Benjamin Wittes may be a gun-grabbing fool, but he’s at least an honest one.

“The Second Amendment is one of the clearest statements of right in the Constitution,” Benjamin Wittes, a guest scholar at the center-left Brookings Institution, acknowledged in a discussion Monday. “We’ve had decades of sort of intellectual gymnastics to try to make those words not mean what they say.”

Wittes, who said he has “no particular enthusiasm for the idea of a gun culture,” said that rather than try to limit gun ownership through regulation that potentially violates the Second Amendment, opponents of gun ownership should set their sights on repealing the amendment altogether.

“Rather than debating the meaning of the Second Amendment, I think the appropriate debate is whether we want a Second Amendment,” Wittes said.

Read the full article at CNS News.com.

What Mr. Wittes doesn’t understand is that modern society’s apparent ambivalence toward protecting themselves from our own government (the crux of the Second Amendment) is not universal. It is an East Coast delusion, that aside from California, has no solid backing west of the Appalachians.

The Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States was designed from the beginning to protect the rights of the individual from being overrun by the desires of the many. It wouldn’t matter if there was just one person in the USA who still believed in the right enumerated in the Second Amendment, that is enough – the amendment stands.

Of course, law and reality do not walk hand in hand. It all leads back to rights being null and void if they are not backed up with force. This again, is the primary reason that the Framers of the Constitution put down the Second Amendment, to ensure first of all that the government knew that the People had the tools needed to fight for their rights and to establish a societal foundation of personal arms, so that the Second Amendment and others could not be repealed later down the line. It entrenched the concept of personal ownership of weapons into the culture, putting the final say of power directly in the hands of the People, all to back up what the Bill of Rights was enumerating. Without this possession of force by the People, the Bill of Rights is inconsequential and the rule of law is trivially manipulated by the government. The Founding Fathers of this nation knew this and planned for it.

Is it any wonder that some would love to see this right repealed?

As the creeping fascism in this country grows in power, the Second Amendment is going to be put to the test. What those like Benjamin Wittes are counting on, is the American Idle, sitting back and crying about their guns being taken away: doing nothing of value, while popping open another beer and flipping through the channels, trying to figure out why things went the way they did.

What Wittes and the rest of the statist clan don’t want to think about, are people like me: who are more than willing to take up the arms they have against those who would take them from us. We’re a pretty serious bunch, many of us with military or police background, who know what we’re doing with these weapons, who understand small arms combat tactics and practice such. If a small percentage of unskilled and untrained Iraqi’s are keeping our military pinned down, using crappy AK-47’s and some improvised munitions: try to imagine what kind of force America’s enthusiastic firearms owners, with their highly refined rifles, quality sidearms and US military or para-military training can do…

It is the primary reason that the Soviet Union never attempted an invasion of the States. It is the primary reason that those who work to usurp rightful power from the People to the state, have had to move so very, very slowly and carefully to do so.

Waking up this groggy giant would be a very dangerous thing to do.

I have honestly been disappointed with America’s patriots. We’ve been sitting down and accepting things for far too long now. We’ve watched our rights being whittled away, bit by bit, from both of the major parties and have done nothing. Though Witte and others believe this to be a sign of indifference, I hope that it is instead a sign of lingering faith in the democratic process – a hope that things can be resolved without firing a shot.

However, that inaction will not last. At the rate things are going, soon we will know for certain whether indifference or lingering faith has held America’s patriots from action.

Note: All updates are in orange.

Brace yourselves, America – the next round of draconian guns laws are just around the corner. Actually, they’ve been sitting on Capital Hill since the Democratic party takeover of congress, but were stalled until now.

These bills, coupled with worse waiting in the wings, are going to flood the legislature after today’s horrible shooting in Virginia – the largest mass shooting in US history. Even if the Bush administration doesn’t support the gun control bills coming, look for them to expand their police state accordingly. Parties irrelevant, government lusts for power and control, and incidents like this hands it to them on a silver platter.

Thirty one Thirty two Thirty three people, including the shooter, are confirmed dead, with twenty twenty six more injured, from the incident on Virginia Tech’s campus. Apparently, this lone shooter, armed with a .22 and a 9mm pistol, strolled without words through a dorm and then a class building, shooting apparently selected targets; at least to a degree. Full story here.

I work at the University of Utah, which imposed an un-Constitutional firearm rule that bans those with valid carry permits from carrying on campus, which the courts have been battling over ever since. One of the primary concerns held by the University President and others here who are incapable of understanding not only the Second Amendment of the Constitution, but common sense; is that if those who go about the task of obtaining carry permits and passing background checks are allowed to carry, it will make people somehow unsafe to be around them. Funny, Virginia tech had equivalent rules and it did nothing to help out when this illegally carrying and criminally acting shooter took to the campus grounds. On the other hand, if one of those living in the afflicted dorm or in the classrooms had been legally carrying, things might have worked out differently.

The basic premise of gun control is flawed: it is the belief that by making a rule, you will prevent crime. If this was the case, we could just outlaw murder and have nothing to worry about. The fact of the matter is, criminals don’t obey the law, any law – which is why we call them criminals. They don’t care what rules you put in place, what punishments they might suffer should they live through their actions; they are only concerned with carrying out their goals, whatever they may be. Rules prevent nothing. Expecting those of nefarious intent to abide by the rules, is plainly stupid. Laws exist to outline society’s punishments for transgression, they cannot prevent any criminal activity in and of themselves. They are structure to provide for government imposed punishment for criminal events after they occur.

There is but one proper reaction to the criminal use of force, lawful use of force in return, when and where it happens. This is why the police carry firearms and not feather dusters. The People have the same rights that police officers do, to preserve their own lives in the face of attack. Certainly the police have every justification to carry on the job, as they are setting themselves up to be possible targets by putting on a badge. That same badge also weighs in for the People, as criminals take considerable caution not to commit crimes when the police are around. Conversely, that means it’s likely that when something bad happens, the police are not going to be there to protect the public. If the police were everywhere, we’d be living in a certified police state.

What choice do we have then, but to protect ourselves? No discussion can be made over the duty of the protection of one’s life, without taking into consideration the obligations of the intended victim. The one and only person who has any duty or obligation to protect that person, is themselves. No one else has the duty to protect them, not even the police. The courts have unanimously ruled that the police have no obligation to protect anyone in particular. Read that sentence a couple of times to yourself and then reflect on how you feel about lawful carry of firearms for self protection.

What incidents like this show is not that we haven’t gone far enough to control firearms, but that we’ve gone too far. We’ve disabled the innocent from protecting themselves, while enabling the criminals to commit their evil intent without obstruction.