Reader Phil from Hawaii emails the following in answer to those anti-Second Amendment activists and / or grieving parents being used by those same activists. Powerful stuff that he’s kindly allowed me to repost here:
I hear the voices of all murdered children. It is a joyful noise: they laugh and sing; safe at the footstool of the Lord.
I hear the voices of all parents of murdered children. They wail, they rage; lost in an abyss of grief. And no amount of teddy bears, no hugs, no laws can heal them. They are forever broken.
I hear myself. I rage, I weep: for all parents of murdered children; for my wife; for me. My 27 year old stepson, Michael Edward Young and, my 8 year old first grandchild, Joshua Allen Young were murdered in 1995 in Tempe, AZ. Abiding pain says it could have been just yesterday.
And I hear the drone of politicians. They weep in public, claiming others murdered children as their own. These children are not theirs, they are ours, are mine. For them to claim otherwise is pandering at its worst; is vile; is despicable. To then prey on the vulnerabilities of such overwrought parents in effort to metastasize a political agenda is even worse. To say they feel my pain is incomprehensible: my pain is my pain only. It isn’t even my wife’s pain; she has her own to bear.
Guns did not murder my boys. Crack-heads with guns obtained illegally under existing law murdered my boys. No new laws will change this fact. Making criminals of law abiding citizens will not change this fact; will not prevent future occurrences of such crimes by criminals; will only encourage more such crimes.
Sometimes, the price of freedom is most steep. But personal tragedy, no matter how excruciatingly painful and enduring, is never justification to trash our Constitution. We are a nation ruled by law as delineated in our Constitution. To abrogate our Constitution for one is to abrogate our Constitution for all; is to render us as a nation ruled by law - into one ruled by whim of tyrannical men and women. The Second Amendment does not give us the right to keep and bear arms; this is an inalienable right. The Second Amendment merely proscribes governments from trampling this inalienable right.
Even though the price of freedom sometimes is most steep – always – the cost of its alternative is steeper. So I do not decry the Second Amendment; do not seek edicts to mangle its intent. Even if I wanted to infringe it - to do so in the name of Mike and Josh – would dishonor them.
Yes, I am forever broken; yet unbowed. I choose liberty over tyranny. I choose to honor my murdered children. And, I implore you to do the same. Vote no on criminalizing honest citizens. Vote no on giving free reign to existing criminals.
Liberty isn’t cheap, but it is consistently under assault from the cheap emotionalism that demands we surrender it for promises of government-provided security.
There’s a reason the 2nd Amendment was included in the Bill of Rights. The only “rethinking” (which always means, in the end, abolition) we need do about it is that the numerous controls placed on it over the years have given both criminals and government agents.
(thanks to Blake for the link to the fascist academic in the pussy suit)
Powerful stuff.
Every Federal gun act to my knowledge that has been passed is unconstitutional. None of them were necessary, and none of them did what they were purported to do. Instead, as always, they have punished honest citizens and made criminals more powerful.
Babsolute moral authority is the kind Sen. Boxer wields.
Great stuff, reader Phil.
It’s a tribute to your fortitude that you can see the forest for the fallen trees.
One summer working at a gas station between college years, a solemn man in a pickup was filing up. He had NRA stickers on his truck. He also told me he had to drive down to San Diego because his niece was killed in the San Ysidro McDonalds massacre.
At he time I was thinking how ironic. I am glad I have grown up a bit.
Why do I weep when my heart should feel no pain
Why do I sigh that my friends come not again,
Grieving for forms Now departed long a go?
I hear their gentle voices calling “Old Black Joe.”
I’m coming, I’m coming, for my head is bending low:
I hear those gentle voices calling, “Old Black Joe.”
Statists like Oberg never stop to consider what tends to happen to people of his ilk when they are no longer useful to the state.
Even more bizarre, Oberg ostensibly teaches history. I cannot imagine just how bad Oberg’s course must be.
Linked here: http://bobagard.blogspot.com/2013/06/an-inalienable-right.html
Mexican drug gangs too with Fast & Furious. Also in all the most gun rights restricted places like Chicago, the gangs o’ thugs have no problem at all getting, carrying, using guns, day in and nights out. Just like Holder’s buddies in Mexico and Obama’s in Syria.
Another progressive mole sticks its head up and uses the 1st Amendment by means never contemplated and incomprehensible to the founders.
Yet that Right still is there and the intent of those men is as meaningful now as it was then. So to is the intent, the meaning of all the Constitution and its Amendments.
The smartest people of the 18th century “couldn’t possibly comprehend the world of today”…?
They comprehended it a damn sight better than Byron Williams does.
That’s quite a spanking Williams is getting in what he must have thought was friendly turf.
It pisses me off that I can’t reply to drivel like that without granting HuffPo access to my social network. Bastards.
[…] “Phil from Hawaii” via Protein Wisdom: […]
The Jersey shuffle plays on still, even as “Big Frankie” molders away.
molders is a great word
it’s like what happened to our whorepig government’s esteem for individual freedom