Quiz: What Would Induce You To Rebel?

Courtesy of Shot In the Dark comes the following, maximally incisive question:

Joe Doakes of Como Park emails:

Question: Can you conceive of any set of circumstances under which you would take up arms against your own government?

Your answer determines your stance on the Second Amendment.

If you answer “Yes,” then logically you should insist on being able to possess weapons at least as good as the police and military will be using to suppress your rebellion, including ugly rifles and standard-capacity magazines, else your resistance is doomed before it begins and you might as well change your answer to “No.”

Because if you answer “No” – if you would never rebel against your own government but instead are willing to put up with any intrusion, any oppression, confiscation of property and beatings and rape rooms and even death squads – then you have no need of the Second Amendment. Nor of the First, Third, Fourth, Fifth . . . you’re a willing slave to whomever holds power at the moment, no different from the lowest peon in any Third World Country.

May 29th is Patrick Henry’s birthday. How many Americans today would echo his most famous line? Or even recall what it was?

Indeed.

In what follows, site owner Mitch makes the following statement:

Liberals believe people are fundamentally good.

There I must disagree. If we go by their behavior, liberals believe that people are fundamentally either stupid or evil -- except for liberals. Which is why:

• All political power must rest in the hands of liberals;
• Private persons must be disarmed, lest they think to resist the liberal program;
• The education, journalism, and entertainment industries must be 100% staffed, programmed, and edited by liberals;
• Dissent from the liberal dispensation must be as severely punished as conditions will permit -- ideally, with the full and merciless weight of the law.

After all, if people were fundamentally good, government would not be necessary. As outre as the claim might seem to those who know a few liberals personally, even a liberal would have enough working brain cells to realize that. So it's the moral duty of the certifiably good people -- i.e.., the liberals -- to amass all political power and force the rest of us to behave according to their prescriptions and proscriptions.

And therein lies liberals' true objection to the right to keep and bear arms. No one likes to be ordered around, especially not by self-important vessels of superior wisdom and virtue. Such creatures make excellent targets, albeit lousy eating.

The sole point of importance yet to be resolved is how liberals can be so stupid as to think themselves smarter and more virtuous than everyone else past and present, but smart enough to realize that they need the coercive power of an unopposable State to enforce their wills upon us stupid and evil sorts. However, it's perfectly clear that We the Stupid or Evil had better hold onto our guns for dear life...because when it all comes to a head, "dear life" is what will hang in the balance.