There Will Be No Reprieve

First, to those who wrote to ask: Yes, I will produce an exegesis of Natural Law in the not too distant future. It's a topic of enormous importance, and very few people have given it any thought at all. The "professional philosophers" are all asleep at the wheel, and theologians tend not to be consistent logicians, so the job (as usual) has fallen to me. Rest assured, I'll do it properly.

But not today.

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Three items that appeared in my morning news sweep suggest that the pressure on Americans to disarm will not relent:

• Florida Sheriff: Report Neighbors Who Don't Like Government
• ERIC HOLDER TO KANSAS: We Will Ignore the Bill of Rights and State Laws to Enforce Federal Gun Grabs
• Dingy Harry’s Verbal Diarrhea Continues to Appall – Now He’s Calling Tea Partiers The Real Anarchists

Please read those three articles in their entirety. They presage a new front in the Left's war on private armament: a combination of rationales and approaches, intended to delegitimize opposition as dangerously psychotic, illegal under (unConstitutional) federal law, and inherently anti-government. No one of those three contentions stretches quite...far...enough to allow the Obamunists to cross the chasm of Second Amendment rights and reach their goal of a disarmed and helpless populace. The combination, however, might just bridge the gulf.

Mind you, the bridge won't be composed of Constitutionally solid members. The Left is hoping to induce us to fear one another more than we fear an overweening, unbounded State. Leftist strategists are aware that they can't get 100% of us to cower behind locked doors, terrified of our neighbors' rifles and shotguns. But they don't need unanimity, or even a majority; a substantial, sufficiently vocal minority, animated by something like Sandy Hook, that holds together long enough to ram through some enabling legislation, would serve their purposes adequately.

The Obamunists' divide-to-rule uber-strategy will be employed to its fullest:

• Whites will be persuaded to fear armed Negroes, Hispanics, and other minorities;
• Minorities will be persuaded to fear armed whites;
• Members of "mainstream" religions will be persuaded to fear "cults;"
• Members of "cults" will be persuaded to fear everyone else;
• Women will be persuaded that they cannot trust armed men;
• Men will be persuaded that they cannot trust women, armed or otherwise;
• Liberals will be persuaded that conservatives are about to lock, load, and "purge" them;
• Conservatives will be persuaded (perhaps accurately) that the hour has come to take back America by force of arms.

Will it work? Unclear. But the Left will definitely strain to its utmost to inculcate us with as much fear of one another as it can evoke. Programs such as the one in Palm Beach will become commonplace. Low motives other than fear will play their part.

If significant federal or state anti-gun legislation should be passed and signed, we might yet see the ultimate anti-Second Amendment obscenity:

• The confiscation of Smith's firearms at a local police force's sole discretion,
• On the affirmation of Jones, who hates Smith, that Smith made a remark about hating his wife, or Jones, or another neighbor, or the government,
• And a bounty paid to Jones per firearm thus confiscated.

Let that possibility sink in for a moment while I fetch more coffee.

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A program designed to induce and exploit fear isn't necessarily defeasible by any counter-program. Smith could strive with all his might to persuade Jones that Jones has nothing to fear from him, entirely without result, for Jones could always say to himself, "That's what he wants me to believe." Similarly, a broad effort to expose the motives behind a fear campaign would only be effective if Americans could be induced to fear the State more than they fear one another: given the rising proportion of the populace that literally lives on State handouts, a chancy matter at best.

In this as in so many other things, it will pay to be proactive:

• Be on the best possible terms with your family members and neighbors;
• Be candid about what firearms you own and why you own them;
• Try to involve those around you in the shooting sports, so they'll become comfortable being around weapons;
• When the time is right, talk about the importance of an armed populace, and the terrors that have been visited upon those who foolishly decided to trust in the benevolence of the State.

We are under siege by forces determined to disarm us.
Their recent setbacks have only redoubled their determination to prevail.
Should they succeed, their success will be irreversible without widespread bloodshed.

There will be no reprieve.