Last week Joe asked “Did we just win?”
I believe that, yes, in a sense, we did.
However, that does not mean that the opposing team is fine with playing defense all the time.
Those of us living in the Rocky Mountains are steeped in America’s famous gun culture — and we therefore know well the binary debates surrounding the Second Amendment. Firearm enthusiasts — the vast majority of whom use weapons responsibly — believe the Constitution protects their right to bear arms. Gun-control advocates counter that the Constitution doesn’t give anyone the inalienable right to wield automatic weapons that can kill scores of people in seconds.
This is the stultified freedom-versus-safety quarrel that seemed to forever define gun politics — that is, until anti-government activists started bringing firearms to public political meetings.
In early August, a protester came to a raucous Tennessee congressional forum packing heat. Days later, President Obama’s health care event in New Hampshire was marred by a protester posing for cameras with a pistol and sign reading, “It is time to water the tree of liberty” — a reference to a Thomas Jefferson quote promising violence.
And this past week, 12 armed men — including one with an assault rifle — not only showed off their firearms at Obama’s Arizona speech, but broadcast a YouTube video threatening to “forcefully resist people imposing their will on us through the strength of the majority.”
These and other similar examples are accurately summarized with the same language federal law employs to describe domestic terrorism. Generating maximum media attention, the weapons-brandishing displays are “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population.”
Yes, the gun has been transformed from a sport and self-defense device into a tool of mass bullying. Like the noose in the Jim Crow South, its symbolic message is clear: If you dare engage in the democratic process, you risk bodily harm.
With that implicit threat, the incessant arguments about gun ownership have been supplanted by a more significant debate over which should take precedence: the Constitution’s First or Second Amendment?
Based on America’s history, the Founders’ answer to that question clearly lies in the Bill of Rights’ deliberate sequencing.
Yes, it is just as twisted a logic as was used by Robb’s discovery of Mr. Marc Rubin. But just as Sirota believes it, so will thousands of bigots across the country. And just how do you argue against such idiocy as that which suggests that the right to freedom of speech and expression trumps the 4th Amendment?
Does that now mean that pro-life activists can once again demonstrate within with the 500ft “no protest” radius surrounding abortion clinics?
Or that the 3rd Amendment, being before the 13th Amendment, means that soldiers can still be harbored in the homes of non-whites?
And exactly how do the 18th and 21st Amendments get a long?
The mind. It boggles.
They would have crapped their collective britches when I was a kid in places like Malta, Havre, Scobey and Forsyth in Montana. On Saturday, the main drag would have mostly pickups and the odd travelall parked on them. In the rear windows on rifle racks would be at a minimum of a .22 of some kind and a shotgun. They may or may not have been loaded. Most would have the ammunition in the jockey box(glove compartment for the historically challenged). There may have been a .22, .38/.357 or a Colt SAA .45 hanging off of the seat.
This was normal back then, in places like that. It wasn’t a statement, it just was.
We would grab our .22s and hike to a place to shoot pop cans and gophers. Maybe someone’s dad would drive us out into the country to shoot said popcans and gophers. It was just how life was and 99.9 percent of us grew up to be really good people.
Even in Malta, there is still one saloon with swinging doors on it. I have as Harry Truman used to say, “struck a blow for liberty”, in that very saloon on occasion.
East of the Great Divide and West of the 95th Meridian is all that’s left now.