Begging your pardon, Mr. O, but every conservative needs to be in favor of our second amendment, or one is not as conservative as he boasts.
The willingness to learn from experts is essential. Because the second amendment is about independence from government, I would not be so quick to ask government for clarification, nor to denigrate resistance to excesses of public servants. On this question, the sovereign are the experts.
I say this because on last night’s O’Reilly Factor, Bill O. didn’t want to listen to guest Stewart Rhodes, Founder of the liberty movement, The Oathkeepers. [See Oathkeepers.org and visit David Codrea’s analysis as well. ] The Oathkeepers’ mission is clearly a patriotic one, and where you sometimes find analysts who believe in sensible gun laws, you also find people who believe in the regulation of patriotism. There can be no such thing in a free country.
The Oathkeepers serve an important purpose of meaningful discernment as an essential element of patriotism. For every individual in a free country, discernment is essential to self-rule. You have to have a sort of independence radar, a personal better judgment over that of our public servants, so that you are less likely to be bamboozled by them. Gun control is a bamboozle, and so is the taking of guns from the electorate, the bamboozle coming in the form of thinking there is such a thing as a reasonable gun law to begin with. Take away guns, crime grows, crisis is cited, mandates are handed down. Bamboozle.
O’Reilly believes in reasonable gun laws, which might explain why he kept interrupting Rhodes with charges of encouraging soldiers and police and firefighters to choose which orders one obeys and does not obey. At this time, I am informed that soldiers are taught such discernment so they do not carry out orders as dupes in committing unwitting crime. To set this in stone, I have two words: My Lai.
Knowing right from wrong is going to save this country as easily as not knowing right from wrong is killing it. Virginia Tech was wrong and paid an $11 Million settlement for its watered down alert system. (Those alert systems in lieu of armed students don’t seem much of a substitute.) The District of Columbia was found wrong and it cost taxpayers needlessly in legal burden hours. Other cities will throw away tons of money fighting the same wrong fight, and perhaps for nothing: we are the sovereign, the servants are not.
O’Reilly is the only FOX News Analyst I can think of who opposes gun freedoms. Any regulation whatsoever on personal gun ownership is an attempt to regulate the lethal force which backs our sovereign authority. This connection must be made in the mind of every citizen who believes in some measure of gun regulation. Gun regulation is about as sensible as the Fairness Doctrine; it is an attempt to regulate a safeguard of our sovereignty put in place to regulate the servants instead. They don’t like being regulated.
When Rhodes furnished Katrina as an example of gun confiscations, O’Reilly interrupted by downplaying Katrina as bad weather; Rhodes countered by showing that bad weather doesn’t suspend the second amendment. It doesn’t.
But Katrina was not bad weather; Katrina is cited for it’s being an example of organized gun confiscations and under-reported ones at that. It was the very kind of Orders that are known from the outset to be against the law, but carried out anyway. It was an organized disarmament by force under color of authority. Second amendment liberty foundations filed a lawsuit and prevailed, and the City of New Orleans was ordered by the court to return the guns illegally taken. At this hour, they have yet to return those guns to their rightful owners. You can see now how important it is to obey every order given. Will heads roll, or will the confiscation stand? Obviously, the confiscations stand.
There are other such confiscations around the country following inclement weather events. Liberty purists believe these are experiments to test the tolerance of the electorate.
This impelled people like Bobby Jindal to make it illegal for governments to confiscate weapons in time of emergency. Several other state legislatures followed, and it is now against the law over many parts of the country for governments to come for the guns under some ruse of safety.
It’s worth noting, also, that in time of disaster, armed citizens have been much more asset than liability.
My advice to Bill O’Reilly is to consult more private gun owners on the question of what is reasonable and what is not when it comes to the second amendment. The public servants are generally the last people to trust on how much authority the sovereign has.
There is no such thing as a sensible gun law. The presumption that there is such a thing as a sensible gun regulation is the asumption that there is such a thing as a sensible regulation of our patriotism.
