What the great minds have said about gun control

Norfolk Crime Examiner

What the great minds have said about gun control

April 16, 8:39 PM

The 2008 Supreme Court decision which struck-down Washington D.C.´s ban on handguns, also banned localities from interfering with a citizen´s right to keep and bear arms.

The Court´s 5-4 decision read: "The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home."

The framers of the constitution understood the necessity for American citizens to keep and bear arms. Unfortunately, our society has been so influenced by those on the left, that many of us now believe that we should give up that right...Thus leaving ourselves, our homes, and even our loved-ones at the mercy of the criminals. You see, gun laws only affect the law-abiding.

In most states, one needs a permit to carry a concealed weapon. Once again, the only people who observe this law are the law-abiding, thus making this measure useless. A few years ago, Virginia legislators passed a bill which banned citizens from carrying concealed weapons into an establishment which serves alcohol. Even with a concealed-carry permit, it became a felony to enter a bar with a gun which is hidden from plain view...Another piece of legislation giving an upper hand to the criminals.

Laws which prohibit law-abiding citizens from possessing and carrying firearms are not lost on criminals. It is no coincidence that in the 32 years since the District of Columbia placed a ban on the ownership of handguns, the number of crimes to individuals (rape, robbery, murder) soared.

Criminals are also keenly aware of the prospect of an armed citizen and will almost always steer clear of potential victims who may be armed.

In 1982, Kennesaw, GA passed a law which required heads of household to have at least one gun in the house. The burglary rate immediately dropped an astounding 89 percent. Ten years after the law was passed, the burglary rate was still 72 percent less than in 1981.

The idea of gun control and the need to defend one's self is not a new one. Much has been said on the subject, even before guns were invented. The need to protect you and yours is as natural as breathing. Of course, as with all natural instincts, there will be those attempting to legislate it away.

What follows is a small collection of what many of man's greatest minds have said on the right to possess arms:

Cicero :“Civilized people are taught by logic, barbarians, by necessity, communities by tradition; and the lesson inculcated even in wild beasts by nature itself. They learn that they have to defend their own bodies and persons lives from violence of any and every kind by all means within their power.”

James Madison, while criticizing the governments of Europe: which “were afraid to trust the people with arms” and argued for “the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over almost every other nation.”

Richard Henry Lee (a framer of the Bill of Rights): “To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them.”

George Orwell: “Rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon -- so long as there is no answer to it -- gives claws to the weak.”

President of the Congress of Racial equality Roy Innis: “To make inexpensive guns impossible to get is to say that you're putting a money test on getting a gun. It's racism in its worst form.”

President John F. Kennedy: “Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom.”

Mahatma Gandhi: “Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest.”

Even Jesus weighed in on the subject, in the Book of Luke: “When I sent you out barefoot without purse or pack, were you ever short of anything?...It is different now, whoever has a purse had better take it with him, and his pack too; and if he has no sword, let him sell his cloak to buy one.”

Since people have had the opportunity as well as the need to arm themselves, there have been those attempting to rob them of this right. It was as true in Colonial America as it is today, and just as it was in Hitler's Germany. In 1938, the Nazis enacted a gun-control act, which robbed not only Jews, but all citizens of the right to defend themselves.

In 1942, Hitler made the following statement: “The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to permit the conquered Eastern peoples to have arms. History teaches that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by doing so.”

Near the end of World War II, the Japanese Admiral Yamamoto once said that the reason Japan never invaded the mainland of the United States was because “there would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.” Americans´ right to keep and bear arms has served us well. It is also a well known fact that well armed citizens prevent crimes from occurring, and many of those armed citizens have sent thousands of violent criminals on their way to hell.

The fact is, the police cannot be everywhere at once. If you choose not to defend yourself or your family, that is your absurd decision and I wish you luck. However, for those of us who choose to exercise our Second Amendment right…Remember the old adage: “It is better to be judged by twelve than carried by six!”

A Declaration For All Time

Our country's founding document retains its genius even as the times, and our values, change.

The story of the Declaration of Independence has been mined so deeply and disseminated so widely that most of the myths surrounding it have long since been dispelled. It was not, we now know, on the 4th of July, 1776, that Americans declared their independence, but on the 2nd of July — when the Second Continental Congress formally resolved that the colonies ought to be independent and that bonds to the British Crown should be dissolved (leading John Adams to write to his wife that July 2 would henceforth be celebrated by Americans as their "Day of Deliverance" and "solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other").

The Declaration itself was signed two days later, but, frankly, many considered it a not terribly important document, more "dress and ornament rather than Body, Soul or Substance," as Adams put it. It took months before an official copy arrived in Europe (the original dispatched by the Congress got lost), according to historian Pauline Maier, and in the decades that followed, it did not stand out for most Americans as the classic statement of their national principles. A British parliamentarian, admittedly biased, called it "a wretched composition, very ill written, drawn up with a view to captivate the people."

One reason it didn't immediately take its rightful place in history may be that it was viewed very differently then than it is now. Indeed, even Thomas Jefferson, when he drafted it, didn't see it as fundamentally about liberty or equality or the rights of man, as we do today. His focus, says Maier, was less on individuals than on colonial grievances and the prerogative of the people, collectively, to "alter and abolish" any government that failed to represent them or to ensure their safety and happiness.

It was only years later that the first sentence of the second paragraph came to be seen as the central idea — the sentence declaring that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."

Today, with King George's misrule largely forgotten or forgiven, it is those two key concepts — liberty and equality — that continue to both guide and bedevil Americans. On the face of it, and especially in Jefferson's eloquent words, they seem such clear, fundamental principles, yet 234 years later, there is still vehement disagreement about what they mean and how to apply them. Think of the issues raised at the contentious confirmation hearings of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan last week. Just how much liberty is guaranteed by the Constitution's 4th Amendment ban on unreasonable searches and seizures? Does the freedom to speak one's mind extend to the right to counsel terrorist groups? Should judges, in their effort to guarantee equal justice, feel a special solicitude for the "despised and disadvantaged"? When may the government seize private property? Could Congress pass a law mandating that Americans must eat their fruits and vegetables?

Each of those is really a question about how far liberty ought to extend, or how equality can most fairly be defined. In case after case this year, the Supreme Court, too, turned and turned those concepts of liberty and equality in its hands. Are corporations entitled to the same 1st Amendment free speech guarantees as individuals? That was the question in the troubling Citizens United decision, which permitted companies to spend unlimited sums to influence elections. In McDonald vs. Chicago, the court considered whether the right to bear arms is one of the core liberties of U.S. citizens or whether guns, as Justice John Paul Stevens put it, "have a fundamentally ambivalent relationship to liberty."

For Congress, for President Obama, for governors and legislators, these debates loom large as well. Indeed, what's so inspiring about this country is that so many years after the revolution, our leaders — when they're not pandering for partisan advantage or airing attack ads or flying off on junkets or defending special interests or sleeping with their staffers — are still feverishly debating the bedrock questions that engaged the founders in the Declaration, the Federalist Papers, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Even voters themselves are asked to wrestle regularly with these enormous philosophical questions. Voters in California, for example, squarely addressed the subject of equality in 2008 when they chose — wrongly, in the view of this page — not to allow same-sex marriage. They'll consider the limits of liberty later this year when they're asked to decide whether Californians should be allowed to smoke marijuana legally.

Disagreements over the scope of liberty and equality run as deep today as they did in Jefferson's day. But the fact that there's still so much debate, and so many new circumstances to which those basic precepts must be applied, deals a heavy blow to the arguments of the strict constructionists and original intenters, who seem to believe that all questions about American law can be answered by imagining that we still live in the 1700s or by trying to intuit what the country's founders would have thought.

The reality is that times change and values change. The text of the Constitution and of the Declaration and the context in which they were written are important, but so is the subsequent evolution of the country. The founders may have been slaveholders, but over time, the three-fifths compromise gave way to "separate but equal," which in turn gave way to Brown vs. Board of Education, which held that segregation was inherently unequal. Similarly, the 1st Amendment, written when those who owned printing presses held a monopoly on speech, now must be retrofitted to include text messages and cloud-based e-mail and Facebook.

The brilliance of America's guiding principles lies, ultimately, in their breadth, flexibility and resiliency, which allow them to be endlessly reexamined, reinterpreted and, ultimately, reaffirmed. Abraham Lincoln, an especially fervent devotee of the Declaration of Independence, understood that when he wrote in 1859: "All honor to Jefferson — to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that today and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression."

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

What is a Living Wage?

What is a living wage?

A living wage is one that does more than just pay your bills. It also allows you to put some money away for your retirement so that you may live after you can no longer work.

A living wage is also one that will allow you to live in the present. That means you might go to dinner once in a while. Maybe go to a movie.

A living wage will allow you to make some investments so maybe you don't have to work all they way to 65 or 70.

A living wage gives you more than what you need to survive. It gives you some extra too.

Anything less than a living wage is simply survival, day-to-day, with no possibilities for improvement.

The Disarming of America

As long as there has been an America, Americans have owned firearms, a lot of them, and that's a good thing.

Anyone who wants to dis-arm America is simply un-American.

Theodore Roosevelt said: "Speak softly and carry and big stick". Why would any American want us to put down our stick?

I appreciate people who want a better world, one without violence and such. Me too. But until that day arrives, I plan on surviving.

Keep America strong! Learn about, own, and use firearms, regularly.

Kevin Reynolds