Topic: Gun Control
Ron Paul on Gun Control and the McCain, Obama, and Hillary Risk Every major candidate other than Ron Paul is a high-risk bet on the gun control issue.by Random Outlier
(libertarian)
Sunday, April 13, 2008
When in doubt, ask your bookie.
Mine gives me fair odds that the Supreme Court will, in June, affirm that the Second Amendment protects an individual right.
That would be umitigated good news, but not total victory.
While a majority -- five or six, depending on how you parse their hints -- suggested during oral arguments they believed the right to be armed was an individual protection, there was no doubt most also believed that it was a subject to reasonable restriction.
One man's reasonableness is another man's insane statism, so even if the Heller vs. D.C. case comes down as expected, the battle continues in the legislatures and lower courts.
The high court question seems to be to how it will guide the legislative branch on what constitutes "reasonableness."
How heavy should the burden of proof be on government to prove "reasonableness" before stripping you of your individual right to meet deadly threat with lethal force?
The leftist-elite will argue for a burden inflated with helium. "Whatever anti-gun lawmakers want to do is reasonable because we say it is reasonable."
The justices sympathetic to limited government will argue for much heavier burden of proof, and constitutionalists can only hope they prevail.
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It will work something like this:
With a fresh Supreme Court ruling declaring arms to be a constitutionally protected individual right, the legislative and judicial battles will begin anew to rewrite gun laws with the usual suspects making the usual arguments. The gun banners will shelter under whatever slack the high court gives them on "reasonableness."
Pro-libertarian forces will contend that (a) gun control has virtually never corresponded with reduced crime and (b) the exact contrary is true, that the armed citizen has a most salutory effect in stemming the ambitions of your average thug, therefore reasonableness must be based on an objectively compelling public interest.
As those issues are joined in chambers from your local village to federal halls, the attitudes of your elected officials become paramount, most especially including your elected president who controls the microphone, and, to a disheartening degree, the kind and quality of data reported by the mass media.
If Mr. or Ms. President espies political hay to be made in scaring soccer moms he will rephrase the Schumer/Kennedy line, the media will report it, and soccer moms will tremble. And vote.
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Naming Names:
Hillary Clinton: Simply hopeless.
Barack Obama: More hopeless than Clinton.
John McCain: Slightly less hopeless than either of the above.
Ron Paul: Your man if the right to keep and bear arms is important to you.
The Clinton record is clear. She is abed with Ted Kennedy in lust to disarm the lawful. She voted to sustain the assault-rifle ban which did not ban assault rifles. (It mostly banned ugly black guns made abroad. Nice American blue-steel and walnut semi-autos were deemed fine.) And to this day, after millions of words of polite explanation to Sen. Clinton and her anti-gun clique, we can bet the farm she still can't define "assault rifle."
Obama comes out of the Cook County, Illinois, political machine which, in essence, bans guns to anyone not a useful contributor to said machine. The Chicago attitude is continually pressed on the entire state with heavy success. I find no record that Obama has ever objected any of that, not even a raised eyebrow.
McCain is a little more interesting. The son and grandson of admirals, he hails from the brass class of the American military tradition. There I think lies his problem. The officer class believes sidearms are for officers, never to be possessed by the unwashed enlisted masses except in special circumstances -- carefully defined and supervised by the officer class. And he calls Obama an elitest?
The McCain firearms-rights record is -- at the extreme outer limits of charitability -- spotty. His newfound sympathy for permitting the law-abiding to be as well armed as the criminal class is often characterized as a response to his political need to fix fences with non-urban conservatives. What he would do as a president facing anti-gun pressure from a liberal congress is anyone's guess.
Leaving us with Ron Paul who says, believes, and undoubtedly would implement this view:
--The Constitution means what is says, and that meaning is not nearly as obscure as hair-splitters claim.
-- That before limiting the individual rights of citizens, whether to defend themselves against the lawless or perform any other obviously reasonable act, the government must press a very, very heavy burden of proof.
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The views expressed in this
article are those of Random Outlier only and do not represent
the views of Nolan Chart, LLC or its affiliates. Random Outlier is
solely responsible for the contents of this article and is not an
employee or otherwise affiliated with Nolan Chart, LLC in his/her role as a columnist.
Actually, everyone aside from Ron Paul is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a globalist organization that has openly stated its objective is to eliminate national sovereignty and to establish a world goverment. A vote for ANYONE other than Ron Paul is a vote for a traitor to our country.
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