The Christian Science Monitor (CSM) asks the right question about the recent McDonald Supreme Court case: “Do gun rights protect against tyranny?” And they quote the right person: Daniel Schmutter in a friend of the court brief on behalf Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO). But in its attempt to do the fair and balanced thing, the CSM get it ridiculously wrong. “To gun control specialists this argument is deeply troubling. They worry that any armed person with a beef against the government will look to the Second Amendment for encouragement to lock and load and then rain down armed force in the face of what he or she perceives as ‘tyranny.'” Who said that? While it’s certainly true that gun control opponents believe that arming right wing extremists is a bad idea that justifies government control over the manufacture and sale of firearms, I can’t remember any “specialist” calling The Second Amendment an “encouragement” for domestic terrorism. Luckily, it gets better from there . . .
In a lame attempt to bolster that absurd position (i.e. put those words in someone’s mouth), the Monitor relies on a friend of the court brief from Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence. Oddly, it suggests exactly the opposite: that the government is the potential source of gun violence.
“The Framers plainly did not envision ad hoc groups of armed individuals beyond state control (i.e. a ‘citizens’ militia’) as a constitutional check on tyranny,” Mr. Schreiber wrote. “They saw them as unruly mobs that must be quelled.”
And then the CSM casts its journalistic light on the rift between the JPFO and the Anti-Defamation League, calling the former’s anti-bulwark against tyranny “a different perspective” (and how).
In a friend of the court brief the organization worried that expansive gun rights might feed into what it said was a pervasive culture of guns and violence among extremists in the US.
Call it self-serving self-protection vs. universal disarmament. In which policy would you trust your life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Anyway, the CSM finishes up with a big blast of Second Amendment – genocide linkage.
In a dissent in a 2003 gun case, Appeals Court Judge Alex Kosinski laid out his views on the Second Amendment and tyranny. “The simple truth – born of experience – is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people,” he wrote.
“If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars,” Judge Kosinski said.
“The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision,” he added. “One designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed – where government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.”
