Posts Tagged → gun
Militia
Militia
By Josh First
January 3, 2013
[PHOTOS ARE COMING]
Along with other beautiful stained glass windows dedicated to free speech and religion, “Militia” is just another large, elaborate stained glass window in the Pennsylvania State Capitol building (photo above).
This window’s prominent place in the Capitol is no accident, as the free citizen militia were fundamental to being an American citizen, and formative in founding the nation. After all, it was a free citizen militia (photos below) that was so determined to hold on to their liberties (now yours) that they literally faced down the world’s greatest super power, shooting only when they saw the whites of their hardened enemy’s eyes.
Like the other rights in the Bill of Rights, belonging to the militia is an individual right. No central or national army can supplant it. It is the exact purpose of the citizen militia to act as a counterweight to a centralized army or National Guard. As the Second Amendment so clearly states, you can’t belong to a militia unless you are armed with a military-quality arm, that you own and keep in your possession, as the original militia did.
Militia is not the heavily regulated, structured, centralized Army or National Guard of today; well-regulated meant muster rolls were kept. Militia was always a grass roots, citizen-led counterbalance to national governments, whether of Britain or the new United States. Unless the National Guard reports only to the local citizens or state governors, then it is not the heir to or the modern representation of the founding militia. The militia were and must remain separate from the central (national) government and its standing army.
The Bill of Rights does not describe governmental rights. All ten of its amendments describe and reserve citizens’ individual rights and liberties, and set limits on government power. Who creates a “Bill of Rights” that grants the central government the “right” to make an army and disarm the citizens? The fact that Americans have owned firearms since the beginning demonstrates the clear intent of the Bill of Rights. Whether or not some of today’s Americans are aware of, or comfortable with some Constitutional rights and obligations, they exist nonetheless. This is who we are. It’ll take a Constitutional amendment to change the Second Amendment, if you don’t like it. And changing it could lead to a second civil war, because the Second Amendment guarantees all the other amendments, and, like the Revolutionary War militia, free citizens are still willing to fight for their liberties.
Let’s talk more about that supposed potential change to the Constitution.
Gun prohibitionists are now pursuing an orgy of unconstitutional laws that exponentially grow government intrusion and end citizenship as defined since the birth of America. Do gun prohibitionists and anti-gun politicians really believe that freedom-loving Americans will just roll over and “turn them all in,” as US Senator Dianne Feinstein so casually says? I guarantee you a massive, defiant, and probably violent dissenting reaction across the nation in response to such an effort, if not an outright armed rebellion. Political elites like Feinstein and their fellow urbanites have little contact with “fly-over country,” so they do not know, care, understand, or respect the views of their fellow citizens there.
Statists, like Feinstein, whose greatest goal is a big government involved in citizens’ lives from cradle to grave, are deaf and blind to the kind of vehement resistance now brewing among tens of millions of citizens. Many, many Americans feel and see the America they knew and loved being transformed into an unrecognizable juggernaut aimed at controlling citizens’ lives and erasing their liberties. Seething beneath the surface of daily life is an increasing, simmering frustration and mistrust. It’s one thing to beat them at the ballot box. It’s another thing altogether to aim to disarm them.
These citizens know that the bigger the government, the smaller the citizen. The more the government does, the less the citizen can do. To them, government is a direct threat, not a solution.
Gun control already exists in overbearing quantity; new laws that would take away guns from law-abiding Americans are exactly the kinds of unconstitutional assaults on individual liberty that the Second Amendment was designed to repel and that the citizen militia was created to address. Using democracy to achieve undemocratic results has been the method of extremists from both Left and Right; with the latest wave of proposals, gun prohibitionists reveal their own extremism.
Draft resistors, anti-government dissenters, and assorted protests have been historic hallmarks of one part of the electorate. Will Second Amendment-rights activists have to carry their God-given guns on a Million Man March to Washington, DC, carrying today’s equivalent of the 1776-era military-grade musket, the AR-15, to get their point across?
Pro-abortion activists have long stated matter-of-factly that legally prohibiting abortion won’t end abortion, and that those who want one will seek it out, legal or not, safe or not. Well, folks, tens of millions of Americans are about to have that equivalent experience with their guns, taking them into the back alleys, yards, and woods, where they will have them, despite whatever the government may say. Such defiance is what created America. Let’s hope it doesn’t end up re-creating it.
Adam Lanza’s insane massacre of school children in Sandy Hook, Connecticut, is so painful, so emotionally scarring that I will never be the same person I was the day before it occurred. My three children are as gentle, innocent, defenseless, and precious to me as those children were to their parents, and the thought of losing mine or theirs in such a cruelly violent way is too much to contemplate. My heart aches for the Sandy Hook parents. My fury rises at the incompetent parole board that unleashed murderer William Spengler to murder again, this time the brave firefighters who rushed to douse his arsonist blaze in Webster, NY. Blame enough to go around, but the actual problem-solving is hard.
Let me try: Does Hollywood really have an unfettered, unaccountable right to use its power of suggestion to continually encourage cruel, unchecked violence across America? During the recent Benghazi debacle, weren’t we told that the First Amendment doesn’t necessarily confer a right to make a movie that might incite violence? Thus, if Hollywood wants to continue marketing sadistically happy murder carnage from Django Unchained and the equally moronic Gangster Squad, why don’t all movies and video games with a modern gun in them have to pay a 50% ‘violence mitigation fee’ on each ticket sold? Use that money to put armed guards in schools, gratis Quentin Tarantino and Sean Penn.
In sum, disarming innocent citizens will not succeed, at least not without forcing millions into long-neglected, perhaps forgotten, well-regulated militias to defend their rights. Using emotional crises to immediately demand sweeping new laws is irresponsible. Can cooler heads prevail? Let us hope and pray so.
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The Militia:
You, the citizen, are still the militia. America is yours.
Politicizing A Tragedy
Wasn’t it just a few months ago that people said we aren’t supposed to politically exploit tragedies? Wasn’t Mitt Romney excoriated by his political opponents for asking basic policy questions about the declaration of war and murderous assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya? So why now should these same exact people and politicians be trusted to lead us down the right path on the discussion about what happened at Sandy Hook?
Emotion is the wrong approach to policy solutions. But feelings and emotions have always been at the heart of liberalism, not rational thought or careful reason.
My heart aches for the Sandy Hook victims and their families, and as a parent of small children, I will never forget this event.
Sandy Hook
Today’s massacre of small children in their school at Sandy Hook, Connecticut, is an unimaginable horror. My heart and soul go out to the victims and their families. Gun control creates soft targets, and bad/ insane people pay no attention to legal restraints. Regulating guns more will have zero effect on the safety of places like Sandy Hook. It’s a debate for the period after grieving, and as a parent myself you can bet your bottom dollar I’ll argue for maximum protection. Again, the pain I feel about this event is indescribably bad and deep, and I wish I could console the families.
Love Sick, or Sick Love?
Love sick, or sick love?
© Josh First
July 21, 2010
Love is powerful, beautiful, a token of the highest commitment. And it can be dangerous when it makes us act dangerously or like we oughtta be committed to a looney bin. Love can be a powerful drug, is the 1970s aphorism, and as many of us learned in the 1970s, drugs are bad, because while they may feel euphoric for an hour, they also cause a loss of self control and resulting damage that lasts for years. Among kids, the casualties of lovesickness are typically minor, while lovesick adults can inflict real damage.
When I was a high school teen, I fell madly in love with a girl named Mardy. Love sick, I followed her around like a puppy, gave her some silver jewelry despite not getting back the same intense vibe, and forgave her every indiscretion, including when she broke up with me. Heartbroken but sick with love, I cluelessly figured she’d come around and we’d be blissfully married forever (thirty years later we now share photos of our families and joke about our own teenagers). I was blinded by love, and that blindness caused me to act against my own interests.
Love that so badly warps your judgment that your native, most elementary powers of reason and empathy become suspended is not beautiful. It unnecessarily puts you and others around you in harm’s way. For the seemingly insignificant trade-off of a few drops of happy-rainbows-sunshine-smiley faces dopamine in our brain, the love sick adults among us enter into or create situations that can or will result in our bodies pumping massive amounts of adrenaline as fear and anger course our veins. That’s not love sick, but a twisted, sick love. And mental sickness is to be avoided.
What I’m really talking about here are a lot of adult owners of large dogs.
What’s up with those folks with large dogs off their leash, roaming free, or walking or running up to people and barking, growling, gingerly sniffing us as if to bite, etc.?
Do the owners of these dogs really not realize that their sick love for their pet causes them to suspend their good judgment, unnecessarily put people at risk, and treat people in ways they themselves don’t like being treated? Following are two personal examples of how the sick love of pets has caused hard feelings, hard words, and close calls with enormous, potentially life-altering consequences. If these aren’t sufficient, there are plenty of press reports from around Harrisburg and the nation demonstrating this bad trend.
Last week, I walked to pick up my son from summer day camp. His drop-off\pick-up location is a couple of blocks from my home, and unless rain is pouring or time is short, walking there is a pleasant afternoon jaunt, usually with my wife. Next to the drop-off\pick-up location are some homes with a long metal fence running between them, along their common boundaries. As we were leaving with our sweaty, red-faced boy, with other little camper kids milling about all around us, a big German shepherd dog in an adjacent yard came roaring up to the fence, barking ferociously, hackles flaring, white spit flying, fangs bared. Three little boys on our side weren’t scared, but rather intrigued, and two of them went to put their hands through the fence to touch the dog. Ahhh, innocence in the face of danger. Leaping back towards the kids, I shooed them away while their counselor came and corralled them to another area.
When those little hands approached the big-enough holes in the chain link, the German shepherd turned its head and put its muzzle right up to the fence, still barking convulsively, ready to bite whatever came through. It was a moment that could have turned out badly. Can’t we just imagine the severe life-long damage to those inquisitive little hands from the impressively toothsome bite of an animal tough enough to serve as a four-legged cop?
No sooner had I shooed away the kids, than the dog’s owner appeared in the place of the dog, a woman in shorts and an orangy tank top, mid-fifties, arms crossed, staring, and old enough to know better to not do what came next.
“You talking about my dog?,” she asked. “Don’t you talk about my dog,” she demanded, before I could respond.
To which I responded, “You mean your big, ferocious dog that scared us?”
To which she responded, “There’s no way he’s going to climb that tall fence and bite you…and you have a problem…and you don’t talk about my dog that way…and I never…and…and…and… etc.” On and on she went, firing up her sense of indignation. She had a lot to say. She said a lot in volume, in an angry tone.
She was upset that we were frightened by her vicious dog, and she had launched into her own ironic harangue, a form of loud, aggressive human barking, yelling not-nice words, trying to engage me or any other adult nearby in a shouting match. Meanwhile, I was 100 feet away already. The lady had lost, suspended, or traded away her common sense. Her sick love for a dangerous, unpredictable animal had made her behave in a sick way, and place other people, little tiny kids, at risk.
Another related story from recent times, reported in the Patriot News, described a dad walking with his two small kids in their Uptown Harrisburg neighborhood on a Saturday morning when they were suddenly attacked by two unleashed, unprovoked pitbulls owned by an adult. In seconds the dogs were on the kids, and the dad tried to knock them back with his hands and feet. With his four-year-old son’s neck the repeated target of the larger dog’s gaping maw, and a second or two to stop the attack or watch his boy die, the dad pulled a gun and fired on instinct (he had a concealed carry permit). Several rapid shots later, fired within a foot of the struggling boy, the wounded dog limped off and its frightened companion joined it in retreat. Without the gun, the kids would have been dead or disfigured. Few enough legal, normal, people carry guns, and under typical conditions this story would usually have ended much differently, with great sorrow and loss. Thank God I was carrying my pistol that morning.
How did this attack happen? It happened because another man’s twisted idea of “love” for his dogs precluded him from “unfairly shackling” them with leashes and limiting their movements. Gosh, he just loves his dogs and wants them to run freely, go free happy dog; wheee. His reasoning must have been that he likes to move freely, and that, therefore, his dogs must, too, and it’s unfair to have them feel unhappy if he doesn’t like to be unhappy. Act on impulse, folks, do what you want, it’s the new American way. Even if other people are put at great risk. The dogs’ owner cared more for his dogs than he did for innocent humans; he cared less about the basic safety needs of humans than he cared about his dogs’ sense of mobility. His judgment had become warped by his shallow, sickly sweet, sappy feelings for his dogs.
And let’s not pretend that shallow sentimentalism is uncommon. Thanks to Liberalism, shallow sentimentalism appears to be a huge force in America, as well as the driving cause behind animal welfare activism and many regular dog owners’ defense of their animals’ indefensible behavior. Their anthropomorphism is the dominant feature of owning a potentially dangerous, animated, unpredictable animal, but hey, they enjoy spoiling Fido. Sure, pets in general and dogs in particular serve positive roles, etc. I know it well, because I grew up with large utilitarian dogs, as my parents sought for many years to protect a rare strain of Alaskan Malamute, and all our neighboring farms employed dogs as sentinels, too. I like dogs. But the benefits of pets and dogs are not the issue at hand, and the fact that many dog owners will still try to defend their own pet from these concerns is sure proof of just how sick this sick pet love has become. The dog owners don’t listen, they ignore leash laws and signs, they pretend that every person walking on the same sidewalk won’t mind being sniffed, licked, or touched by their mutt.
Every beach, park, or forest trail I walk on, I am almost guaranteed an encounter with a large, free-ranging dog or two, running out just ahead of their owners. “Awwww, my liddle sweet poochy poo would neeeever hurt anyone,” goes the typical canned line from these sickly sweet sentimentalists as their dogs bark at you, nose around your crotch, or cautiously sniff your leg during your otherwise serene walk. Sappy sentimentalism is not prevalent in these encounters, but rather, it is overpoweringly common among owners of large dogs. Nevertheless, dog bites in public venues remain common.
What psychologists would say, or do say about this childish escapism masquerading as love among otherwise functioning adults, normal people don’t know and they don’t care. Despite plenty of reported dog attacks in the press, and plenty of laws on the books to prevent dog attacks, lots of owners of large dogs continue to ignore or flout them and place everyone else around them at risk. It’s as selfish a behavior as can be found, and it has become a hallmark of modern America. Folks, you are not a dog, and your dog is not a person. Please help make the public venue safer by leashing, controlling, and muzzling your large dog.
Because begging and cajoling dog owners to be responsible citizens hasn’t worked (and we haven’t even raised the issue of many owners failing to clean up dog poop), here’s a list of recommended improvements to established laws that will shape the kind of public environment we deserve:
1) Criminalize any and all unsolicited touching of a human by a dog in public. No, dude, you would not want me to walk up and sniff, lick, or touch your wife while she’s walking down the sidewalk, and surprise, guess what, my wife is really unhappy that your dog did that to her. No harm, you say? Well, actually, your subjective opinion aside, it’s battery and emotional distress, and you would react differently if it were my pet tarantula that I decided to let walk on your neck just ‘cause I wanted to. It’s simple: Dogs and their owners have no right to intrude into people’s lives in public. Humans have the right-of-way.
2) Increase the size and legibility of dog licenses so they can be easily identified.
3) Increase fines for unlicensed dogs sufficient to make it impossible for dog owners to ignore licenses.
4) Zero tolerance for violent dogs. Any dog that, unprovoked, attacks a human in the public venue, and possibly in private, shall be immediately seized and euthanized, with the public bill paid by the dog’s owner.
There’s lots of other ways to get a better handle on this problem, but I’m an advocate for limited, common-sense laws. Let’s get these suggestions implemented first, and hopefully they’ll be so effective that the news will change from dog bites man to man bites dog, a rare and newsworthy occurrence, indeed.
Originally published by and licensed to www.rockthecapital.com, Copyright Josh First.