class="p1"> When a gun rights advocate brings up the Second Amendment, I ask them why they wouldn't defend the First, Fourth and Sixth Amendment from either Bush or Obama. If they are willing to fight for the Bill of Rights, why do gun-lovers not just allow, but fight for stripping our right to a jury trial, to privacy or protest?
Worse yet, if firearms are the answers to stopping government tyranny, why are gun owners first to grant this government the authority to unilaterally label US citizens as terrorists and wipe them off the map?
Codified by an overwhelming bipartisan majority, the 2011 NDAA makes firearm ownership yet another "red flag" for the government's new legal authority to track, eavesdrop and ultimately, assassinate citizens, including minors, on their sole extra-judicial say-so, with total opacity. Isn't this what the Second Amendment intended to prevent?
The "Well-Regulated Militia"
When the founders mandated we arm ourselves to stand against tyrannical rule, citizen soldiers using muskets, bayonets and cannons trained to resist phalanxes of government soldiers or statehouse coups like a glorified neighborhood watch.
We can agree "non-standing" militias were designed to provide security without federal control or tax dollars, but we must see a lopsided imbalance has evolved. Current laws allow citizens limited access to long arms as a comical check to the government's stockpiles of atomic missiles, aircraft carriers, tank brigades, iron curtains, remote controlled flying machines -- or digital ears and eyes in every home.
By the age of mortars, bazookas and howitzers, any glint of citizen parity with War Department firepower was lost, but after they developed the Apache copter, Stinger/Hellfire missiles and Predator drones, the concept was relegated to an exercise in fantasy. The very idea of thinking about a 'security check' on a government is made more ludicrous by the advantage government has in secrecy, encompassing anything from their new crowd control ray to classified bio-weapons programs, nano, genetic, or as-yet-unknown technologies.
The best defense is brains - the academic and independent labs that outpace DoD research, the freedom of the press that exposes their antics, the public shunning and shame.
The individual gun owner today might be able to take out a single rogue FBI agent on their lawn, but cannot hope to beat back the local SWAT team, let alone the US military, were they to turn on us. The Supreme Court admitted this in 2008, when Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority acknowledged the changes in technology indeed made the "security" clause of the Second Amendment moot. Nevertheless, Scalia used the opportunity to invent an arbitrary carve-out preserving the right to own hand guns, furthering confusion and endless debate.
The power of the people today lay in our political and aggregate strength, intelligence and economic power. The hacker community has more capability than some governments, demonstrating routinely how they can assume control of sites and networks, but often do so with a self-proclaimed morality responsible to the peeps, using their power to pick virtual locks with a conscious.
We have not been able to curb government corruption because the federal government hydra has grown over 470,000 times it's size since the Second Amendment was ratified. But the venue for achieving balance has shifted anyway, from a potential homeland battlefield to the intellectual space - money, votes, airtime, buzz, boycotts, protests.
We The People are what keeps the country functioning, so our smarts and numbers will mean more to public policy than the founders' writ. With respect to best intents, that horse hath left the barn already...
As often seen overseas, governments invest heavily in "heart and minds", promising our votes and political support control outcomes. A major plank in this is gun ownership, a perennial wedge issue splitting us into rural and urban camps, but in practical political terms, a long settled debate.
The issue did not get ink in 2012 or 2008, a win for the status quo. Democrat John Kerry posed for a photo while game hunting, conceding the issue in 2004. Obama's "skeet" photos are the latest round in the optics game that ensure the toothless Second Amendment is not in the crosshairs.
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