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Nov. 28, 2007 The Supreme Court has agreed to review a decision by a lower court that says, in effect, that the Second Amendment delineates an individual right to keep and bear arms, throwing a large monkey wrench into the works of those who believe that people are untrustworthy and should not be permitted the means to defend themselves against predators...be they government types or simply home invaders bent on rape and mayhem. Some years ago, Washington D.C. passed a law essentially forbidding one from owning or possessing a firearm inside the District, following the lead of those other paragons of personal safety; New York City and San Francisco. That law was challenged and the 5th District Court of Appeals has ruled essentially that the right to "keep and bear arms" referred to in the 2nd Amendment is an INDIVIDUAL right--not a "collective" right as the city has maintained. The "collectivist" point of view is due to the preamble to the 2nd which reads, "A well-regulated militia being necessary to a free State...." The phrase "well-regulated militia" has been interpreted by these people to mean the National Guard. Of course that's nonsense. All 9 of the other Articles of the Bill of Rights refer either to individual rights (freedom of speech, the right not to be compelled to incriminate oneself, etc.) or specifically limiting the rights of Congress (...all rights not otherwise specified in the Constitution are reserved to either the individual States or to the people.) In particular, the first five Amendments are very clearly individual rights. Taken in its historical context, the term militia in 1783 meant all able-bodied men over the age of 16. There was no "national guard" or any other such organization at that time. The Founding Fathers were even suspicious of having a standing military. Let's, for a second, examine the phraseology. You'll notice that the way it's worded, the Second Amendment does not GRANT the people the right to keep and bear arms. "...the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." It presupposes that such a right already exists and simply prohibits Congress from interfering with that right. "...the right of the people..." could not be clearer. However, given the knuckleheadedness to emanate from the U.S. Supreme Court in the past, despite its somewhat conservative makeup currently (Justice Kennedy is the "swing" vote and he can be obtuse) there's always the danger that their decision will, once and for all, give the anti-gun idiots the ammunition they need to either register and/or confiscate individually-owned firearms. Conservatives KNOW what the Founding Fathers meant when they penned the Bill of Rights. Liberals, in their unending zeal to disarm the people, have done everything they possibly could to twist those words out of context and recognition. Four members of the Court will undoubtedly decide on the liberal interpretation, which is essentially based on fear of giving ANY authority to ordinary citizens that's not within their power to control. Four members will probably take the conservative position--that the right referred to in the 2nd IS an individual right and that the Amendment simply limits Congress' (the government's) authority to interfere with that right. That leaves Kennedy, who has jumped back and forth from the left to the right, dependent upon the issue. I suggest to you that no issue decided in the past 100 years by the Supreme Court is more important to our ability to remain a free society. Disarming the people will almost assuredly guarantee one of two, ultimate scenaria. (1) We will be witness to the passage of draconian laws that will remove all of our individual rights under our Constitution--perhaps even see a new Constitutional Convention to rewrite that document so that it will conform more closely to the left's idea of what the Constitution SHOULD say, which you can be certain will NOT contain any right for individual citizens to arm themselves; or (2) we will be invaded and conquered once disarmed by our own government. A former KGB agent, after the fall of the Soviet Union, stated that the one factor that prevented any thoughts of invasion of the U.S. by the USSR or their surrogates (the "Red Dawn" scenario) was the prevalence of individually-owned firearms in the U.S., making conquering us militarily nearly impossible. As soon as the left succeeds in disarming ordinary citizens, you can bet that restriction will be noticed by those who long for the overthrow of the U.S. However, the left is well on its way to overthrowing the government by means other than militarily so that second option is probably unlikely. By controlling our education, news dissemination and entertainment industry, the left is slowly but assuredly engaged in mass "re-education," of the populace--just as in the infamous re-education camps established in the USSR, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and Laos after the communists' successful "revolutions." Such revolutions are impossible here, however, only for so long as the people have the right to arm themselves. Every despot to rise to power in the world in the last century has been able to do so ONLY after effectively disarming the populace. It was one of the very first things that Hitler did after Munich, that Lenin did after the October revolution succeeded and that Castro did in Cuba in 1960. Let us hope that the left does NOT succeed in doing it here, and one of the primary ways of preventing that is for the Supreme Court to agree with the Founding Fathers that firearm ownership IS an individual right, forever owned by individual people by virtue of their being free citizens. To do otherwise is to assure that this nation will not survive this century intact. ------------ About the author: David A. Jared is a news junkie, semi-retired and an avid golfer who's been writing his first book, "4000 years of chopsticks" for the last 20 years. Email: jaredland@sbcglobal.net ------------- All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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