Co-Counsel on the Parker/Heeler case, Robert A. Levy, gets an Op-Ed he wrote published in the LA Times and makes me hope I remember to check on their Letters to the Editor section in a couple days for the reactions.
It may or may not be related, but I’d like to point out that over at Uncle’s Place there is a rather lively discussion on what the “breaking point†might be. Yes, that breaking point.
Since I’m not very good at group discussions/interactions (which explains why I have a blog of my own) let me just say that I agree with Anarchangel/Chris, though I believe that it will be mostly because the majority of gun owners won’t see the BP for what it is and not because they have no will (though there are way too many who don’t).
As for Uncle’s wont to “Turn them in. Ammo first.†I hope that he dislikes playing defense as much as I do and doesn’t plan on waiting for them to come a-knockin’.
I’ll be honest – talk of this makes me somewhat uncomfortable. It’s the other side of the two-edged sword of independence, in that one often can’t get a large group of independently-minded people to agree on ANYTHING, let alone something as important as the “breaking point”. I’ve seen several times where people have made a stand on their rights and be ridiculed or demonized by the rest of the gun-owninng community as a “wacko” or nut – the same community that shouts out “molon labe!” or “from my cold, dead hands!”
Because there’s no real recognized consensus on what constitutes “the breaking point” – “I’ll know it when I see it” isn’t really all that helpful, because you may be going it alone by that point – anyone who sticks their neck out is liable to get it shortened, with no help whatsoever from the gun-owning community at large.
The gradual erosion of liberties that we are seeing in effect keeps moving the goalposts, so that a government action that would have seemed unconscionable say fifty years ago today only seems mildly disquieting, and certainly not enough reason to reach for the guns. It’s depressing, but there it is.
And yes, in all of this rambling, I myself have not clearly defined what the “breaking point” is…
Any consensus on where the breaking point is must be reached in many thousands of private conversations, not on the internet. It’ll filter up to the Wrong People, of course — but the point is to give them no excuses to knock on my door when Congress, or the President, or the local po-leece department, etc., crosses whatever we have decided is the breaking point.