21JAN2021
Once again, I am forced to address erroneous (and absurd) conclusions made by uneducated pinatas of stupid regarding the second amendment.
Again, the tired myth that the founding fathers we referring only to flintlock muskets when they wrote the second amendment. Having said that, let us meet today’s pinata boy:
I’ve said before that this is a specious argument that is not only dishonest, but so stupid that it deserves to be torn down, dissected and the person making such a moronic statement deserves only scorn and ridicule.
That said…he wanted to go down this absurd path…fine. Let’s do absurd. But if we’re going to do it, let’s go whole hog…Let’s go to ludicrous levels of absurd.
To say that the founders only meant single shot, flintlock muskets…well if that’s the metric you want to use to judge the second amendment, then we must apply the same metric to all of the amendments in the Bill of Rights. The 18th Century Tech standard it is then.
The First Amendment only applies to speech. Those within the sound of your voice. The public square, churches, taverns, pubs etc. No television, no radio, no internet etc. Only your voice.
Oh, sure, you can write letters, but before you do, you may only use parchment, vellum or other such paper as was available in the late 18th century. You must also use Iron Gall ink, quills or a stylus…after all, the ball point pen and gel ink hadn’t been invented yet. While we’re at it, you may only send letters via Post Rider.
Freedom of the Press? Yeah…the founding fathers meant something like this:
No modernized technology, no mass-produced newspapers for you. And forget news shows, radio, Television etc. ‘Reporters’ must do things the old-fashioned way. No cameras, video recorders or such allowed. Afterall, the founders couldn’t envision such things as cameras or photography. They intended hand printed newspapers, pamphlets and broadsides printed on these antiques. Forget illustrating your article…unless you want to painstakingly carve a picture on a block of wood to be set into the press.
For circulation, you can only use paper boys on the street corner hawking your publication, or maybe being delivered by post rider or horse and buggy. The founders never imagined automobiles after all.
As for freedom of religion? Well, I guess you can only be Christian or possibly Jewish. In the late 18th century there weren’t too many mosques or Bhuddist temples in America. Afterall, that clause in the first amendment was meant so that you could worship at the church of your choice and not be forced to worship at the Church of England.
That’s JUST the first amendment! Let us move on down the list and see just how absurd we can be…
The fourth amendment only applies to your home and personal papers. The government can now search your computer, your iPhone, your iPad or other device without consent or a warrant. I mean, after all, the founding fathers meant personal papers and didn’t ever imagine electronic devices that could have incriminating or personal correspondence on them, now could they? So, you might as well hand those devices over now.
Can you see, now, where this absurdity leads? The notion that the founding fathers meant the second only to apply to muskets is a crap assertion that has no legal standing unless you apply the same standard to all of the Bill of Rights.
That notion is also easily disproven. The founding fathers were well aware of the advancements being made in technology. During the American Revolution, there were several weapons available that were highly innovative. Take for example, the Puckle Gun. This was essentially a machine gun. It used a cylinder with 11 rounds loaded and fired by turning a crank, similar to how the Gatling Gun worked.
If that wasn’t enough to convince you, there is also the Fergusson Rifle. This was a breech loading flintlock rifle that could fire something like 7-9 rounds per minute. This was 2-3 times more than a standard Brown Bess Musket.
There was also the Girandoni Rifle. This was patented sometime around 1779 (two years before we sent the Cornwallis home with his tail tucked between his legs). This was an air rifle with a range of over 150 yards. The rifle used a 19 round detachable magazine, sported a high rate of fire and due to being an air rifle, it had almost no report and no smoke. The Girandoni really was the AR-15 of it’s day. I mean, Silent, no flash, high-capacity magazine and high ROF…this pretty much triggers all the Graboid talking points…about 200 years before the AR15 was invented.
So, you see, the idea that the founders never ‘envisioned’ a weapon like the AR15 is simply nonsense. They were well aware of innovations and the nature of firearms manufacturing. Repeating arms have been around since the 15th century, albeit prohibitively expensive.
Because of that, the argument that they couldn’t have envisioned such weapons falls woefully flat. However, if that ‘failure of imagination’ is the argument you’re going to use against the second amendment, you should think twice. Because it can also be used on several sacred cows the liberals love to champion. Do you really believe the founders imagined the mass extermination of babies for the sake of convenience? That women would kill their own unborn children hundreds of thousands of times a year as a method of birth control?
I’m also reasonably certain that the founders never imagined that men would ‘become’ women and force their way into ladies’ showers in the name of equality or that we would consider marriage as being anything other than one man and one woman.
It is doubtful that they envisioned that we would be forced to accept more than 2 genders or that a person’s right to practice their faith in their business would be one day forbidden.
And I know damned well that the founders never intended that our Judiciary could legislate from the bench, creating rights where none previously existed or essentially rewriting a law to make it constitutional.
This is the absurdity of absurd. How far down this rabbit hole do we really want to go? Because I contend that we’ve already gone WAY too far down the path and we are beginning to see the disintegration of our republic.
Abraham Lincoln once said that if the United States falls, it will not be because of an outside force, but will fall from within. It is because of this mindset, one our founders shared and thus not unique to the 16th president, that we were given the Bill of Rights and the reason we have such a plethora of information, essays, articles, speeches and quotes from them. It is why we have the Federalist Papers. Our founders knew that Republics will eventually begin to rot from within.
Because they knew this, they left us those words as a caution against the excesses of Government and Mob Rule (Which, by the way, is how they viewed democracy). They left us the Bill of Rights to protect us from those excesses. As we watch the erosion and rot of our nation, it is now more important than ever to protect those very rights our forefathers fought so hard to defend.
The second amendment is essential to liberty and to the protection of the other rights. Our First amendment is equally essential. It is, indeed, the reason we have both. As our nation continues it’s rot from within, we have seen over the last 50 years, a slow and steady erosion of our rights.
We cannot allow this to happen and we can not allow our enemies to continue to frame the second amendment (or any of them) in so absurd a fashion.
~FINIS
