Freedom from fear: Why the First Amendment trumps the Second Amendment

I wanted to show how the left sees the counter establishment protesters and then I found this little jewel. Mostly it is a continuation of the protesters are violent rednecks theme the left have been pushing since the 1st tea party but this one has also added an anti gun rant.

I should start by admitting that I also think bringing a gun to a political rally is a bad idea but for different reasons. I have no registered weapons, buy no gun/weapon magazines, I do not belong to any pro-gun organization and never buy ammo from anywhere that requires me to sign something or have it shipped to my house. In short, I do not trust a few people working inside our own government. The vast majorities of our government employees follow the privacy rules, obey the law and are not agenda driven. That said, it would not take many well-placed government employees working together to corrupt the system. We should make it extremely hard for them to identify people that have opinions different from theirs.

Being photographed at a political rally while armed gives any number of law enforcement agencies probable cause to investigate you.

Ok, now that is out of the way let us see where this guy and I differ.

By David Sirota, 22 Aug, 2009, the Seattle Times
Those of us living in the Rocky Mountains are steeped in America’s famous gun culture and we therefore know well the binary debates surrounding the Second Amendment. Firearm enthusiasts — the vast majority of whom use weapons responsibly — believe the Constitution protects their right to bear arms. Gun-control advocates counter that the Constitution doesn’t give anyone the inalienable right to wield automatic weapons that can kill scores of people in seconds.
-Combat records show it takes millions of rounds to wound a man, killing scores in seconds is a dream not currently available to today’s marksmen.

This is the stultified freedom-versus-safety quarrel that seemed to forever define gun politics — that is, until anti-government activists started bringing firearms to public political meetings.
-Licensed gun owners have been carrying concealed weapons legally to political rallies for years. They are quietly approached by security, asked to show their permit, and normally not further harassed. This is another reason I do not think it is a good idea, the security does verify the right to carry but being professionals, they do watch the person with the weapon closely. Dependant of the size of the security staff it could limit their ability to watch for other threats and cause an added risk to the principal.

In early August, a protester came to a raucous Tennessee congressional forum packing heat. Days later, President Obama’s health care event in New Hampshire was marred by a protester posing for cameras with a pistol and sign reading, “It is time to water the tree of liberty” — a reference to a Thomas Jefferson quote promising violence.
-Cute use of a slang term (heat) in an attempt to show his personal degree of gun knowledge. It failed but it was cute. The attempt to bring in Thomas Jefferson as a man of violence also failed. The right responds to that name by remembering him as one of our heroic founding fathers. Bring his name up to support a left agenda will always fail.

And this past week, 12 armed men — including one with an assault rifle — not only showed off their firearms at Obama’s Arizona speech, but broadcast a YouTube video threatening to “forcefully resist people imposing their will on us through the strength of the majority.”
-I did not verify those numbers but I say so what? What was the problem? All ended peacefully, no organized group of counter protesters has yet to take on the armed men or pull any of their traditional disruption techniques. It seems they realize acting stupidly in public can get you hurt. I find it funny that the left fears an exposed gun but is ok with stunts pulled by groups like code pink, acorn and others.

These and other similar examples are accurately summarized with the same language federal law employs to describe domestic terrorism. Generating maximum media attention, the weapons-brandishing displays are “intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population.”
-Really? Now the author can read minds. Having never developed that particular ability I will resist the urge to determine their intent.

Yes, the gun has been transformed from a sport and self-defense device into a tool of mass bullying. Like the noose in the Jim Crow South, its symbolic message is clear: If you dare engage in the democratic process, you risk bodily harm.
-There we go back to the armed white racist redneck theme. Predictable but fails to resonate when most of us saw the recent article of a Black man carrying a rifle at a rally. I fail to see how his stance on maintaining an America under the existing constitution relates to Jim Crow.

With that implicit threat, the incessant arguments about gun ownership have been supplanted by a more significant debate over which should take precedence: the Constitution’s First or Second Amendment?
-Lets keep the constitution as written, how about that? My thought on this is clear-our founding fathers wanted all amendments to carry the same weight, the order written is not an order of precedence.

Based on America’s history, the Founders’ answer to that question clearly lies in the Bill of Rights’ deliberate sequencing.

The First Amendment ethos guarantees people — whatever their politics — a fundamental right to participate in their democracy without concern for physical retribution. It is the primary amendment because America was first and foremost created not as a gun-owners’ haven, but as a place to shelter citizens from oppression.
-Isn’t a governmental takeover of your life and limiting personal choice a form of oppression?

Over two centuries, we have taken this tradition seriously, enacting statutes reinforcing freedoms of speech, creating the secret ballot, and outlawing harassment at Election-Day polling stations. This is why, whether tracing roots to Colonial England, Nazi Germany or any other tyranny, so many Americans say they came here specifically looking for protection from political persecution.

While the First Amendment doesn’t ensure credibility or significance, it is supposed to guarantee freedom from fear — a freedom that is now under siege. Citing the Second Amendment and the increasingly maniacal rhetoric of conservative media firebrands, a small handful of violence-threatening protesters aims to make the rest of us — whether pro- or anti-health-reform — afraid to speak out.
-Name one that has attempted to stop you and then do the right thing and report them to law enforcement. Your perception that a man at a rally thousands of miles from you somehow personally threatens you shows you to be both delusional and paranoid.

And so we face a choice that has nothing to do with health care, gun ownership or any other hot-button issue that protesters of both parties are fighting over. It is a choice about democracy itself — a choice that comes down to the two axioms best articulated by, of all people, Mao Zedong.
-Finally, a valid point. This is not about “health care, gun ownership or any other hot-button issue” this is about our constitutional rights and our willingness to preserve the constitution as written. Under a democracy, the government works for the will of the people and not too control the will of the people.

One option is willful ignorance: We can pretend the ferment is unimportant, continue allowing the intimidation and ultimately usher in a dark future where “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
-I see we are back to the violent redneck theme. Until I see the tea party and anti government heath care protestors organize themselves into military style militias, write their own constitution and declare martial law, I am not worried. Standing up to limit government control proves them not to be dangerous but patriots.

Better, though, is simply making public political events firearm-free zones, just like schools and stadiums. That way forward honors our democratic ideals by declaring that politics may be war, but in America it is “war without bloodshed” — and without the threat of bloodshed.
-Men with guns scare you I got it. I understand, they are scary, smoky and make loud noises. You should organize a turn in your guns rally, start with obama supporters. Those people are scary.

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