By Walter E. Williams
Wednesday, January 02, 2013
Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., in the wake of the Newtown,
Conn., shootings, said: "The British are not coming. ... We don't need all
these guns to kill people." Lewis' vision, shared by many, represents a
gross ignorance of why the framers of the Constitution gave us the Second
Amendment. How about a few quotes from the period and you decide whether our
Founding Fathers harbored a fear of foreign tyrants.
Alexander Hamilton: "The best we can hope for
concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed," adding
later, "If the representatives of the people betray their constituents,
there is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original right of
self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government." By
the way, Hamilton is referring to what institution when he says "the
representatives of the people"?
James Madison: "(The Constitution preserves) the
advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost
every other nation ... (where) the governments are afraid to trust the people
with arms."
Thomas Jefferson: "What country can preserve its
liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people
preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms."
George Mason, author of the Virginia Bill of Rights,
which inspired our Constitution's Bill of Rights, said, "To disarm the
people -- that was the best and most effectual way to enslave them."
Rep. John Lewis and like-minded people might dismiss
these thoughts by saying the founders were racist anyway. Here's a more recent
quote from a card-carrying liberal, the late Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey:
"Certainly, one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government,
no matter how popular and respected, is the right of the citizen to keep and
bear arms. ... The right of the citizen to bear arms is just one guarantee
against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against the tyranny which now
appears remote in America but which historically has proven to be always
possible." I have many other Second Amendment references at
http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/quotes.html.
How about a couple of quotations with which Rep. Lewis
and others might agree? "Armas para que?" (translated: "Guns,
for what?") by Fidel Castro. There's a more famous one: "The most
foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to
possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject
races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing." That was
Adolf Hitler.
Here's the gun grabbers' slippery-slope agenda, laid out
by Nelson T. Shields, founder of Handgun Control Inc.: "We're going to
have to take this one step at a time, and the first step is necessarily --
given the political realities -- going to be very modest. ... Right now,
though, we'd be satisfied not with half a loaf but with a slice. Our ultimate
goal -- total control of handguns in the United States -- is going to take
time. ... The final problem is to make the possession of all handguns and all handgun
ammunition -- except for the military, police, licensed security guards,
licensed sporting clubs and licensed gun collectors -- totally illegal"
(The New Yorker, July 1976).
There have been people who've ridiculed the protections
afforded by the Second Amendment, asking what chance would citizens have
against the military might of the U.S. government. Military might isn't always
the deciding factor. Our 1776 War of Independence was against the mightiest
nation on the face of the earth -- Great Britain. In Syria, the rebels are
making life uncomfortable for the much-better-equipped Syrian regime. Today's
Americans are vastly better-armed than our founders, Warsaw Ghetto Jews and
Syrian rebels.
There are about 300 million privately held firearms owned
by Americans. That's nothing to sneeze at. And notice that the people who
support gun control are the very people who want to control and dictate our
lives.
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