I completely agree. I am a strong supporter of the Second Amendment, which I believe was placed in the Constitution to secure our liberty as well as to
enable individuals to protect themselves and their families from violence. It is my opinion that the liberal left is using events like Newtown and
purposely ignoring the numerous situations where individuals have used their legal firearms to protect themselves from violence (especially situations
where the defender could not have physically resisted their much larger, stronger assailant any other way) in order to advance their agenda of
general disarmament. Personally, I do not believe that this agenda has anything to do with stopping crime. I sincerely believe that the objective
is to give the government a "monopoly on the use of force", which the left believes is necessary to advance the rest of their radical agenda. Mao Tse
Tung, the psychopathic leftist Chinese dictator who slaughtered tens of millions of his own citizens, once said that power grows out of the barrel
of a gun. Well, so does freedom.
Remember, the social contract theory of government upon which ours was established maintains that legitimate government exists only as long as it
honors its side of an implied contract with the governed. The government's side of the bargain is to respect certain inalienable rights which were
endowed by our creator. Thus, a social contract theory maintains that our liberties existed prior to the creation of any government, so the government
did not create or grant the rights we enjoy. Rather, government must respect those pre-existing rights in order to retain its legitimacy as such.
The Bill of Rights, when viewed through this lens, is not a document that gives us our rights (we already had them), but it is rather the document
that legitimizes our government. When the government ignores our rights as described but not created by that document, it loses its legitimacy and
should be undone. Never forget that without the Bill of Rights several states would have never ratified the Constitution that CREATED the Federal
Government, and so that institution would never have been established on this continent without that language.
Our founding fathers recognized that as a practical matter government could not be counted on to honor individual rights. Government neither created
nor granted our rights (for then they would not be rights but mere privileges - such as the "privilege" rather than the right to life itself),
and so the people would always be left with the responsibility of securing them for themselves. Thus, the right of the people to keep and bear arms
was not to be abridged in any way. I would invite you to read the Second Amendment very carefully. In the beautiful, succinct language of the
eighteenth century it states not only that you have this right but why you have it.
Incidentally, while I agree that we need to put more emphasis on mental health issues, I would also urge caution in this area as well. Remember
that there are legal mechanisms that allow the state to deprive a person deemed mentally incompetent of many of their rights without a trial. The
psychiatric community in this country recognizes more than 10,000 different mental health conditions that can be regarded as impairments, and many of
these rely on very subjective evaluations by the attending psychiatrist or psychologist. That is why the insurance community is very reluctant to
provide mental health coverage through their policies (it is a very broad and open-ended obligation since almost anyone could be diagnosed with a
mental health condition at any time and the diagnosis is nothing more than the OPINION of the physician who is being paid for the treatment). The
ambiguity of mental health definitions and diagnoses could be deployed by the state to deprive you of your rights as well. In fact, in communist
countries the state often simply decided that its enemies were "insane" and required "reeducation" when they disagreed with the official view on world
affairs. The emergence of "political correctness" in daily speech in this country is a strong indicator that our left would try to define their
ideological opponents as clinically mentally incompetent if they could do so. The AMA already has a very leftist official opinion on guns and the
Obama administration wants to inlcude your gun ownership status in your "medical" records. So, be careful with that as well.
Thank you for your concern about this matter. I recommend that you contact Senators Rockefeller and Manchin and Congressman Rahall about this very
important matter. The legislation you are concerned about is being discussed at the Federal rather than the State level and those men are
members of a political party whose national platform is strongly antagonistic to your Second Amendment rights. It is very important that
they be constantly reminded about the sincere sentiments of those they represent in order to ensure that they do not fall under the influence of
their party's leadership and ultimately betray their own constituents on this very important matter.
Ray Canterbury
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Originally Posted by RookWV
