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Posts Tagged ‘Brookhiser’
November 1st, 2011 at 4:14 pm
Madison on Guns

I loved Tim’s column the other day on rising support for the individual right to bear arms.

It just so happened that right before I read it, as my computer was stuck in an “update,” I was reading Richard Brookhiser’s new biography of James Madison while I waited for my ‘puter. Within a page of where I began that hour’s reading, I came across this from Brookhiser: “In Federalist # 46, [Madison] had even warned that Americans could resist an oppressive government thanks to ‘the advantage of being armed, which [they] possess over the people of almost every other nation’.”

Yes, being armed is an individual right, and yes it is both for personal protection AND for the radical eventuality, which we hope never to need, of resisting an oppressive government.

And if anybody at the Obama Department of Justice wants to Shanghai me for exercising my First Amendment rights about the meaning of the Second Amendment, and to accuse me (falsely) of inciting insurrection… well, bring it on, baby, bring it on. For the record, I am inciting nothing, but merely explaining that the Second Amendment’s origins did indeed include the notion of protection against government. It’s a purely objective analysis. And it’s a lot safer to write about guns this way than it is to deliberately seed the realm of drug lords with firearms, which is what Eric Holder’s minions appear to have done. My freedom of speech is far saner and safer than their idiocy of action.