I haven't been blogging in a while. Way too long. But right now my feathers are ruffled, and I have a lot to say about, yes, you got it, gun control. The Leftie Loons are coming after our guns, one way or the other. Politicos such as Obama, Biden, Cuomo, Dayton, and a host of others either do not understand why our Founding Fathers inserted that simple clause in the Second Amendment, "the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed", or they simply want to move us closer to a totalitarian dictatorship. I suspect that for many of them, it is the latter. There are some, like Dayton, who are just too stupid to understand the Constitution.

Cuomo recently stated "It's simple - no one hunts with an assault rifle. No one needs 10 bullets to kill a deer". Well, yeah, he's right. No one hunts with an assault rifle. An assault rifle, by definition, must have selective fire capability, meaning it is capable to fire single-round, burst, or full auto at the pull of a trigger. To won such a weapon, one must have a Class III Federal Firearms License. In some states, like Minnesota, even if you have such a license, only a business, not a private citizen, can own such a weapon. The ownership of assault rifles is strictly controlled. And yes, no one seriously needs 10 bullets in order to kill a deer, unless you are a horrible shot.

But the Second Amendment is NOT about hunting. The founding Fathers did not put that in there to enable people to hunt, or to target shoot. Although you can rightfully conclude that, in part, it is about enabling people to defend themselves from criminals, the main reason it is there is to enable the American People to protect their rights, and their Liberty, from a potentially tyrannical government.

Think about your history for a moment. Why did the British march on concord and Lexington on April 19th, 1775? The Revolution hadn't started, no shots had as yet been fired, nor were there open hostilities between the British and the Colonials. Their mission was to secure and destroy military stores in the possession of the Colonials in those towns. They were going out to disarm the Colonials. The British didn't gain much success on that score, aside from disabling three 24-pound cannons that were buried on Ephraim Jones' property. Unless you count triggering the War of Independence to be a British success.

Sure, one can say "Well, the Founding Fathers didn't mean fully automatic assault weapons when they wrote the Second Amendment. They meant single shot muzzle-loading rifles." Note: Muzzle-loading single shot rifles were state of the art military grade weapons. As were the Brown Bess muskets typically used by the infantry of both armies. Note: The Colonials had stashed cannons and other crew-served military weapons in various places from the government.

The cornerstone of American Rights, and American Constitutional Law, is our Declaration of Independence. In it, Thomas Jefferson wrote:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Without the Second Amendment, without the Right of the People to keep and bear arms, none of our other rights can remain secure.

Indeed, over the past few years we have watched our Rights to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness be infringed upon by the Federal Government with the passing of ObamaCare, requiring the People to purchase certain kinds of health insurance, under penalty of paying higher taxes, even over-riding the right to religious freedom contained in the First Amendment by requiring business owners to provide contraceptive and abortion services through insurance policies, despite such requirements being contrary to their religious beliefs.

Our national debt now stands at over $16 Trillion, more than our gross domestic product. Budget deficits in excess of $1 trillion dollars per year since Obama took office in 2009, the only president to have deficits that high. Even under Bush, the highest previous budget deficits were $550 Billion (and yes, even those deficits were way too high, and thanks mainly to a Congress controlled by Pelosi and Reid).

And now the Administration may be planning to bypass Congress in an unconstitutional move to implement potentially draconian gun control laws via Executive Order. That is how dictators operate - via edict.

If the Obama Administration attempts to use an Executive Order to push gun control, we had better start seeing impeachment proceedings begin in Congress, and impeach anyone in the Administration, Congress, and the Judiciary who supports such an Executive Order should be immediately removed from office.

I don't think there is an adult in the free-world who is not watching all of the turmoil in North Africa and the Middle East, especially what is going on in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. There are a lot of Leftwing pundits and politicians who are embracing these protests, riots, and ousters of dictators as being a sign of changes to more democratic governments in those countries. There are some of us on the right-hand side of the political divide who believe it will be more like the change that Iranians got when they deposed the Shah and got Khomeini as a replacement, trading one dictator (a pro-West one at that) for another dictator (one who is anti-West). I still believe that this is what will happen in Egypt with the ouster of Mubarak. So far there are more indicators that I am right than wrong.

Jerry Bowyer, writing over on Forbes, seems to see things the same way I do, and gives a darn good bit of supporting evidence why things may go the way of Iran, and why so many Democrats and leftwing pundits are wrong.
 

One of the tenets of classical political theory is that people get the government they want, which means they ultimately get the government they deserve. This does not just apply to democracies that are based on an explicit commitment to the "consent of the governed," but it applies to other types of regimes as well.

Soviet Russia, Communist China, Iran, Cuba, North Korea are all modern day examples of revolutions resulting in worse tyrannies than what the people had before. There are many others of course.

Bowyer uses Liberia as another example of why Western Democracy, American style Liberty, self-government, are concepts that are doomed to failure in these varied hotspots. Bottom line, the most of the people in many of these countries don't understand the concept of self-government and rule of law as they have known nothing but dictatorships throughout their history.

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NOTE: The following is my opinion, but is more right than most of what you will read online

I recently got into 2 interesting conversations online, one with a hard-core Libertarian and one with a eurotwit.

The position we on this blog take, In My Humble Opinion, with of course personal difference is basically small government Conservatism, tending toward small “L” libertarianism. I would do a quick and dirty summation as this: Government is a Necessary Evil. It should be as small as possible and NO smaller.

The first conversation I had was in response to a post that claimed that the Republican party has always been a fascist party. I responded with “wha? Freeing the slaves was fascism?” He diverted the conversation into the idea that Lincoln was a fascist and that Republican policy has always been the policy of less freedom for the individual and support of BIG Business. I could “hear” the BIG in his tone.

This is the point of departure for me from Libertarians. Scratch a Libertarian, and you will find an Anarchist. The big L Libertarians really have no use for government, and cannot distinguish between between the exigencies of war and the Overarching Conspiracy. Given the choice of defending Democracy, which they claim to love and allowing the government to temporarily expand to fight a real and present danger, they will walk away and let freedom fail.

The second conversation I got into, and got bailed out of by some excellent help was in response to a rather silly comment about taxes by a fellow that proclaimed himself a non-American, and demonstrated it. My thought on it ran this way: Tyranny begins when “Yes we can” become “Now you must.” I also opined that when people insisted that the force of law should be used to advance a social agenda that they were imposing their morality on us. He immediately labeled me an Anarchist and asked me if I was a NeoCon (!) All together a rather ill-informed arrogant fellow, i.e., a classic European.

As I understand NeoConservativism, it actually has much to praise, as well as rather over-reaching ideas. It believes in American Exceptionalism, that the American Ideal is the best of all presented options and should prevail and be spread everywhere. This can, unfortunately, devolve into Imperialism and Manifest Destiny. Also NeoCons, while great allies in time of war, love bigger and bigger government. At their worst they make the fears of my Libertarian friends seem too plausible.

As I see our future, we must avoid both Scylla and Charybdis. Avoid the excesses of the Anarcho-Libertarians, and the Imperialism of the Big Government Statists.

Thinking about the TSA kefluffle... Especially seeing non-conservative/libertarians taking exception to the heavy handedness (pun intended) tells me that really 90% of Americans are really at their heart freedom loving small "L" libertarians that just want to be left alone.

We were watching "Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" the other day, an excellent movie, but a hard "R." And my housemates and I noted that they were surfing the web with a laptop in a moving car. My housemate who has travelled to Europe answered our unbelief by noting that yea, Europe is about 10 years ahead of us in internet access. After some initial, "Why can't we do that?" I gave it some thought.

It's because of liberty. The United States is not a country in the same sense that Germany or Sweden is. It's also not the same kind of Union as the EU. For as much as conservatives and libertarians lament the death of states rights and local government, we have it in spades compared to the rest of the world.

Our country was constructed for the purpose of individual liberty, and despite 100 years of progressivism, still is amazingly free.
But this freedom has costs, and technological progress is one of them. We don't have rigid Central Planning, we don't have a government imposed standard, because the saner members of government realize a solution that would work in Vermont would not work in Montana. The individual states still do retain 10th Amendment protection, so the kind of monolithic change possible in Europe don't happen (yet!) here.

So when you are cursing the lack of connectivity, realize this is a byproduct of freedom.