These days it seems politicians are hell bent on taking away our second amendment right to bear arms, along with the other rights we have given up. Those rights were put into the constitution for a reason. You will always have people that abuse those rights, and mentally unbalanced people like Jared Loughner,.that shot congress woman, Gabrielle Gifford, and the, as yet unidentified, murderer, that kicked his way into an exit door of a Colorado movie theater, killing 14 and wounding 50 others. http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/20/us/colorado-theater-shooting/index.html It is a travesty, but taking away our rights will not solve the problem.
One incident and everyone goes crazy, but the truth is, you have always had cases like this, and always will. If you consider how much our population has grown, per capita, you probably had more killings in the wild west than you have now.
The right to bear arms is not only so you can protect your home and family from attack, but also to protect the citizens from an over zealous government.
The first thing Hitler did was to make the citizens register their guns, that way they were easy to confiscate, and after that, the rest is history. Women were raped, whole families tortured, and their homes pillared.
History always repeats itself, and as you know, Hitler was not the first evil ruler and he won't be the last. All an evil person needs is complete control, and when the government has the weapons, and the citizens have no means to protect themselves, there will always be an evil person ready to grab that power and take advantage of those that can't.
However, some of the Jews could at least hide, building fake rooms in their homes, but thanks to 911, and the so called war on drugs, in the name of protection, we gave away many of our rights, because we were afraid, and unlike the Jews, there is no place to hide.
Police can now shine a laser beam into your home, and they can tell how many people are in your house, and what your doing. They can do a sneak and peak (basically go into your home when your not there, and rummage through your personal things, listen in on your phone conversations, take you away without telling your family or your friends what happened to you, and hold you indefinitely without charging you with a crime. They can plant evidence in your home, and take your home, and you have no way to defend yourself. Don't think this has not already happened here in the USA, it has, and will continue, unless we the people stand up and demand our rights back, and refuse to let the government take anymore of them.
Dr. Khassan Baiev has seen first hand what happens to people that can not defend themselves against their government. He witnessed the horrors of war, and the slaughter of defenseless countrymen, and women, many whom he fought to save in the 1990's when he was a doctor in war torn Chechnya. He watched helpless as soldiers pillaged his home and took everything down to the parquet flooring, all the while eating his food and using his floor for a bathroom. Why? Simply because they could. Grief of My Heart: Memoirs of a Chechen Surgeon
Better yet, look at what happened in Rwanda when the people could not defend themselves. This excerpt is from http://www.gendercide.org/
With breathtaking rapidity, the genocide expanded from Kigali to the countryside. Government radio encouraged Tutsis to congregate at churches, schools, and stadiums, pledging that these would serve as places of refuge. Thus concentrated, the helpless civilians could be more easily targeted -- although many miraculously managed to resist with only sticks and stones for days or even weeks, until the forces of the Rwandan army and presidential guard were brought in to exterminate them with machine-guns and grenades. By April 21 -- that is, in just two weeks -- perhaps a quarter of a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus had been slaughtered. Together with the mass murder of Soviet prisoners-of-war during World War II, it was the most concentrated act of genocide in human history: "the dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust." (Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998], p. 3.) (Gérard Prunier provides an even higher estimate: "the daily killing rate was at least five times that of the Nazi death camps." Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide [Columbia University Press, 1995], p. 261.) By the end of April, according to Human Rights Watch, "the worst massacres had finished ... perhaps half of the Tutsi population of Rwanda" had been murdered.
Governments change when they are given too much power, and so does the average person. Take for example the following excerpt concerning a prison experiment at Stanford that had to be called off because it got so out of hand.
The Stanford prison experiment was a study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. The experiment was conducted from Aug. 14-20, 1971 by a team of researchers led by Psychology professor Philip Zimbardo at Stanford University. Twenty-four students were selected out of 75 to play the prisoners and live in a mock prison in the basement of the Stanford psychology building. Roles were assigned randomly. The participants adapted to their roles well beyond what even Zimbardo himself expected, leading the "Officers" to display authoritarian measures and ultimately to subject some of the prisoners to torture. In turn, many of the prisoners developed passive attitudes and accepted physical abuse, and, at the request of the guards, readily inflicted punishment on other prisoners who attempted to stop it. The experiment even affected Zimbardo himself, who, in his capacity as "Prison Superintendent," lost sight of his role as psychologist and permitted the abuse to continue as though it were a real prison. Five of the prisoners were upset enough by the process to quit the experiment early, and the entire experiment was abruptly stopped after only six days. The experimental process and the results remain controversial.
This experiment just goes to show what happens when people are defenseless, and have no rights, but it also shows what happens to people when they are given too much power.
We have allowed the government in many states to change imminent domain to mean your personal property can be taken for private use. You can build up your business for years, make it a success and if someone else comes along that can hire more people than you, and pay more taxes than you, you can kiss it goodbye. Will it stop with businesses? The next thing will be, someone can build a bigger home than you, and pay more taxes so you have to move from your family land and find somewhere else to live.
Murder has been around since the beginning of time, and it will be happening long after you and I are gone. When a person, intent on killing others, doesn't have a gun they use knives, poison, swords, home made bombs, vehicles, rocks, and sometimes just their hands, but those things won't help you defend yourself when you are attacked; when someone else has a gun and you don't, the gun is going to win.
In the words of John Adams, "It is better that one guilty man go free than three innocent men go to prison." Our rights, all of them, were put into the constitution for our protection, but we are fast being sold the lie that we don't need those rights, because some criminal might get off for his crime. Those laws were not put into place to protect the criminals in society, but rather to protect the innocent. Some will beat the law with those rights, and the government is quick to point it out, because it wants you to give up more, and more of those rights.
Let them take your second amendment rights, and you can kiss America goodbye. We are like sheep being led to the slaughter, and I hope you will decide to be a shepherd instead. I've heard it said, the only thing necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing, so when the government wants more of your rights, stand up and say, not no, but hell no.
The framers of our constitution knew that no government can be trusted unless the power is to the people first, and that power rest in your rights. It is time for a change, and you still have the power of the vote. Neither party represents the people, and unless we the people say no more, it may soon be too late. Next election send them a loud and clear message. We are fed up, and if you won't make the necessary changes, then go find yourself a new job.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety - Franklin
One incident and everyone goes crazy, but the truth is, you have always had cases like this, and always will. If you consider how much our population has grown, per capita, you probably had more killings in the wild west than you have now.
The right to bear arms is not only so you can protect your home and family from attack, but also to protect the citizens from an over zealous government.
The first thing Hitler did was to make the citizens register their guns, that way they were easy to confiscate, and after that, the rest is history. Women were raped, whole families tortured, and their homes pillared.
History always repeats itself, and as you know, Hitler was not the first evil ruler and he won't be the last. All an evil person needs is complete control, and when the government has the weapons, and the citizens have no means to protect themselves, there will always be an evil person ready to grab that power and take advantage of those that can't.
However, some of the Jews could at least hide, building fake rooms in their homes, but thanks to 911, and the so called war on drugs, in the name of protection, we gave away many of our rights, because we were afraid, and unlike the Jews, there is no place to hide.
Police can now shine a laser beam into your home, and they can tell how many people are in your house, and what your doing. They can do a sneak and peak (basically go into your home when your not there, and rummage through your personal things, listen in on your phone conversations, take you away without telling your family or your friends what happened to you, and hold you indefinitely without charging you with a crime. They can plant evidence in your home, and take your home, and you have no way to defend yourself. Don't think this has not already happened here in the USA, it has, and will continue, unless we the people stand up and demand our rights back, and refuse to let the government take anymore of them.
Dr. Khassan Baiev has seen first hand what happens to people that can not defend themselves against their government. He witnessed the horrors of war, and the slaughter of defenseless countrymen, and women, many whom he fought to save in the 1990's when he was a doctor in war torn Chechnya. He watched helpless as soldiers pillaged his home and took everything down to the parquet flooring, all the while eating his food and using his floor for a bathroom. Why? Simply because they could. Grief of My Heart: Memoirs of a Chechen Surgeon
Better yet, look at what happened in Rwanda when the people could not defend themselves. This excerpt is from http://www.gendercide.org/
With breathtaking rapidity, the genocide expanded from Kigali to the countryside. Government radio encouraged Tutsis to congregate at churches, schools, and stadiums, pledging that these would serve as places of refuge. Thus concentrated, the helpless civilians could be more easily targeted -- although many miraculously managed to resist with only sticks and stones for days or even weeks, until the forces of the Rwandan army and presidential guard were brought in to exterminate them with machine-guns and grenades. By April 21 -- that is, in just two weeks -- perhaps a quarter of a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus had been slaughtered. Together with the mass murder of Soviet prisoners-of-war during World War II, it was the most concentrated act of genocide in human history: "the dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust." (Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998], p. 3.) (Gérard Prunier provides an even higher estimate: "the daily killing rate was at least five times that of the Nazi death camps." Prunier, The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide [Columbia University Press, 1995], p. 261.) By the end of April, according to Human Rights Watch, "the worst massacres had finished ... perhaps half of the Tutsi population of Rwanda" had been murdered.
Governments change when they are given too much power, and so does the average person. Take for example the following excerpt concerning a prison experiment at Stanford that had to be called off because it got so out of hand.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This experiment just goes to show what happens when people are defenseless, and have no rights, but it also shows what happens to people when they are given too much power.
We have allowed the government in many states to change imminent domain to mean your personal property can be taken for private use. You can build up your business for years, make it a success and if someone else comes along that can hire more people than you, and pay more taxes than you, you can kiss it goodbye. Will it stop with businesses? The next thing will be, someone can build a bigger home than you, and pay more taxes so you have to move from your family land and find somewhere else to live.
Murder has been around since the beginning of time, and it will be happening long after you and I are gone. When a person, intent on killing others, doesn't have a gun they use knives, poison, swords, home made bombs, vehicles, rocks, and sometimes just their hands, but those things won't help you defend yourself when you are attacked; when someone else has a gun and you don't, the gun is going to win.
In the words of John Adams, "It is better that one guilty man go free than three innocent men go to prison." Our rights, all of them, were put into the constitution for our protection, but we are fast being sold the lie that we don't need those rights, because some criminal might get off for his crime. Those laws were not put into place to protect the criminals in society, but rather to protect the innocent. Some will beat the law with those rights, and the government is quick to point it out, because it wants you to give up more, and more of those rights.
Let them take your second amendment rights, and you can kiss America goodbye. We are like sheep being led to the slaughter, and I hope you will decide to be a shepherd instead. I've heard it said, the only thing necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing, so when the government wants more of your rights, stand up and say, not no, but hell no.
The framers of our constitution knew that no government can be trusted unless the power is to the people first, and that power rest in your rights. It is time for a change, and you still have the power of the vote. Neither party represents the people, and unless we the people say no more, it may soon be too late. Next election send them a loud and clear message. We are fed up, and if you won't make the necessary changes, then go find yourself a new job.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety - Franklin
Linda you did a great job on this article! I for one have thought about getting my concealed weapons permit. You talked about Gabrielle Gifford think of what a different outcome it would have been if someone there had a concealed weapons permit. How about if we had teachers armed? Wouldn’t our kids be safer? Maybe they need to be trained in using weapons just like an officer of the law. Who wants to think that we have to arm our teachers to keep our kids safe? With all of the sick people out there now, either my natural causes or by drug abuse wouldn’t you feel safer if the school had some way to protect its students. Don’t most people feel safer now that we have armed guards flying on our airplanes? My son flies all the time and I for one am glad we have people packing. Look at Texas, low crime rate everyone packing iron! I for one will fight for my second amendment the right to bear arms.
ReplyDeleteLinda you did a great job on this article! I for one have thought about getting my concealed weapons permit. You talked about Gabrielle Gifford think of what a different outcome it would have been if someone there had a concealed weapons permit. How about if we had teachers armed? Wouldn't our kids be safer? Maybe they need to be trained in using weapons just like an officer of the law. Who wants to think that we have to arm our teachers to keep our kids safe? With all of the sick people out there now, either my natural causes or by drug abuse wouldn't you feel safer if the school had some way to protect its students. Don’t most people feel safer now that we have armed guards flying on our airplanes? My son flies all the time and I for one am glad we have people packing. Look at Texas, low crime rate everyone packing iron! I for one will fight for my second amendment the right to bear arms.
ReplyDelete