National Rifle Association (NRA) board member and aged rocker Ted Nugent made national headlines in April when his threats against President Obama and Democrats earned him a visit from the Secret Service. But he has taken recently to uttering another mantra that is equally disturbing and revealing. At a concert in Forth Worth on August 25, Nugent told the crowd, "The whole world sucks. America sucks less." It was at least the fourth time in the last year he's publicly shared this derogatory opinion about the United States.
Nugent's remarks got me thinking about a seldom discussed but critical aspect of the modern pro-gun movement: Its total lack of faith in the system of government established by our Founders in the U.S. Constitution. It is that profound lack of faith -- more than anything -- that is responsible for the insurrectionist ideology ("Second Amendment remedies") that fuels the movement.
Pro-gun leaders like NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre would have us believe that "the guys with the guns make the rules" in our democracy. But nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, our Founders ratified the Constitution to obviate the need for political violence. The very first line of the document reads as follows: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." The Founders were telling the world that this brilliant new system of government -- this social compact -- would secure individual rights on a scale previously unknown in the civilized world. They protected liberty not by creating a libertarian society where every citizen was in it solely for himself, but by establishing a strong, energetic government and stressing civic responsibility.
In the face of this history and the plain terms of the Constitution itself, it is amazing to see modern insurrectionists like Judge Roy Moore, the controversial former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice, write things like, "Liberty and freedom are gifts of God, and not the government. The means by which we secure those gifts are ultimately in the hands and the 'arms' of the people." It's as if Moore is totally unaware of all the robust protections for individual rights spelled out in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The idea of liberty may be a "gift of God," but the Framers knew it could only be safeguarded if a robust government was in place to arbitrate private disputes and guarantee that each citizen has an equal voice in the affairs of the nation. Furthermore, what spurred the drafting of the Constitution was a fear that "licentiousness" -- freedom taken to excess -- was the greatest threat to individual liberty!
Nonetheless, Moore is far from alone in his belief that only private violence can be trusted to "secure the Blessings of Liberty." At the 2011 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Wayne LaPierre told those in attendance:
Their laws don't work, their lies don't ring true ... Government has failed us with our money and our financial institutions. It has failed in running our post offices and trains. It has failed in enforcing our immigration laws, our drug laws, and our laws against violent criminals with guns. Heck, they can barely get the snow plowed ... By its lies and laws and lack of enforcement, government policies are getting us killed and imprisoning us in a society of terrifying violence.
In LaPierre's world, it's as if the U.S. government never fostered the most powerful economy in the world, or put Neil Armstrong on the moon, or won two world wars, or built a national system of highways, or prevented generations of senior citizens from living out their final years in poverty, etc., etc. And the system of justice spelled out in the Constitution? The NRA has completely given up on it. Bill of Rights protections? Worthless. The courts? Can't trust 'em. In Personal Firepower We Trust.
Perhaps most disturbing are the endless attempts to conflate our constitutional republic with some of the most brutal and inhumane dictatorships in human history (try Googling "gun control Hitler" sometime). Recently, when my organization, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, asked National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) General Counsel Larry Keane if he felt that individual Americans had a right to shoot and kill government officials in response to what they personally perceived as "tyranny," Keane tweeted back at us plaintively, "Just like the Jews in the ghettos of Warsaw? The South Sudanese? Kurds? The American colonists?"
Keane makes an important, but unintended, point. Countries that kill their own citizens are not democracies. As political scientist R.J. Rummel noted in his 1997 book, Power Kills: Democracy as a Method of Nonviolence, nations with strong democratic institutions do not murder their own citizens. A more recent study by Christian Davenport and David A. Armstrong II examined this conclusion statistically and found, "Democratic political systems have been found to decrease political bans, censorship, torture, disappearances and mass killing, doing so in a linear fashion across diverse measurements, methodologies, time periods, countries, and contexts." Well-developed democracies are the most effective means of preventing public and private violence, and the U.S. Constitution -- to this day -- remains the template for free societies.
Last year, the NRA criticized a blog I had written here at the Huffington Post in a column in their flagship magazine, America's 1st Freedom ("Fear and Loathing Post Tucson," May 2011). For believing in the system of government established by the Constitution, I was compared to Timothy Treadwell, who was killed by a grizzly bear after spending 13 summers around these creatures in Alaska. "Horwitz' fantasy that government can and will safeguard us from the brutal excesses of the state of nature reminds me of another individual who thought the designs of man -- in this case not the constructs of government, but the human values of compassion and fraternity -- could keep the brutality of the world at bay," wrote NRA editor Blaine Smith.
Except it wasn't my fantasy that the "constructs of government... could keep the brutality of the world at bay." It was the fantasy of our Founders who traveled to Philadelphia in May of 1787 to correct the deficiencies in the Articles of Confederation and establish a new system of government that could "insure domestic tranquility" and "secure the Blessings of Liberty." And while the NRA and the pro-gun movement might have absolutely no faith in their wisdom and foresight, most Americans still do.
Follow Josh Horwitz on Twitter: www.twitter.com/CSGV
http://www.aurorasentinel.com/opinion/perry-fatalistic-flaw-in-letting-gun-nuts-and-gunmen-run-the-show/
The NRA has not committed any violence yet you accuse them of being insurrectionist while liberal progressives Occupy movement you fail to mention. Your only fooling your self since on this matter since even gun banners I talk to can't deny such facts.
The 2nd amendment is a constitutional check against mob rule. Democracy is not freedom. Freedom requires rights that no majority can over rule. The NRA is acting in the spirit of the constitution by protecting the means in which the minority can defend their rights against mob rule.
"The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered, as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them." Justice Story, SCOTUS, "Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States" 1833
"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United States. A military force, at the command of Congress, can execute no laws, but such as the people perceive to be just and constitutional; for they will possess the power, and jealousy will instantly inspire the inclination, to resist the execution of a law which appears to them unjust and oppressive."
---Noah Webster, An Examination of the Leading Principles of the Federal Constitution (Philadelphia 1787).
The thing is, the FOUNDERS and those who were intimately familiar with the era, something Josh seemingly is not, WANTED the people armed, to INSURE the government never became "tyrannical". It has worked well 223 years, the year the COTUS went into effect.
"O sir, we should have fine times, indeed, if, to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people! Your arms, wherewith you could defend yourselves, are gone...Did you ever read of any revolution in a nation...inflicted by those who had no power at all?" Patrick Henry, VA ratifying convention.
"[C]onceived it to be the privilege of every citizen, and one of his most essential rights, to bear arms, and to resist every attack upon his liberty or property, by whomsoever made. The particular states, like private citizens, have a right to be armed, and to defend, by force of arms, their rights, when invaded." Roger Sherman, during House consideration of a militia bill (1790)
"The prohibition is general. No clause in the Constitution could by any rule of construction be conceived to give to congress a power to disarm the people. Such a flagitious attempt could only be made under some general pretence by a state legislature. But if in any blind pursuit of inordinate power, either should attempt it, this amendment may be appealed to as a restraint on both." William Rawle
Such insurrectionists in Josh's mind. He would have supported the British, it seems.
I love my country, but I hate my government, because it is not the government of our Founders.
http://gunfreezone.net/wordpress/index.php/2011/10/18/csgv-ladd-everitt-thinks-he-is-in-cuba-or-venezuela/
Countries that do that must be 'democracies' in their world.
Now we can add the 6th Amendment to that as well as the CSGV now opposes the right to a trial by jury.
Genocide
Concentration Camps
Spousal Abuse
http://daysofourtrailers.blogspot.com/2012/05/which-rights-do-they-support.html
This is your 'pro-gov't' gun controller in action.
Any questions?
How is that robust protection going now? How's the First Amendment doing, anyway?
Ask Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. He was taken for questioning at 12:30 am by Marshals after his video. I thought the First Amendment was to protect even scurrilous speech such as P*$$ Christ, "The Last Temptation of Christ", and that Elephant Dung Madonna picture, and include this trashy video. Or are some amendments and some speech and some religions more protected than others?
Is the Second Amendment weak enough now that the First is next to fall? Is what YOU say still protected?
‘If receipt of a firearms by the person would violate section 922(g)(10), any information which the Attorney General relied on for this determination may be withheld from the applicant if the Attorney General determines that disclosure of the information would likely compromise national security. In responding to the petition, the United States may submit, and the court may rely on, summaries or redacted versions of documents containing information the disclosure of which the Attorney General has determined would likely compromise national security.’.
Get that? They don't have to provide ANY information to you or the courts they determine to be 'sensitive' and the courts have to rule on what is presented.
That's how much they care about 'individual rights'.
Semper fi
CSGV Reponse: Correct
The CSGV later attempted to deny this statement.
Josh, can you please point to anywhere on earth that this is not true? You guys used to so enamored of Max Weber and his idea of a state monopoly on violence. how is that not the folks with the guns making the rules?
And to insure that this robust government did not infringe upon individual rights, they added a Bill of Rights which acted as a limitation on the powers of government. Thus, it prevents the government from interfering with freedom of religion and prevents government from establishing religion, prevents government from interfering with freedom of speech and the press, prevents the government from interfering with the right to peaceably assemble and petitionand prevents the the government from infringing the right to keep and bear arms.
Yep Josh, the framers decided to protect individual rights by LIMITING the power of this "robust government", not by increasing it.