Rod Blagojevich (D)

[Urbane Guerrilla]

A damning quote from Janet Reno, demonstrating why the NRA-ILA didn't like her at all:

"Nobody should be owning a gun which does not have a sporting purpose."

(I shouldn't have any trouble coming up with a date and place for this, which was a result of mere minutes on the 'Net.)

This is how, if you successfully sweep up all the rifles with automatic transmissions, as it were, you sharply cut the citizenry's physical ability to tell the government to close up shop and go the hell home because its legitimacy is at an end. (The Clinton Administration and its First Lady were really into that sharp cutting away!) Cut that ability far enough and you no longer have a Republic, which is all about the broadest distribution of power. You have, instead, a replay of Nazi Germany. What, once wasn't enough? Learn from history. The power of life and death is about as powerful as power gets, by a force like natural law, not so?

Do you not keep a republic by checks and balances on the government as well as within it? This checking and balancing of the government as a whole is an essential every conservative knows about and readily acknowledges, and it remains functional regardless of anything that may go on within the government. We conservatives don't trust government to stay good all the time -- history is positively rife with examples of republics gone bad, and all of these controlled guns, too. There are also numerous examples of monarchies, not very republican at all, having quite the liberal society in encouraging gun possession among the citizenry. There are shades of class differences in every national example of this in Europe, but the classical liberal tenet that a limited monarchy greatly improves over an absolutist one may be borne out by the contrasting governmental philosophies of England and France -- Magna Carta versus "L'état, c'est moi." Seek not to allow the government say in every aspect of your life, says the conservative. Thus you retain the necessary power to do something about a government gone rotten.

Liberals always pooh-pooh this -- until they go to the camps and get extinguished. Where are their pooh-poohs then? The great government crime is the crime of genocide -- and its targets NEVER see genocide coming, for it is invariably an ambush. They have no clue at all what they should be concerned about, and this is what makes them die in a hecatomb.

But an armed electorate doesn't get herded into the ovens so cheaply. And that is a thing of virtue. A good Jew, I think, would be one who practices that virtue, along with those other 168 Talmudic ones.

If you're going to be skeptical about the government, your skepticism had better have teeth, should it not? No government responds properly to mental masturbation, and no guns for you means no attention paid to you. Unresponsiveness to the citizen and his proper rights is the very definition of a tyranny.

I contend the well-armed electorate is the nongovernmental reason it can't happen here. Confining the killing tools to the government only is the reason the genocides happened elsewhere. Have checks and balances independent of the government, and the libertarian says have all things independent of the government. In this the libertarian so much resembles the average conservative that it is clear libertarianism is fundamentally a conservative philosophy.