What’s
Wrong Today:
There is
an undeclared war about to be waged in
America by a loose coalition of survivalists, militia men,
secessionists, and white supremacists.
You
probably heard last week about James Yeager, the CEO of a Tennessee firm that
offers firearm and tactical training. He published a video in which he threatened to “start killing
people” if the Obama administration
proceeds with executive orders regulating guns.
This is From Yeager’s Facebook page
where he speaks about legislation that may come out of the President’s
Taskforce on Gun Violence:
(Emphasis
below by the Wrongologist)
535 members of the House and Senate in both parties that allowed such a law to
pass would largely be on their own; the Secret Service is too small to protect
all of them and their families, the Capitol Police too unskilled, and competent
private security not particularly interested in working against their own best
interests at any price.
The
elites will be steadily whittled down,
and if they cannot be reached directly, the targets will become their staffers,
spouses, children, and grandchildren. Grandstanding media figures loyal to
the regime would die in droves, executed as enemies of the Republic.
Keep all of this in mind as the Obama
administration moves toward articulating a policy of narrowing the use of
certain firearms and high capacity magazines over the next month.
Some of these
guys could be about to explode.
“Some of
these guys” could include the Oath Keepers. Founded in 2009,
the Oath Keepers say they are patriots upholding the Constitution by the very act of taking up arms against
the Federal Government. They are organizing militias around the country
to resist actions by our government that they believe overstep what they define
as “constitutional boundaries”.
On their website, the Oath Keepers
say they believe that the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment is not
about protecting themselves and their families against street crime, rather:
preserving a final, doomsday capability to fight oppressive government…it is
also about the people themselves, as the militia, being the domestic military
security force.
Oath
Keeper member Richard Mack has said:
we face today is not terrorists; it is our federal government. One of the best
and easiest solutions is to depend on local officials, especially the sheriff,
to stand against federal intervention and federal criminality.
Elements of the GOP and the Tea Party have evolved
an extreme worldview that is able to justify any means, however destructive, to
achieve whatever righteous cause they embrace. In this case, they are joined by
the Oath Keepers and the NRA in championing the unrestricted right to use
military-style weapons, even though the NRA says they are only used for
hunting.
The Oath
Keepers placed this billboard outside Ft. Leavenworth KS, home of the US
Army Command and General Staff College, after an Army Colonel wrote an
article that described the Tea Party as a possible future military opponent for
the US military.
Their
cause is helped by right wing writers who posit that the
whole purpose of the 2nd Amendment and the reason it protects even
weapons designed for use by the military, is to preserve the right
of insurrection
against the state should it institute “tyranny.”
They
believe in 2nd Amendment absolutism.
The Second
Amendment absolutists believe that electoral majorities and court decisions cannot be permitted to modify the right
to bear arms. Any effort to do so is “tyrannical.”
The
lynchpin of this debate is the answer to the question: Who gets to decide when
it’s necessary to take extralegal action?
The Oath
Keepers? Wayne
LaPierre? Or, God forbid, James Yeager?
According
to them, our political system (the system that produced the “tyranny” of
Obamacare) will not protect their rights. So it’s up to heavily armed individuals
and groups to figure out when it’s
necessary to start shooting politicians or other beneficiaries of tyranny.
Let’s
review the 2nd Amendment:
The
purpose of the 2nd amendment was NOT to protect American citizens against the
American government. It was to protect American citizens against tyranny from
outsiders, like King George. The new American nation did not have a standing
army. Thus the Constitution gave its citizens a mechanism to defend the nation
should it be attacked. When the alarm was sounded, the citizens were supposed
to grab their muskets and gather on the village green, prepared to defend
their nation.
The right to bear arms was established
within a context.
All of the Amendment’s clauses matter. The language is tricky, but we must try
to understand the full text. Gun enthusiasts need to show us how their
preferences fit the complete text.
Do the Absolutists intend to operate as part of a well regulated militia?
In the Federalist Papers, Hamilton wrote about the use of
well regulated militias to counteract threats to the federal government. Hamilton
states in #29:
power of regulating the militia and of commanding its services in times of
insurrection and invasion are natural incidents to the duties of superintending
the common defense, and of watching over the internal peace of the Confederacy.
He
continues to discuss the need for uniformity in training and such before
summing up his thought with:
desired uniformity can only be accomplished by confining the regulation of the
militia to the direction of the federal authority…If a well regulated militia
be the most natural defense of a free country, it ought certainly to be under
the regulation and at the disposal of that body which is constituted the guardian
of the national security.
In #25,
Hamilton warns that unregulated state militias were a potential risk to
national security. (context below by the Wrongologist)
this situation [insecurity between the individual states], military
establishment [militias], nourished by mutual jealously, would apt to swell
beyond their natural or proper size; and being separate disposal of the members
[states], they would be engines for the abridgement or demolition of the national
authority.
That
should be enough for any person who isn’t willfully blind to see that militias
were meant to be defenders of the federal government, what Hamilton meant by the
“national authority.”
Read
all of #29 at the link above if you want a complete understanding.
In 1783, democracy
brought majority rule by its citizens to the US. In a democracy, a minority can
disagree with the legislative actions of the majority, but disagreeing with the majority cannot mean defining the prevailing
legislative direction of the majority as tyranny. Majority rule is how
democracy works.
The 2nd
Amendment Absolutists fail the first test for citizenship in a democracy;
namely, respect for the will of the majority. Their claim that 2nd Amendment gives them the means to rise
up against the US government if they disagree with the legislative
action of the majority (what they would call tyranny) is specious and seditious.
We shouldn’t be able to own military-style weapons. No one needs one in
order to hunt.
We should be
prevented from being able to cut down trees or huddled masses in a mall, with a
burst from our “hunting rifle.”
Excellent summary of the fringe. Sadly, the fringe claims to want self government, but when the government gives a result outside of their narrow imaginings, the freak out.