Giving any organization a monopoly in the use of force is very dangerous, and this demands very strong oversight by the subject populace. Most people trust government way too much, usually when they have not been on the wrong side of abuse. most people also trust their news sources too much, and especially when they say the same things.
Police and prosecutors are human, not angels. Peace officers no more, now they’re law enforcers.
In maybe even most areas in Latin America police are useless at even law enforcement, & ill trained.
But in a few areas I know of personally, citizens do not rely on somebody else for protection of person or property or family. They openly carry really big guns, concealed ones, and may have a bunch of AK-47s stashed somewhere.
The weapons left over from the guerrilla years and the Contra years ended up in big trunks of everybody’s homes. In one incident, some combatants on either side took to crime. A group set up a roadblock to rob a bunch of cars & buses on the road.
One Pepsi trucker took out his AK-4, “I didn’t bring this for nothing’ and began shooting at the robbers. Shots started coming from the trees. Then the grannies & the daddies & the others brought out theirs, and the bad guys were getting a rotten day because a bunch of good guys brought their guns, gun laws be damned. My now-wife and her now-ex were on a tour bus. The tour bus driver took off, taking advantage of the confusion.
Bad guys got a big surprise that day by people who had the means of self defense themselves.
Well, some people have opinions, and others have facts.
After the shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas, some media celebrities decided to proclaim their foolishness, rather than keep their silence and let people doubt it.
DOUBLE-BLIND STUDIES ON INTERCESSORY PRAYER
Many double-blind studies have shown that intercessory prayer DOES work. The one recent study, just one, that got some publicity, claimed that the results were not conclusive. Even so, they admit that there were even negative results.
There was no mention in those reports about the several studies that did show that it does work.
I propose, though, that it is very hard to get a good handle on this phenomenon statistically. My first question for any such study is to ask whether they accounted for the praying people’s faith or lack of it, and how did they measure that? Barna Research has some good guidelines on such matters, because their people are committed Christians and regard it as a ministry to help other ministries and pastorates allocate resources wisely.
A lot of unbelievers reproached the calls for prayers for the survivors and families of the people killed in the massacre. A few more claimed they wanted more action to prevent such incidents, by which they really meant they wanted to make it more difficult for people like Stephen Willeford to acquire effective arms. Willeford was the neighbor who stopped the killing when he exchanged gunfire with the killer outside the church. The killer fled after that exchange, and ended up rolling off the road into a ditch about 12 miles up the road.
By the way, the Good Samaritan neighbor, Willeford, had the same type of weapon the killer had used, an AR-15. He said he would have a lesser chance of aiming properly with a lesser weapon like a pistol.
If you want to do more, you might do like some bigger churches do, who have good guys with guns ready to protect the flock in case of some wolf wanting to do damage.
Smaller churches, like the one in Sutherland Springs, often have members who do have firearms and can legally carry them. There have been previous incidents in which a killer was stopped by someone with a gun inside the church. One of them involved a terrorist attack against a mixed-race church in South Africa during Apartheid days, where one guy in the Security forces was packing and chased off all five, who had not expected anyone to shoot back.
For those who think it was all over before the hero got there, keep in mind that the killer had more weapons and lots of ammunition in his vehicle. There was another church two miles up the same road he fled on. If not chased, he might have otherwise to continue the spree.
Another relevant fact. This guy had made two posts on Facebook where he had good things to say about the violent nihilist (“neo-Brownshirt”) Antifa. He had illegally bought the guns because he was a convicted wife-beater and baby-basher (cracking his stepchild’s skull) which got him expelled from the Air Force.
The government is just too big and too slow to react quick enough or properly so with people like this guy, especially surrounded by a government-compliant media complex that soaks its audience with faint praise for street marauders as in antifa.
As the slogan goes: Remember, when seconds count, the police are just minutes away.
Here’s the story. The officer came to break up some fisticuffs when school got out. He pulled one of them off the other and then the crowd or 40 or 50 started to join the wannabe bad ass in beating up on the cop. But then the neighbor came out showing his weapon and the kids backed off.
The CNN interviewer asked Ben Carson about gun control:
“But just to clarify, if there had been no gun control laws in Europe at that time, would 6 million Jews have been slaughtered?”
Liberty Upward mentions his book: “In Carson’s new book “A Perfect Union,” Carson writes that “through a combination of removing guns and disseminating propaganda, the Nazis were able to carry out their evil intentions with relatively little resistance.” (From Liberty Upward )
What a gotcha question, so they could set him up for Holocaust industry for potshots.
Did Carson remember to mention the Warsaw uprising? That’s where the Jews in that ghetto held off the Nazis for days in a full-scale battle?
He could have mentioned that the first gun control proposal in the U.S. Congress after WW2 was modeled almost word for word on the Nazi gun control laws.
What a gotcha question, so they could set him up for Holocaust industry for potshots.
Did Carson remember to mention the Warsaw uprising? That’s where the Jews in that ghetto held off the Nazis for days in a full-scale battle?
He could have mentioned that the first gun control proposal in the U.S. Congress after WW2 was modeled almost word for word on the Nazi gun control laws.
Jesus had his disciples carry weapons for self-defense in the Garden of Gethsemane where he knew he would be betrayed.
In another lesson for Christians, though, he was not a warmonger. He had already refused his attempted coronation after the miracle of the loaves and fishes, when he also told us why some people vote for their favorite candidate: not because you saw a miracle, he told them, but “because your bellies were full.” He had also declared that the greatest in God’s kingdom (already “within you”) would be the least among us and a servant to the rest, in a role reversal.
Daily Mail just ran a feature with photos of “survivors of gun violence”. The feature did not show any of the victims who successfully shot back, or the ones who shot down the perpetrators, or the guy in a Washington state mall who stopped a shooting spree with only one down, because the shooter saw his gun.
I didn’t see Susan Hupp’s picture there either. She was at one of the worst massacres in history at Luby’s Cafeteria eating with her parents when a guy crashed his truck into the place, landing inside, and calmly began shooting. Her Dad was hit and her mother died with him.
Her handgun was locked up in her car one block away because at that time Texas had a ban on concealed carry.
She was so mad she waged a one-woman war against gun control, got herself elected to the Texas state legislature, and pushed and yelled till she got concealed carry passed..
My wife stopped a kidnapper from walking away with her son because she had her own “protection” in her purse, and she used it. He had the good fortune that it was my wife because she didn’t drop him dead.
There is one area in Honduras that has no violent gang problem. It has a violent reputation and everybody is armed there. They tried to form one gang chapter there but it was literally terminated after they killed the first father’s son.
The best prevention against bad guys with guns is good guys with guns. Best defense against tyranny especially.
Mr. P. H. would have his readers believe that the Second Amendment was meant to ONLY protect the right of the *government* to “bear arms” for the protection of a “free state”!
Yessir, they say, the Founding Fathers knew that without a constitution that guaranteed the right of the government to bear arms, why, the poor Congress and the poor Executive and the poor government-financed Army and the militia that they organized would be left defenseless! Nobody would let them arm the police! How could they have a standing army!
You heard right. They do agree that these rights are for all individuals, and that the fourteenth amendment recognized that these rights extend to individual rights from all governments (federal, state, local):
–free exercise of religion
–freedom from a religious establishment (official church)
–speech
–press
–assembly
–petition the Government for redress
–freedom from forced hosting of soldiers, whether in time of peace or war both
–to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable and warrantless searches and seizures
–no holding to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury
–freedom from double jeopardy
–to refuse to be forced to testify against one’s self
–to one’s life, liberty AND property, except by *due process* of law (not arbitrary process)
–freedom eminent domain except for a public purpose
–fair compensation for properties seized under eminent domain
–if accused, a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of peers, to confront witnesses against him, assistance of counsel, and to obtain witnesses in his own favor
–and, no excessive bail
–ALL other rights even if not enumerated
But some people say that there is one that was included in this list of INDIVIDUAL rights that was the ONE exception. That is, they say, that the right to defend your freedom against your own government is a right that they reserved for only the government itself!?!
I’m not trying to be argumentative, just curious. The current Court has struck down most recent attempts of states and municipalities to regulate arms. The NRA wages legal and electoral campaigns against anyone who breathes a hint to restrain a “right to bear arms“. The U.S. Congress, as well as the President, refuses to consider any restrictions.
—
The Supreme Court in the past few decades, has trashed the Constitution and allowed lots of infringing against the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
Finally Illinois forced the issue with an obvious hit against the collectivist misinterpretation, and ruled that it was an individual right, not a state militia right.
[Cue the snicker sound track here.] After all, if the right to bear arms is a right of governments and not a right for individuals, then the Second Amendment really means, according to this insanity:
Does it say this?
2nd Amendment: A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the [government???] to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
[Cue riotous laughter at that…].
So to protect the “security” of a
Dred Scott, whose famous case to gain his freedom began as a lawsuit filed in St. Louis in 1846 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
“free” state, the right of the government to bear arms shall not be infringed. Under this misinterpretation, the Second Amendment would presumably include the right to “bear” nuclear weapons.
So, are Steve and I permitted to own (keep) and use (bear) nuclear weapons (again, sorry, Norm, you were born on the wrong side of the pond)? If not, why not? That is, if I can keep and bear an AK-47 or AR-15 why not a thermonuclear device?
—-
There are MUCH WORSE people than you or Steve that already own (as in possess the use of) nuclear weapons.
#1. For example, one person who could throw nuclear weapons at somebody right now include one who arranged a massacre in a theater in which 130 innocent people died:
#2. Another group killed an estimated 5,000 with over 10,000 hurt critically, all in cold blood to stop a peaceful protest.. The troops they sent in were ordered to shoot anybody that got in the way; they were brought from distant bases (presumably so that they would not include too many who would worry about relatives being among the victims:
#3. Another one has arrogated to himself the illegal and unconstitutional “authority” to order secret kills on anybody he wants to anywhere in the world and has done it with full public knowledge. He (and his subordinates in command) continue their and unconstitutional and interventionist wars in five foreign countries.
For survivors, he has put command-and-control death panels in their future. Special treatment for special friends.
Rational people would demand all means possible to defend themselves against these obvious pathological maniacs, ruthless killers. And the list above is of the ones currently in possession of the worst nuclear weapons in the world. It does not include criminal dictators and rulers from the past or the future.
I’m serious. I admit that a reasonable person would not want Jason to have a tight rubber band, much less a nuke, but seriously should that be a limitation (no matter how logical and reasonable)? Instead is there case law which delineates what is protected by the 2nd amendment and not? Perhaps case law defines “arms”, which means that there would be a line in the sand; what is that line? I.e., what is protected and what is not?
—-
Case law is worse than useless when it numbs the mind of erudite attorneys at law and of citizens who accept it. Case law changes on the whim of those who make it, including 100s of reversals by the most respected Court in the world, the U.S. Supreme Court. Their ruling on the Republicans’ Civil RIghts Act in the 1960s reversed the Dred Scott case, for which you cannot find one little phrase of justification in even the slaver-protecting Constitution. (Justification was provided by the horror they felt at the prospect of blacks being able to carry arms, because if they are free men they carry arms).
2nd Amendment: A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
—
And some people out there in the cackling industry actually try to pretend it means that governments have the right to arm themselves!
Imagine that! Next thing they’ll pass a law that says chickens shall lay eggs and water shall flow downhill!
At least those amendments and laws would make lots more sense than the sewage pouring forth from looters’ governments today!
Self-defense is a natural right of every individual, and the right of a father and mother to protect their children. This is the basis for the right to bear arms, as having the means with which to defend yourself comes with the right to bear any weapon you need to defend yourself. The Bill of Rights is merely a list of explicit declaration of that right. THIS is the number One basis for the natural RIGHT to bear arms. SELF-DEFENSE means the right to defend yourself against BOTH other individuals (criminals) and other groups of criminals (governments, including your own).
The argument that the Second Amendment was to protect the right of governments to bear arms is a ridiculous argument. Consider it for a moment. Without the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Constitution already says Congress even has the power to raise whole armies and to support them. So they needed an amendment to say the governments had the right to have an army? Are you kidding?
If the ACLU applied the same reasoning to the other first nine amendments, they would not bother, like they said about the Second.
If you apply the same reasoning to the First Amendment that Infringers of the Second say about gun control, they would say that only people with a government issued permit should be allowed to say anything (free speech), all religions would be illegal except for government-approved ones (an old Soviet law, that), and that only government-approved people, and that you could only use the Fifth to avoid incriminating yourself if you were a high government official.
Trutherator's Weblog 