The Right to Bear Arms

by Joseph Farah
[email protected]

Special to TLE
[Originally published December 6, 1999 in WorldNetDaily at www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_btl/19991206_xcbtl_the_right_.shtml]

           There's a reason the Founding Fathers considered the right to bear arms fundamental in a free society. A couple of recent unrelated incidents should bring this home to all of us.
           In Seattle last week, the local government, faced with widespread civil disobedience over the city's hosting of the World Trade Organization conference declared a state of emergency, a curfew and even went so far as to ban the use of gas masks by anyone except police.
           Now, in case you hadn't considered this before, gas masks are not weapons. They can only be used to defend oneself, usually from tear gas fired by government police. Now imagine you lived in Seattle and had some urgent business. Perhaps you have an asthmatic son or daughter with a doctor's appointment. You live outside the immediate area of protests, but as a precaution against what could be a life-threatening attack to your child, you feel compelled to break out the gas mask collecting dust in the basement.
           In Seattle, you would be treated as a criminal.
           It's arbitrary. It's capricious. And I say it's unconstitutional. And the Constitution doesn't even explicitly guarantee the right to bear strictly defensive tools such as a gas mask. I think many, if not most, people -- left and right -- would agree with me.
           Nevertheless, there is still, somehow broad debate in this country about whether the Constitution really means what it says about firearms. I don't get it.
           Some of the anti-gun, anti-Constitution, anti-freedom crowd looks at it this way: "Yeah, it's in the Constitution. But the Constitution is outdated and in need of change -- especially the Second Amendment. Our first priority needs to be to protect people from violence. If we take the guns away from ordinary people, they will be safer and more secure. They can rest easy knowing the government will protect them."
           Of course, the facts, the statistics, the evidence just doesn't bear out any such theory. On the contrary, the only cold, calculating, objective, scientific research conducted in this area, by Dr. John Lott, shows just the opposite to be the case -- more guns mean less crime.
           But put that aside for a moment and consider a recent development in a police shooting case in Claremont, Calif. Last January, Irvin Landrum Jr., 18, was stopped for a traffic violation. The cops say Landrum pulled a gun on them, so they shot him and killed him. The family never bought the story and filed a lawsuit suggesting the police shot the kid and planted a gun on him.
           It turns out ballistics tests showed the gun was not fired that night. It had no fingerprints on it. And the last traceable owner was the late police chief of a neighboring town.
           I don't know about you, but I believe the kid was shot three times by the cops and the .45 was dropped on him.
           It happens. You see, some cops are crooked. Some cops are dishonest. Some cops are even unbalanced, untrustworthy and unqualified to carry a gun. And even more of them are unsuited to that role if and when the police hold a monopoly on firepower.
           When some nut climbs a tower somewhere and shoots innocent people, too many Americans begin clamoring to take away guns from perfectly law-abiding citizens who need them to protect themselves as well as to protect our own liberty from the creeping police state. When a nutty cop goes berserk and kills innocent people -- and it happens -- I never hear anyone suggesting we disarm all police.
           True self-government requires an armed citizenry. If the government holds a monopoly on force, tyranny is only a shot away.
           We can never allow that to happen in America.
           Nor can we ever tolerate American city governments, state governments or federal government suspending the constitutional rights of free people. The WTO be damned. Let the organization meet in China. Let it hire its own private security force to protect Fidel Castro and Bill Clinton. We shouldn't suspend the Constitution to protect people who would like to shred it permanently.
           Remember, gas masks don't kill people. Overbearing, unchecked, heavily armed governments kill people.

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Joseph Farah is editor of WorldNetDaily
http://www.worldnetdaily.com
A daily radio broadcast adaptation of Joseph Farah's commentaries can be heard at http://www.ktkz.com

REGULATORY CLAWS

"What killed the [Seattle WTO] meeting was not the protesters so much as the man who finally let the regulatory cat out of the global-government bag: Bill Clinton. In a slip of the tongue, he told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer that the WTO should use sanctions to enforce U.S.-style labor regulations around the world."
-- Lew Rockwell, in WorldNetDaily
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Source: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_rockwell/19991206_xclro_wto_more_a.shtml

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