Dear America: Guns aren't your problem, You are. To Keep and Bear Arms Across Time - pt3

What do you think of when thinking about the 2nd Amendment? I've said what I think of: what the meaning of the 2nd Amendment is, I think of those objections I have to both those who're promoting something they call 'gun rights!', and 'gun control!', and of how I think its opponents evade honest discussions through ideological falsehoods and evasions for political gains. But that's me - what comes to your mind when you think of the 2nd Amendment? Are you, like many, one of those who think about shooting statistics and reducing crime numbers through common sense gun policies and laws?

Personally, I'm most definitely not thinking about statistics, in any way, when thinking about the 2nd Amendment. But for those of you who do, it probably wouldn't surprise you to learn that I welcome those who, having once relied upon such statistical studies arguing for 'common sense gun regulations', have since had their views on their effectiveness changed, by the very statistics they once used to justify imposing various restrictions upon the 2nd Amendment, with. This former believer and researcher, who revised her position to say that 'gun control' does not work, is a good example of that:

"...Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly....."

, and that,

"...I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn't prove much about what America's policy should be. .... And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths...."

You might of course believe that your own review of the 'statistical facts' leads you to conclude that your 'gun control' methods would, or even do work, as this delightful manufacturer of two faced straw man arguments claims. But perhaps not. Or, if you wonder whether the Australian gun confiscation model might work here, since it seemed to lower shooting deaths there, this paper, which doesn't agree with me, presents a very reasonable case for why that is unlikely to be true for us here, or even for that matter for them there, and explains why.

But even if favorable findings and statics such as those were accepted without question, they still are not something that I'd use to make an argument for the 2nd Amendment.

Why? Because if that is your approach, then you are not thinking of what, IMHO, all such discussions should begin from - and that is a mistake. You cannot make a sound argument for something, on the basis of something that is not essential to the nature and purpose of that thing you are arguing for. Personally, I tend to think that any consideration of the 2nd Amendment, which actually begins with the premises that the 2nd Amendment was written from, and which define the purposes that it was written for, will lead you too to conclude, with me, that what it upholds and protects is deeply valuable to everyone's life, then and now. But even if you somehow had statistical proof, or some other claim of proof, for the effectiveness of 'gun control' measure or another, showing the numbers of lives it would save, and asked me what I thought of that, then I would reply as clearly and transparently as I possibly could:

I really don't care whether 'gun control' proposals will, or won't, 'work' to reduce crime and murders, and my opposition to them would remain unchanged.

Why? Because the 2nd Amendment has nothing to do with crime, or with reducing criminal behavior, or with our failures as a society to reduce murders or other criminal behavior, and I'm not giving it up for a false appearance of relevance.

Try looking at it this way: If it could be shown - and I've zero doubt that it could be - that by repealing the 4th Amendment (which preserves the right "...to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures...", requiring warrants, etc.), or even that putting (further) 'common sense restrictions upon it', the police would be able to prevent an enormous number of crimes by having the ability to enter anyone's house on a hunch, arrest anyone on the basis of suspicion alone, and hold them for as long as they thought best, I've no doubt whatsoever that we would immediately see a drastic reduction in crime and murder rates across the nation.

Would you be for that?

I would not.

Why? Because reducing crime is not the purpose of the 4th Amendment, or of the 5th Amendment, or of any of those other essential individual rights that are being protected by any of the other amendments in our Bill of Rights. Not even in those amendments which deal directly with limiting police activities in pursuit of criminals, they are not about crime, or murder, they are about safeguarding our individual rights by specifically preventing governments from gaining those powers which have been historically proven, over, and over again, to be horrifically dangerous to that government's own people, for it to acquire such powers over their lives.

They don't need to have bad intentions for bad things to follow from them, good intentions will more than suffice. It doesn't matter whether such powers are to implement traditional conservative policy

The 2nd Amendment's role in our abusive and violent society of social & legislative reformers. To Keep and Bear Arms Across Time - pt2

Clearly, as we're repeatedly beset with violent actions ranging from robbery, to assault, to murder, to the mind numbing mass slaughters we've experienced at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, a small town church in Texas, and now the sprawling high school in Parkland Florida, our society does have a problem with those who take up arms against the lives, rights and property of the rest of us. But just as clearly, confronting what the nature of that problem actually is, and why, as well as what actually can be done about it, is something that we've been fiercely unwilling to face up to - and that's worth taking a closer look at.

I argued in a previous post that it is because the primary purpose of the 2nd Amendment is not about Guns, that it is able to secure our right to keep and bear the personal arms of your choice, including guns. But why is that important? If you see its purpose as being nothing more than your possessing 'Arms', then you'll be easily diverted with irrelevancies, such as which arms (a .38 Special was the 'bad' weapon when I was young, as an AR-15 is today), or crime, or how much of that 'right' you actually 'need' - and if you don't see the problem there, it's that sort of perspective that would ask Rosa Parks why she needed to sit in the front of the bus. With a Utilitarian view like that, it may never occur to you that the purpose of the 2nd Amendment is wedded to the rest of the Bill of Rights, in that its purpose is to secure our natural right to keep and bear arms in defense of all of our rights, and if you can manage to take that perspective, you'll quickly see that criminals are the least and last of the threats to the 2nd Amendment's purpose.

What most people are not thinking about when the 2nd Amendment is brought to their mind, is our willful failure to identify the nature of what our rights are, which not only prevents us from dealing effectively with those who trespass against them, but encourages the greater trespasses and the very violence which the social & legislative reformers so noisly (and usefully) decry. It is that blank spot in our thoughts, whch has brought about one of those ironies which history delights in, as the attentions that both 'Gun Rights!' and 'Gun Control' enthusiasts mutually focus upon particular guns, serves to push the concepts of Arms and Individual Rights ever further from our minds, so that both groups are busily weakening our understanding of what the 2nd Amendment requires us to know, in order for it to be able to preserve those rights that it was written to defend for us.

Without an adequate understanding of the concepts behind the 2nd Amendment, its revolutionary statement:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

, becomes empty words ("nonsense upon stilts" is the pragmatic and Utilitarian view) that fall easy prey to 'what the meaning of IS is', making it that much easier to deny or avoid dealing with what the issue of armed violence actually is. The 2nd Amendment's power can be no greater than our understanding of it, and those who stand to gain ever more power with its loss, are very much aware of the the possibilities that our ignorance holds for them, and they are using that power to socially and legislatively reform America, into something less than what our Constitution is capable of serving.

The role which the 2nd Amendment has in our abusive and violent society today, even today, is to provide We The People with the means of defending and preserving our individual rights, from those social & legislative reformers who justify using the power of government to infringe upon our lives through our rights, for their vision of the 'Greater good' - no matter how much disorder and violence those reforms might be shown to visit upon us. The role and responsibility of We The People in defending our rights through the 2nd Amendment, is to understand, and apply the concepts which its words defend us with. Those whose efforts are thwarted by it, know that, and they use every trick they can to muddle, evade, and ignore its meaning, so that such thoughts will continue to remain unthought by you, when the 2nd Amendment is brought to mind.

While the 2nd Amendment is proof that the pen is mightier than the sword (we would not still have either arms or rights without the words of our Bill of Rights), its unprotected flanks expose it to attack from those grounds it doesn't explicitly defend. The 2nd Amendment is not about Guns, Criminals or Hunting, but in the intellectual guerrilla warfare we're currently engaged in, those issues serve as excellent cover for snipers firing fusillades of misdirection and falsehood into our midst. If you want to defend the 2nd Amendment's ability to defend us, you must make the effort to understand it, and to spot, and disarm those assaults upon it, or it will be rendered powerless to help us. The Pen is mightier than the sword... but only if its words - and those fired against it - are understood.

Looking directly into the disinfecting sunlight
Before taking a look at how our social & legislative reformers evade reality, and the dangerous abuses that are inherent in, and will result from doing so, let's have a look at the truth that is so painful for them to look upon. The dose of reality that our fellow citizens so desperately need, doesn't take a lot to say:

• There are NO LAWS that would prevent these shootings.

Democracy Dies in Darkness... and they like it that way

Ok, so I've finally read the dreaded "FISA Memo" which the GOP members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote in regards to classified materials, which they had vetted on sources and methods, approved by President Trump, and released to the public. I've heard the Democrat's warnings about endangering national security and about out of context charges. I've read the NeverTrump'rs downplaying of the memo, by Nat'l Review's David French, and the L.A. Times; and of course, although I'd like to read it, we do not yet have the Democrat 'counter memo' available yet, to get 'the other side' of.

The three points noted below are what I find most significant in the FISA Memo, and everything here hangs upon them. If those three points are true, nothing else matters (and if they are fabrications then these charges should be reversed, with a vengeance). But let's deal with the above items first.

As regards the hysterical 'Endangering National Security!' shrieking that we've been deafened by over the last few days by members of the Democrat Party, there are zero credible, or even stretchable points, that can be construed as to be threats to National Security, in this memo. The charge is ridiculous on the face of it, and further makes the case that they'd go to the most desperate measures possible to keep what's referenced in the memo, under wraps. IOW, 'Democracy Dies in Darkness... and they like it that way.'

Then there's the exercise in blinkered besides-the-point Fith'king (pansified 'Fisking'), from NeverTrump'rs (Left and Right) seeking to bone up the almost immediately discredited charges in a New York Times article last year, as being the only noteworthy points in the memo, and their 'oh boy this is gonna be great!' gleefulness about supposedly substantiating some fringe pieces of the "Russia! Russia! Russia!" case against Trump, are pathetic examples of personal pique, and desperate ideologically snowed-blind efforts to avoid allowing any 'good' to get near a story on Trump.

If anyone can read this memo, and come away focused only upon the charges against Trump, or Trump's charges against the media and FBI, instead of being absolutely incensed over the obvious use and abuse of power perpetrated against the American people, by those entrusted with protecting the American people, in order to further their own interests of political and personal gain, then they possess, IMHO, only sick, twisted, stumps of burned out apparatus, where effective minds had perhaps once dwelt.

The Democrats tell us that they'll put out a counter-memo, soon, that will show just how deceptively out of context the memo's charges are, which I'd very much like to see.

But.

Decades of experience reading what passes for 'The News' from all sides, has accustomed me to seeking out the possibility of missing contexts in stories, and as the bits and drabs of the truth of them have leaked out weeks, months or years later have confirmed to me, I'm fairly good at it. I can imagine a large number of clipped, minimized or dropped contexts in this Memo, but none that would actually matter, where it actually matters most.

What I find most damning in the FISA Memo isn't open to much deflation as a result of an expanded and clarified context, because whether or not the essential piece referenced in the Memo (developed from the Steele dossier) actually served as a foundational basis for the FISA warrants, or instead simply lent some additional support to the request for that warrant to spy upon American citizens, the nature of that document's unsubstantiated charges, and its authors' personal animus, bias, financial and political interests involved in its being used, catastrophically taint everything connected to it - especially as that nature was concealed from those who were presented with it as if it was worthy of respectable consideration.

Seriously! If Jeff Sessions had to recuse himself from the 'Russia Investigation' because he publicly talked to a Russian diplomat in a greeting line at a State Dept sponsored event, then there's damn sure no room for anything connected to that piece (sponsored and paid for by the DNC and Hillary Clinton's Presidential Campaign), being used in establishing any aspect of any warrant, let alone the highly volatile nature of a FISA Warrant, and that goes doubly for such information being used while those facts about its origin were deliberately withheld from those who were given them to aid in determining whether or not to issue said warrant (see #4 below).

No matter the imaginable contexts and scenarios that may be brought to light in the future, the following points alone, establish unacceptable behavior, corruption, in the use of the most sensitive and debated investigatory powers our government is able to bring to bear upon American citizens, so as to abuse those powers for the very worst, most corrupt of purposes - that of changing the outcome of a presidential election, to suit the political judgment of a few.

And people, please, stop bringing up Watergate. There is no comparison to Watergate here - that scandal involved a criminal break-in for political purposes. This matter involves using the legal apparatus of our judicial system, to legally spy upon American citizens, in order to corrupt the public mind for political purposes, in a campaign for the highest elected office in the land - not to steal politically sensitive materials, but to corrupt the political judgment of the entire nation. I'll restate that last point: The purpose of obtaining this FISA Warrant, was to corrupt and taint the judgment of the entire American electorate, to manipulate their votes by corrupting the highest functions of our government - our judicial system and defense systems - to taint and dis-inform the public mind and alter their votes by means of our most powerful institutions which are entrusted to 'protect and serve' that same public.

These few points from the FISA Memo, short of their proven to be outright lies, these are not open to the sway of additional context:

• "1 a) Neither the initial application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele's efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior DOJ and FBI officials."
• "3 a "During this same time period, Ohr's wife was employed by Fusion GPS to assist in the cultivation of opposition research on Trump. Ohr later provided the FBI with all of his wife's opposition research, paid for by the DNC and Clinton campaign via Fusion GPS. The Ohrs' relationship with Steele and Fusion GPS was inexplicably concealed from the FISC."
• 4 "...While the FISA application relied on Steele's past record of credible reporting on other unrelated matters, it ignored or concealed his anti-Trump financial and ideological motivations. Furthermore, Deputy Director McCabe testified before the Committee in December 2017 that no surveillance warrant would have been sought from the FISC without the Steele dossier information." [emphasis mine]

If you can defend behavior such as that, I can find no means or warrant for defending yours.