Dave Kopel has a good review and write-up on the next big bi-partisan “compromise” on guns at Volokh Conspiracy. This is via Shall Not Be Questioned.
Let’s be honest folks, the Founding Fathers of the United States rebelled over far less than this. Hell, all the British did is tax some stamps and some tea, and that was enough to agitate things into a position where it would boil over. Throw in an attempt at disarming people in Concord and Lexington, and you have yourself a full-blown revolt. Even after the Revolution was won and done, the US still faced rebellion over trivial matters like economic strife and taxation, like in the Shays Rebellion, where the Government of Massachusetts took about a year to put it down. Coincidentally, this rebellion along with threats of similar ones across the young nation prompted the development of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, which sought to address these grievances by balancing freedom and liberty with a strong central government. But even that wasn’t enough to stop uprisings and rebellions of all shapes and sizes. Like the Whiskey Rebellion… and oh, a little known uprising called the Civil War.
Yet here we are today, in a world where the Government can read our emails, tap our phones, watch us with drones, bar us from owning weapons that it uses against us, and is telling Americans to prepare to give up more, and we’re doing what? Nothing.
Some of the more “level-headed” among us claim that the best way to achieve our ends is via the political process, using a machine which has been long-usurped by those who wish to stamp out all notions of freedom and liberty to replace it with a sanitized version which allows you to the freedom choose the colors of your prison walls. They claim that we can depend on the Courts, with the increasingly aging Justices who may shuffle off their mortal coil any day now. They even hold out hope that in 2016, a real small government politician may be elected to save our liberties by appointing the right people to the Court. Even though the current climate is seeing a shift to the Left.
Let’s not forget how the pro-Freedom and Liberty side lost the war of public relations long ago. The opposition owns the airwaves and the radios. Companies like Comcast actively work against the People, and should measures protecting Net Neutrality fail, your may a decline in access to websites and blogs which support your views.
If this were a war, the side which stands for the Libertarian principles upon which this nation was founded has its back to a wall, facing superior numbers and firepower in the figurative sense, leaving only two options:
- To go quietly into the night of irrelevance
- To fight
So what are you going to do?