment is absolute because it is the lawful force which backs citizen authority, which must be absolute if it is to resist abuses of process as the founders endured. That means student and visitor interests and even employee interests prevail over the dictates of the Chancellor or Regents, and are not subject to official interpretation, but interpretation of the citizens. Another history lesson. Put another way, if students want to carry weapons, students get to carry weapons.
It is unpatriotic to expect the sovereign authority of the nation — the citizen, the student and others — to surrender to its own servants under threat of force the very lawful force which ensures and backs our sovereign authority over those dopey servants and their ‘sensible’ abuses of due process.
Hiding the ball is to conceal the better solution put in place precisely for the public interest: it is to lie to people and deal with students in bad faith. Too many adverse social policies exist because good people forget that their personal authority is superior to anything conceived in the mind of officials, and that laws written against that authority are, themselves, illegal.
Concealing that Independence, not teaching it, erasing and re-writing U.S. History, and punishing Independence is to hide the ball.
2008 Candidates: Repeal all gun laws: it would be good for the country.
John Longenecker is author of The Case For Nationwide Concealed Carry. His website is http://www.TransferOfWealth.net/
(Printer friendly version) Email: John Longenecker
