Author George H. Smith, who’s never voted (and doesn’t plan to), gives an offbeat, qualified endorsement for Ron Paul. You’ll have to stay for the punchline to grasp the meaning in the title.
Archives for 2008
Good News?
I wonder what is the visceral reaction to news like this, which links this, for most people.
For example, the American Federation of Police — with well over
100,000 members — recently praised Ron Paul for introducing a bill
that would help cops obtain topnotch body armor that would withstand
rounds fired from most firearms. Rep. Paul’s bill — HR 3304 — would
amend the Internal Revenue Code to provide for a tax credit to law
enforcement officers who purchase their own body armor. — Jim Kouri
On the one hand, everybody should get a "tax credit" for simply being dead or alive, so on that issue alone, fine. Bring on the tax credits, I guess.
But it seems to me that if you understand the full intent of the 2nd Amendment, it’s that ordinary citizens have some reasonable degree of firepower parity with the state, i.e., to motivate the state to think twice. It is explicitly to introduce an element of bodily risk at an individual level to agents of state force. You can compromise that principle in two ways: either you restrict guns, or you render them ineffective against the technology of the state. So, the attack on the 2nd Amendment really comes from two directions.
And so we see that day after day in America, it’s far too often that this overwhelming invincibility gets used against those least likely to defeat that invincibility.
I’m really not much of a gun nut. I like ’em, grew up around them, and have some proficiency with them. It’s just not something I really get much pleasure out of. Whatever. But what I find really laughable is all the gun bloggers who’re so pro law enforcement. They just eat this G.I. Joe-Cop shit up, and in the end it’s compromising the 2nd Amendment they claim to support, in exactly the same way. But I never figured many of those guys to have the balls to really, really state what the 2nd Amendment is all about and only about.
Go ahead. Make the state invincible. It’ll be used to crush someone: bad guys who are prepared to challenge that invincibility, or the unprepared, and their children & dogs, at 4 a.m., tucked away in their beds. Get out your slide rule and see if you can figure which is the more likely.
“…free to do the right things…”
There you go. A sign of the state of the American culture. Jesus. Doesn’t Radley’s respondent know anything? Who doesn’t know that freedom is about authority?
Why do you think I keep writing about the land of the free? Clearly, we’re just bursting with freedom.
Happy fuckin’ New Year.