Rights and the Amendments

I originally started writing this as a reply to This article on Breitbart. But it became so long that I felt it needed a place in a better forum. This one.

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See, here’s what so many people get wrong about the First Amendment. You absolutely do have the right to cry “Fire” in a crowded theater.

 And the authorities absolutely have the right, nay the duty, to hold you to accounts for the injury and damage incurred by your reckless act! Up to and including restitution and incarceration.

There is no infringement allowed for in the 1^st, it just isn’t spelled out. In the days the Constitution was written, it was an accepted fact of life that a man was allowed to voice his opinion. If you disagreed, you said so and voiced your counter-opinion. If you could change the others’ mind, good for you. If you came to a mutual compromise, so much the better. But if you couldn’t, you did not have the right to attack the other in an attempt to silence them. Doing so might put your life in danger.

Which brings me to my second point. The right to self-defense.

I know I will get push-back for this statement, but hear me out: The 2^nd Amendment is not about personal defense per se. It is about the citizens protecting themselves from a tyrannical government! The Founders knew that the American colonists had come to this new country to flee just that type of government, and had just finished fighting a horrific wear to get from under that government’s thumb!

2A was about loudly proclaiming “Never Again!” to the idea that a government could treat citizens as its chattel. In the Federalist Papers, which are called the bibliography of the Constitution, George Mason is quoted as saying, “I ask, sir, what is the militia? It is the whole of the people, except for a few public officials.” And “That the people have a right to mass and bear arms; that a well-regulated militia composed of the Body of the people, trained to arms, is the natural and safe defense of a free state…”

The right of the individual to defend themselves was so taken for granted as to be not even considered worthy to be included in the 2^nd Amendment. OF COURSE a citizen had the right to defend themselves! It was as obvious as wearing clothes in public! There wasn’t a man, woman or post-pubescent child who didn’t carry at least a dagger or pocket knife at all times. Many men carried swords as part of their daily kit. And if not a sword, a walking stick/cane with a concealed blade. Outside the cities proper, every young man owned his own rifle. Mainly because hunting was his primary means of putting meat on the table, but it was always kept ready to use for defense of self and home from predators of the two and four-legged type.

That this administration is trying to say that the 2^nd Amendment doesn’t apply to “weapons of war” is exactly the reason it was written in the first place. And it is proof that this government is attempting to become exactly the type of government it was written to protect We The People from.