Chaos In A Bottle

If you’ve known me for any length of time, you probably know that I’m an ardent supporter of the Second Amendment. You probably know that I carry a gun.  All the time. Everywhere. Legally. I’m fortunate enough to live in a state that doesn’t place too many restrictions on my constitutional right to protect myself, and I avail myself of that freedom. Every single day.

What you may not know is WHY. If you don’t care to find out, you can go back some, read about zombies or some crap. If you want to know why, either because you’re curious, you want to find out why I’m, in your opinion, cracked in the head, keep on reading.

In one aspect, I carry because I CAN.  Because it is MY RIGHT, guaranteed in the United States Constitution. Because the founding fathers, in their wisdom, realized a few things that I have come to understand as being just as valid today as they were in 1791.

…the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, in The District of Columbia v. Heller:

Nor is the right involved in this discussion less comprehensive or valuable: “The right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed.” The right of the whole people, old and young, men, women and boys, and not militia only, to keep and bear arms of every description, not such merely as are used by the militia, shall not be infringed, curtailed, or broken in upon, in the smallest degree; and all this for the important end to be attained: the rearing up and qualifying a well-regulated militia, so vitally necessary to the security of a free State. Our opinion is, that any law, State or Federal, is repugnant to the Constitution, and void, which contravenes this right, originally belonging to our forefathers, trampled under foot by Charles I. and his two wicked sons and successors, reestablished by the revolution of 1688, conveyed to this land of liberty by the colonists, and finally incorporated conspicuously in our own Magna Charta! And Lexington, Concord, Camden, River Raisin, Sandusky, and the laurel-crowned field of New Orleans, plead eloquently for this interpretation! And the acquisition of Texas may be considered the full fruits of this great constitutional right.

In addition, he writes:

Nowhere else in the Constitution does a “right” attributed to “the people” refer to anything other than an individual right. What is more, in all six other provisions of the Constitution that mention “the people,” the term unambiguously refers to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset. This contrasts markedly with the phrase “the militia” in the prefatory clause. As we will describe below, the “militia” in colonial America consisted of a subset of “the people”— those who were male, able bodied, and within a certain age range. Reading the Second Amendment as protecting only the right to “keep and bear Arms” in an organized militia therefore fits poorly with the operative clause’s description of the holder of that right as “the people”.

I can’t help but feel that this is what our founding fathers would have said were they sitting there.  You see, they had just been through a war of REVOLUTION.  Of REBELLION against their own government, which had grown tyrannical in its dealings with its subjects across the sea. They had taken hold of their God-given right to govern themselves, to embrace their destinies as free men, to be subjects no longer but to be participants in a system of government that they would themselves create. No more would they bow to foreign kings who ruled through birthright and not worth. They would put into place a system that would allow THE PEOPLE to chose representatives to send to the halls of government. They would also codify as rights certain things that they believed vital to the continued success of this fledgling country – things that would guarantee those three things they’d spoken of when they first broke from Great Britain – life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. No longer did people serve the government; in this new country, the government would serve the people.

The thing is – without the ability to DEFEND those rights, the Constitution is nothing more than words on paper. Your freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom from unwarranted search and seizure – WITHOUT THE TEETH OF THE SECOND AMENDMENT, THEY MEAN NOTHING. Without that, you’re a chained dog barking at the burglar breaking into the house you can’t reach to protect. Even worse, should that burglar decide to shut you up, you’ve got no teeth to bite him with, even if you could reach him.

Do you see my point?

Some of you may be having an apoplectic fit right now. I’m giving myself the credit, probably more than I deserve, of actually having a readership outside of my mom (Hi, Mom!). Thing is – I’m ok with that, because your offense or fear or whatever doesn’t trump my right.  My right to defend myself, and my family, from WHATEVER may be a threat. It might be that burglar breaking into my house. It might be someone deciding that the movie theater I’m at with my children would be a good time to release some of their pent-up psychotic rage. It might be the government that has grown so bloated, so concerned with Muslim appeasement and entitlement classes that it has decided it needs to redistribute my meager wealth to others. It might be the Islamic neighbors who yell at me for dressing like a whore (i.e. not in a burka), and believe based on the rantings of their pedophile prophet that I’m theirs for the taking.

I don’t know WHAT threats may come to bear on my family and myself. I do know that I will not, not now, not EVER, give up my RIGHT as a human being and citizen of this once-great country, to defend them or myself.

There’s more of this coming – so keep reading.  Or not.  Embrace the possibilities.