Responding to the National Rifle Association's annual convention in Houston earlier this month, Connecticut's freshman Senator Chris Murphy noted, "The NRA kind of announced this weekend they're morphing into a paramilitary group, that essentially they're going to be advocating for armed resistance to the U.S. government." Law professor Stanley Fish mused, "The more militant members of the NRA and most of its leaders may be un-American ... [John Wilkes] Booth's modern successors are saying that a house in the hands of tyrants does not deserve to stand and they are ready to bring it down with their constitutionally protected guns." They weren't exaggerating.
The NRA didn't just throw down the gauntlet to our government in Houston. It also articulated a vision of America and its ideals that is the antithesis of what our Founders intended, and which would mean the abolition of our Constitution.
There can longer be any doubt that the NRA's leadership views our government as a dangerous enemy that must be defeated with violence and force of arms. The rhetoric at their convention was consistently apocalyptic. Keynote speaker Glenn Beck declared:
The freedom of all mankind, make no mistake, is at stake ... Our liberty, our way of life, is being legislated out of existence. Our rights are being diminished by a ruling class of powerful elites. They're growing out of control. We are in a precarious situation. We are. The hour grows late. We have a government that is now run by radical revolutionaries ... They know, if you lose the Second Amendment you certainly lose the First and the Fourth and the Fifth, the right to a grand jury, and the 10th and the 14th and the 19th...
One sure characteristic of control freaks: You never listen. We will follow the law and the process as long as those are available, but if there comes a point at which our government has become a tyranny, good people will no longer be obliged to comply.
ReplyDeleteBut perhaps Horror of the HuffinPuff believes that we are still rightly British subjects. Perhaps he believes that the people of Syria should submit to Assad.
Exactly. People like Horwitz have no line in the sand. For them, there is no level of government evil that justifies armed resistance.
DeleteHell--CSGV came out and admitted to believing that the government rounding up racial/religious/etc. minorities, to put them in concentration camps, would not justify armed resistance.
Can you imagine being so consumed by abject, degenerate cowardice, so bereft of morality (and humanity) as that?