The Media's Mental Illness On Guns

I really intended to take Father’s Day off to be with my children (and I will do that, once I can pry my ever-sleeping teenager from her bed), but first I felt compelled to address an unsigned Denver Post editorial, Still waiting for Congress on guns.

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Like so many members of the media, the editorial board of the Post betrays a a complete lack of understanding of the intent of the Bill of Rights, and of the Second Amendment in particular, as the following passages from their op-ed make abundantly clear.

In the wake of another school shooting, this time in Oregon, President Obama last week was asked what he was going to do to stop these kinds of incidents.

Obama said there was nothing to be done until there was a “fundamental shift in public opinion where people say, ‘enough. .. This isn’t the price we should be paying for our freedom.”

Sadly, the president is right.

The package of legislation that Obama proposed in 2013 after the horrific mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut would have banned assault-style weapons, mandated universal background checks and placed a 10-round limit on ammunition magazines.

They were modest but prudent reforms.

The purpose of the Second Amendment is now, and has always been, crystal clear.

Americans have the inalienable right to own arms (not just firearms) of contemporary military utility in order to ensure that We, the People, can be conquered by neither foreign foes, nor domestic tyrants.

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In the time that the Bill of Rights  was debated, these arms were cannon and other artillery, hand grenades, edged weapons, single shot and repeating firearms, and other weapons, up to and including privateers, privately owned warships bristling with cannons and weapons of every type.

Modern journalists, lacking a grounding in American and world history and civics but generally sympathetic to a left-wing authoritarian world view and squishy “feel good”-isms, have uncritically accepted the argument of pro-authoritarians that an ever-more-powerful and hungry federal government should have a monopoly of force… a view that the Founders would clearly abhor. 

The Post argues for the outlawing of the modern arms most suitable for ensuring that the citizenry has parity with the government. AR-15s, AK-47s, and other military-inspired firearms are precisely what the Founders would want Americans to be armed with today, and they would likely be upset that Americans don’t have ready access to the selective-fire variants of these same weapons. You must remember: they wanted all citizens to be equally armed and trained (which is what “well-regulated” means) and a match, man for man, against “enemies foreign and domestic.”

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Attempting to prevent citizens for having the arms, ammunition, magazines and training afforded the military is abhorrent.

That these handmaidens of tyranny think that only the government should be afforded the use of military-grade weapons betrays a clear lack of understanding of history.

When government has uncontested power, government kills with impunity.

So it has always been, and so it will ever be. Only a citizenry with equal or greater force than its government can remain free.

Pretending otherwise is a form of mental illness, a mass delusion of the chattering classes.

We know the history of man’s inhumanity to man.

We will not be disarmed.

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