Dear readers! My apologies for a lack of recent posting. Rest assured, I continue to post here on topics that are beyond the X.com/Twitter capacity for content.
It has long puzzled me why the Democrat wing of the USA political establishment - and, indeed, only a relatively small subset of those people - demonstrate an antipathy towards the 2nd Amendment of the United States Constitution which can only be described as "rabid". Why do other Amendments not attract the same magnitude of hate? In this post, I endeavour to explain.
First, a primer. After America was founded, they created the US Constitution, and then 15 years later in 1791 published the "Bill of Rights" - the first 10 Amendments to the Constitution. They set out broad areas where the State may not infringe on the rights of the individual, and were ratified by 3/4 of the original States. Select amendments are:
- [Amendment I] ("the First Amendment; Freedom of Speech")
- Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
- [Amendment II] ("the Second Amendment, Ownership of Firearms")
- A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
- [Amendment VI] ("speedy trial and assistance of counsel")
- In all criminal prosecutions the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
The international reader may read this throughout, and ask themselves "so? and what? Therefore... ?" Why would any particular Amendment be more important than the others.
The answer is twofold: the Second Amendment is not amenable to nullification, and the Second Amendment gives the population the ability to say "no" to politicians - and make it stick!
This year, with the frankly meteoric rise of Twitter/X as an un-censored social media platform - Jack Dorsey having ridden off into the sunset, and Elon Musk having taken over and done a Herculean job of cleaning the Twitter stables - we are starting to see clearly the amount of censorship that has been applied to communications in the USA over at least the last four years - COVID, the 2020 election, Hunter's laptop, etc. This has been a very clear demonstration that the elites in the USA have been systematically underminding the freedom that the First Amendment provides for speech.
As Agent Smith points out to Neo in the original Matrix movie: " Tell me, Mr. Anderson... what good is a phone call... if you're unable to speak?"
When YouTube, FaceBook, Twitter (as was) and others all obligingly collude in down-ranking, hiding or just plain deleting speech that government entities don't approve of, the First Amendment might as well have been written on toilet paper. It's easy to give vocal support to the First Amendment, as long as you know opponents can't be heard.
Now we have Elon Musk and the relative freedom of X/Twitter, we are not at the end of Internet censorship, but at least we have turned the page to a more hopeful chapter. Still, Elon is but one man, and we know what can happen to "difficult" men.
The Sixth Amendment implies fairness of the judicial system - a speedy trial and assistance of counsel. Of all the amendments, this one is the most ridiculously easy for the Democratic Party to subvert. Most lawyers, prosecutors, AGs, and nearly all law professors are Democrats. It's wild luck that the Supreme Court happens to have an approximately conservative majority right now - and even that shouldn't be taken for granted. So when the law is wielded as a weapon to silencem , bankrupt, jail, or otherwise ruin individuals for the Democratic Party's ends, no-one is falling off their chairs in surprise. Consider the jokes about Epstein's "suicide" - all those that were made in advance of the actual event.
No, ladies and gentlemen, the Amendment that the Democrats absolutely hate is the Second, and here's why. As noted, it gives the individual - or groups of individuals - power to resist imposition of tyranny. At the small scale, when the Democrats release their usual BLM protestors to riot in a town, in order to bring some local government to its knees, the ownership of firearms is what lets entire sections of the town stand up to them and "encourage" them to go home. See what happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina - individual neighborhoods quickly formed posses with shotguns and rifles to guard their entry points against looters. See why Kyle Rittenhouse was armed in Kenosha, Wisconsin - protecting an Indian-owned garage (whose owners appear to be ungrateful bastards, but that's another story) against the next evening of riots.
But guns are unique - they are almost impossible to control. Once they are in the hands of a population, how do you regain control over them?
- Confiscation - good luck. There is no national register of guns, and state-wide efforts to impose local registries have had a tiny complliance rate. When pushed, the good citizen will report "I lost them guns in a tragic kayaking accident. Got a warrant?"
- Neutralization - impossible. There have been a few conversations about giving guns a "kill switch" (ironically) but a) no-one would buy one, and b) 400M+ guns already out there don't have one
- Ammunition - I don't know how much ammunition is already out there, but you can figure it in the hundreds of rounds per gun. Kept in good conditions, ammunition can easily last 50 years.
- Voluntary recall - cities do this all the time, and mostly get rusted-out crap that is more of a danger to the owner than to the victim. Exceptions might be widows who didn't like their husbands' gun collections.
The sheer impossibility of overcoming the Second Amendment is what seems to drive politicians like Hillary Clinton, Kathy Hochul, and Gavin Newsom absolutely crazy. All they can do is try to impose pointless and ineffective restrictions on gun owners, e.g. background checks for buying ammo, which - of course - don't inconvenience criminals one bit, but drive up the blood pressure of legal gun owners, who then go out as soon as they can and buy more guns and ammo in anticipation of the next round of restrictions that they're mostly going to ignore.
When push comes to shove, tyrannical politicians know that at any point they could be looking out of their window at a thousand heavily armed citizens, who have had enough of being pushed around and so have come to introduce them to retirement. And that is a possibility that keeps their worst instincts in check. God Bless the Founders for the Second Amendment.
