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Detroit News columnist Robert Smith, Jr apparently is one pretty smart guy. He knows better than our Founding Fathers, who were wrong to give citizens the right to bear arms.
The Founding Fathers of our country made a mistake when they said we had the right to bear arms. They did not know we would be allies with the British and no longer have to worry about them coming over to oppress and colonize us. The British found greater spoils in Africa and India and never looked back on the United States after the Revolutionary War.
The right to bear arms is killing all of us. In 2005 the Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported 3,006 children and teens killed by gunfire, most of them young, black men in inner-city neighborhoods. And CNN reported yesterday that black-on-black murder of young black men is up 40 percent from last year. The harder the times get, the higher these statistics will go.
Yet again, we have another instance of an idiot bleeding heart liberal with no concept of the FACT that guns do not miraculously start flying around, shooting people at random with no one pulling the trigger!
Guns do not kill people. PEOPLE kill people. When will liberals ever get that through their thick skulls? Banning guns does not end crime, as the British could tell you. They banned guns, and guess what happened? Stabbing deaths skyrocketed. If someone wants to murder someone, they’re going to find a way to do it. They likely won’t care about breaking one more law to get a gun, either. Banning guns takes guns out of the hands of law-abiding citizens and yet, criminals will continue to have them.
But the main thing that’s interesting here is the assertion that the Founding Fathers strictly gave us the right to bear arms so that we could fight the British. God, is this guy brain dead? We were given the right to bear arms not only to protect our homes and families, but also so that the citizenry could fight back against a tyrannical government. And that’s any tyrannical government, not just the British government.
Look, I get it. Liberals hate seeing astronomically high rates of inner-city violence, especially when guns are involved. So do the rest of us. However, the rest of us understand that the GUN is not responsible. The man holding the gun is. An unloaded gun sitting on a table is not going to spontaneously fire itself unless someone loads the weapon and pulls the trigger. A gun by itself is harmless. A gun in a person’s hands, however, is dangerous, and it is the people using them to commit acts of violence that should be held accountable, not the weapon. But then, that would require liberals to believe in people actually taking responsibility for their own actions, and they couldn’t cry over criminals sitting in prison anymore, could they? After all, it’s never the murderer’s fault, is it? It’s the fault of that nasty, nasty gun.
Hat Tips: MK Freeberg and Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler
Frank White says: I wonder if this guy was born a complete idiot or he had to work at it for years and years. The reason we were given the second amendment is that the founders knew, that despite their near-perfect system of government, there would come a time when due to man’s inherent nature the leaders would be so corrupt that the population would need to recreate 1776.
Bilwick says: I’m going to go way out on limb here and guess that Mr. Smith thinks the Founding Fathers made a wider mistake (of which the Second Amendment is just one example) of putting too much emphasis on liberty in general. If the serfs think they have the right to defend themselves, who knows what other rights they may assume? Next thing you know the surly rabble is questioning coerced income redistribution or some other sacred ideal All Enlightened People hold dear.
I read this post and was determined to respond to this man’s idiotic opinion… but I can do no better than Frank White or Bilwick, who beat me to it. So, DITTO!
Ricky Nolen says: What I think this person does not get, is the Second Amendment is in place to also defend His right to free speech even if it is BS
Someone forgot to tell that tool about the War of 1812, when the British tried to re-colonize us via the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. But it was Americans with guns that put a stop to that.
Stephen J. says: I’ve come to change my own views on gun control laws in practice over the past few years, largely due to points like this, but I still think there are some caveats worth bearing in mind about the “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” argument. It’s true that guns don’t kill people; people use guns to kill people… but the plain truth is, guns make killing so much easier that their presence or absence does make a difference in how many die, and pretending that isn’t true is its own form of wilful ignorance.
Whatever political developments the Founding Fathers did or didn’t anticipate, I think it’s a safe bet that at the time of writing the Bill of Rights, they didn’t anticipate automatic machine guns capable of killing dozens in a single strafe, or handguns light enough and easy enough for a preadolescent child to use, or ammunition so deadly it made killing by accident possible for that child. Nor did they anticipate industrial manufacturing processes capable of cheaply generating truly staggering amounts of weaponry and ammunition. The Founding Fathers’ intent and political goal is critical, but taking different historical and technological contexts into account when implementing those laws shouldn’t be excluded by definition.
The ultimate goal of most gun control advocates is simply to reduce the sheer volume of arms and ammunition available, so as to reduce the statistical incidence of accident and abuse. No serious and sensible gun control advocate believes criminalizing arms will stop criminals using them; the whole point is to get the weapons out of circulation completely so that they aren’t there to be abused in the first place. (Yes, attacks of impulsive rage will continue and will only use knives or other weapons if guns aren’t available, but there is an objective difference in quantitative danger level and impact between a knife and a 15-round automatic pistol, as well as in the ease of use and the level of hostile impulse required — there is a reason we read of very few “drive-by stabbings” in the newspapers.)
The right to bear arms does not exclude by definition the responsibility of a community to regulate those arms for the safety of fellow citizens, any more than the right to freedom of movement makes the requirement of a driver’s license “unconstitutional”.
Hal says: From the article it sounds like the writer wants to take firearms away from Black people. Hmmmm. Perhaps the gentleman is a closet racist in Libs clothing. I suspect that living in Detroit is at the root of his psychosis, so I’ll cut him some slack.
JimmyC says: What Mr. Smith fails to point out is that
(a) guns prevent a great deal of violent crime (non-partisan studies estimate that about 1 million murders, rapes and muggings are prevented each year in the US because the intended victim was carrying a concealed weapon), and
(b) while it is tragic when kids die in gun-related violence, more of them die from swimming pools than guns (read Freakonomics). Should we ban pools as well?
Just remember, never let the facts get in the way of a good (liberal) argument.
Joe Hart says: The right to bear arms is a big freedom! When our government takes away our rights, we can take away there right to live!
never trust your government, always have a gun.
Frank White says: In the worlds of Dale Gribble, “Guns don’t kill people, the government does.”
Stephan J., nobody ever said we need to abdicate common sense and reason. Henry Ford could never have imagined the speed of an automobile, nor a fool behind the wheel. Cars kill people too. What our founding fathers DID invision was that a government might one day wish to cut the “We the people” part out of the constitution, and become dangerous to its citizens life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. The right of the common man to keep and bare arms was to keep that atleast somewhat in check… there was something else about standing armies and such too… Our founding fathers weren’t to trusting of power in limited hands. Looking around the world over the last many years they were spot on with that bit of paranoia.
See, Stephan, killers will kill. Whatever the instrument at hand. One only has to look at Samolia, or the Congo for that truism.
Proper regulation does and can very well keep the bad guys a bit in check, but not absolutely. And proper handling and safety is a must. Regulating that is easy enough. The NRA will gladly teach you all of that. One should remember however, nowhere in the constitution do we give up unto government our right of self protection. The police ARE there to protect and serve, but in reality they do more filling out reports about what happened than being a preventor. Nowhere near enough to be everywhere all at once.
With what I do for a living I come into contact with a lot of evil people, and I can tell you this for sure – I’ve seen more people cut than shot. I’ve seen several of each lose their life. None of it is pleasant to see or think about. Just don’t get fooled by statistics.
Stephen J,
The ultimate goal of most gun control advocates is simply to reduce the sheer volume of arms and ammunition available, so as to reduce the statistical incidence of accident and abuse.
If we’re discussing commoners, and statistics, and averages and such, it’s worth pointing out — wherever you’re less likely on average, to get shot on average, because the average person has a lower number of average guns, you’re also likely on average to have a much easier time on average looking for an average house to rob, because the average house won’t have an average gun shooting average bullets at you.
That’s the point Cassy was trying to make, above, about the British and their failed experiment (still not yet concluded, sadly).
But I don’t expect this is much of a surprise…to you or to anybody else. Deep down, I think everyone understands it’s all about defense, not about offense. After all, the same folk who say people aren’t important enough to go walking around with guns, to defend themselves and their homes and their children when the defense is needed — they’re the same ones saying we’re not important enough to have rights until we’ve popped all the way out of our mommas’ birth canals. Now, that’s an exceptionally odd juxtaposition, isn’t it? We wanna grab guns from law-abiding citizens ’cause we don’t want anyone shot by mistake…but murdering babies is perfectly alright.
They, in turn, are the ones coming up with reasons not to execute murderers if the murderers have I.Q.s below 80. Or if the execution method might have some ouchieness involved. What they really want to do is abolish capital punishment. So okay. No killing, unless you do it in the dark of night and too quickly for the constable to stop you…or…unless the “thing” you’re killing is an unborn baby. Once you’re convicted, suddenly your life becomes sacred.
The overlap among these three seemingly unrelated issues, is overwhelming. And yet I see only one thread of consistency meandering amongst those three. Did you spot it? I did.
Humans are worthless.
They’re just freak accidents. They don’t get rights until they’re pulled all the way out of their mothers’ bodies. They don’t have the right to defend themselves. And if some creep knocks ’em over and tortures them to death for $30 in their purses, there’s no real atrocity committed there; society has no obligation to put the murderer down, to make sure it never happens again. It’s just an accidental universe. Sh*t happens. Nuthin’ sacred. Except the life of the miscreant who holds nothing sacred — where his life conflicts with order, order must yield, but where your life and my life conflict with chaos, chaos must prevail.
All of which is a round-about, windy way of saying: The right to bear arms is central to the relationship We The People have with our government. It’s impossible to be a full-fledged citizen without this right…and, fortunately, it’s a little tougher to diminish us to the level of “subjects” if we manage to keep this right. That is the real reason we have it.
I R A Darth Aggie says: The ultimate goal of most gun control advocates is simply to reduce the sheer volume of arms and ammunition available, so as to reduce the statistical incidence of accident and abuse.
Yes, if you’re willing to accept their definition of “zero” as being a worthwhile and attainable goal.
I do not, as that means that I, as a law-abiding citizen, am left to the tender mercies of the criminal element who will continue obtaining firearms as they have: through illegal sources.
This, of course, ignores the likelihood that of the 3,000 killed by guns, a sizable portion of that is done by illegally obtained firearms used in the commission of a crime.
Now, if you’re actually interested in the wholesale saving of lives, you’ll be in favor of banning the automobile.
The right to bear arms does not exclude by definition the responsibility of a community to regulate those arms for the safety of fellow citizens, any more than the right to freedom of movement makes the requirement of a driver’s license “unconstitutional”.
That’s not necessarily unreasonable. What is unreasonable is that certain jurisdictions raise the bar so high that it becomes a de facto ban.
I R A Darth Aggie says: Addendum: also, of that 3,000 killed, a number of them are *cough* gang-bangers. While true they’re dying due to gunshot wounds, it’s really their choice of lifestyle that’s doing them in.
there is an objective difference in quantitative danger level and impact between a knife and a 15-round automatic pistol
I will take it that you have never witnessed the amount of damage that even a pen knife can do even in the hands of an average person. I would much rather face a gunshot wound that to be cut open like a Thanksgiving turkey. We may not read about drive by stabbings here, but in the UK knife attacks are on a very rapid rise.
The other side of it is that someone who knows how to use a firearm can effectively defend themselves at range from an aggressor who is bigger and stronger than they are. So, a 90 lb woman can stop that 230 lb rapist rather than hoping to god she can just out run him.
As far as the police go, yes they will try to stop crimes but for the most part all they can do is show up once it is all over and try and catch the person that did it. Like the saying goes: “When seconds count the police are minutes away.”
Knott Buyinit says: ‘Home Invasion’ robberies are relatively common in
Briton, but relatively uncommon in the USA. I can think of only one reason for that: criminals understand the implications of their respective country’s gun laws.
Kate says: “‘Home Invasion’ robberies are relatively common in
Briton,”
No they aren’t – and it’s spelt Britain.
I sho hate it for the “Gang-bangers” … May they rest in peace. Having said that, may I remind everyone, that guns are the only thing standing between America and a tyrannical, Nationalist Socialistic country. Reflect upon Thomas Jefferson’s quote; (stated in 1787)”The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time, with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”
NB says: Hmmm, maybe a quick look at history can give us some clues…seems as though every time a government establishes gun control it’s not long before the collection and extermination of massive amounts of (defenseless) people begins.
http://americanshooter.wordpress.com/2007/11/12/historical-facts-about-gun-control/
David says: The crime rate in the US is lower than in the UK, France, or Germany. Could this be because of the deterrent effect of gun ownership?
Remove homicides committed by blacks and the US has a lower percapita incidence of homicides than France or Germany, who have much stricter gun control laws.
The incidence of gun related homocides in the UK has stayed about the same since they instituted draconian gun control in 1996. The incidence of non-fatal shootings has increased.
Statistics can be bothersome things. 😉
JohnFromChicago says: Two points here. First is the reasoning behind the 2nd Amendment. The right to bear arms has nothing to do with hunting, or protecting the Colonies from British invasion. You have the right to bear arms, and all your other rights because you are a sovereign free person with the right to own property, and the right to protect that property.
Second … the primary reason for shooting deaths in the US is gang violence. A sane and legal drug enforcement policy including the right to possess marijuana will eliminate the vast majority of these shootings as well as the financial motivation of the gangs. Gang-related gun crime is the result of a dysfunctional broken system. Most of these criminals were either arrested previously for violent crimes and released, or arrested for non-violent crimes and became violent within the prison system.
So the answer is not to repeal the second amendment and turn law-abiding citizens into unarmed ducks in a shooting gallery, but for government to do it’s job by keeping dangerous people locked up, and conducting it’s law enforcement as if the US is a free republic and not a fascist police state.
Stephen J. says: People above have raised good points, but I notice nobody addresses my central point, with the possible exception of Morgan K Freeberg: Where legal guns make for plentiful guns, numbers alone make for a much higher statistical incidence of accident and abuse. Yes, reducing the volume of arms available also increases the incidence of “safe” targets for the inevitable minimum criminal element… but it strikes me that the reduction in the number of accidental or criminal deaths from firearms might well be worth it. (Again, it’s acknowledged that criminals will abuse whatever guns they can get their hands on; the whole point is to make it harder for them to get those guns in the first place. Saying that you can’t reduce this to zero doesn’t mean that whatever reductions you can achieve are pointless.)
I myself actually buy the logic that the right to bear arms is the right to be a free citizen, with the right to defend oneself against those who would take away your inborn rights to life and property. Like I said, I’ve changed my mind on gun control over the past few years as a result of considering this logic. All I’m saying is that if the inevitable corollary of this is that in such a world, six-year-old kids will kill other six-year-olds — either by sheer ease of accident or sheer convenience of impulse — it is much less something to brag of and something to treat much more as a necessary evil.
It should be born in mind that guns don’t solve all the problems they create. Yes, that 90-lb woman now has a way to defend herself against the 230-lb rapist – if the rapist doesn’t simply grab her before she has a chance to get to the gun, or worse, use his overwhelming strength and mass advantage to grab the gun away from her before she can muster the nerve to fire and turn the weapon to his advantage. (Ask any rape unit officer about how often scenarios precisely like that actually happen, compared to the righteous fantasy of self-defense.) For every instance of someone successfully defending himself with a weapon against an aggressor there are multiple instances of accidental self-harm, loss of the guns to robbery before you can get to them, family murder and suicides that are much easier to commit on impulse with a gun in the house…. The list goes on and on, and because there’s no way to know how many crimes are not committed simply because a gun wasn’t available at the time of the impulse to do it, it’s all too easy to overlook this convenience factor. Guns make it easy to kill, easier and quicker and safer than anything else. That’s the whole point of them; that’s why they’re built. They have no other purpose but to make it as easy as possible to hurt another human being as badly as possible, and simple statistics means the more of them there are around, the more damage they will do.
It seems to me that there must be a happy medium between an arms restriction that robs a populace of a right to defend itself against aggressors and an unregulated arms industry that makes it criminally and negligently easy for that populace to become such aggressors; you don’t have to be a rabid anti-gun or anti-individualist crusader to think things are too close to the latter extreme as they stand, and to argue for stricter regulations. To argue that we need to do a better job of enforcing the responsibilities that go with a right is not the same as arguing that the right itself must be revoked.
Cylar says: It seems to me that there must be a happy medium between an arms restriction that robs a populace of a right to defend itself against aggressors and an unregulated arms industry that makes it criminally and negligently easy for that populace to become such aggressors; you don’t have to be a rabid anti-gun or anti-individualist crusader to think things are too close to the latter extreme as they stand, and to argue for stricter regulations. To argue that we need to do a better job of enforcing the responsibilities that go with a right is not the same as arguing that the right itself must be revoked.
I just have one question for you. Okay, two actually.
In countries where guns are difficult or impossible for average citizens to obtain legally….is the violent crime rate higher or lower than in countries where the situation is otherwise?
In countries where rates of firearms ownership are so high as to render the nation “awash in guns,” is the violent crime rate higher or lower than in countries where the situation is otherwise?
Compare ownership rates in the UK to those in Finland or Switzerland. You will find that the crime rate, correspondingly, is higher in the UK, lower in Switzerland. The USA is somewhere in-between on both counts.
Your primary argument seems to be about crime rates. Until you’ve addressed this “central point,” (is arms control effective in reducing crime or not?), then all your meaningless blather about being a “rabid anti-gun or anti-individualist crusader to think things are too close to the latter extreme as they stand” is just that…meaningless blather and boilerplate rhetoric. Subjective opinion masquerading as objective analysis.
spike says: steven j, at least you’re honest about your libtardation:
———————————————————–
“the whole point is to get the weapons out of circulation completely so that they aren’t there to be abused in the first place”
———————————————————–
honest, even if ridiculous; you should beware,tho- honesty is not exactly admired on the left!
allow me to leave you with the words of the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution…remember that, the supreme law of the land?
“A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the
people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
any questions?
M.C. Ratel says: stephenj:
The right to bear arms shall not be infringed. Read it. Re-read it. Understand it. If you do not believe in the Constitution and it’s processes, how are you an American? The 2nd Amendment does not say the right shall not be taken away…it says no infringed. There are already ILLEGAL infringements now. It did not say the right can be revoked as long as a bunch of people want to pass laws because they think guns are dumb and all.
The argument that “some kids get hurt/killed”, therefore the 2nd amendment is null and void, is mind-numbingly stupid. Kids die in car wrecks, ban all cars. Kid’s die from household chemicals, ban them. Pools? Ban them. And on and on and on. Kids die falling out of windows, ban windows and multistory buildings. Grow up. Your argument is, in fact, anti-intellectual.
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