Dang - I was hoping he wouldn't go there.....

bailey bud wrote: I was really hoping he wouldn't go there.

He has to go there, he's getting ready to announce his bid to hold the office for a second term, not that he has really stopped campaigning since he announced his candidacy in February of 2007 mind you. Gun control advocates are unwilling to accept that the protection of liberty held in the hands of the populace is going to have an accompanying price of innocent life being laid at the roots of the tree of liberty to provide it nourishment. They believe that more government is always the answer to any problem and that the purpose of law is prevention of transgression, not punishment for transgression when the latter is clearly the purpose.

The problem, here again, is that the federal government is trying to address a problem that the sovereign state was intended to address. The federal government is wanting to usurp the power of the state and have it consolidated into its own powers yet again. What the Constitution clearly states is that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be within the realm of the powers of the federal government to decide or legislate. The reason for this is because the people may have need of those arms at some point to remove the federal government and the security of the sovereignty of the states that have joined the union rests in their citizens being able to resist an overgrown, overzealous, tyrannical and despotic federal government with the arms its citizens hold just as the arms the citizens held were once used to gain independence from another such government.

Just because the states haven't resorted to arms since 1860 doesn't mean that they won't ever need to do so again. The lack of a Gaddafi as a federal executive thus far doesn't preclude the rise of one in the future, and the 2nd Amendment is there so that the balance of power is supposed to be weighted in our favor, not the federal government's, if it ever does. The 2nd Amendment isn't about duck hunters, or elk hunters, or even the protection of one's home and property - it's about the individual liberty of the person and the sovereignty of the states. That is what it protects, that is its sole purpose. It is there so that a state or a group of people can take up arms against the federal government if it is felt the need to do so has arisen. If that state or group of people are wrong, then others, along with the federal government, will resist them with their own arms. If others feel their actions to be the correct one, they will raise their own arms in support of them to defeat the federal forces.

I don't know how the amendment could me more clear. The right to keep and bear arms was instituted to protect the free State of Colorado and its citizens from the United States of America and prevent Colorado and its citizens from being subjected to the tyranny of the United States of America. That is why the government of the United States of America was prohibited from infringing upon the right of the citizens of Colorado to keep and bear arms. The other free states that belong to the union have no more say over who can or cannot keep and bear arms in Colorado than the state of France has over those in Germany. Again, this is not a power of the federal government, it is a power of the sovereign state government. The federal government has specifically been excluded from having any power of decision in the matter by the Constitution because the security of Colorado rests in the right of its people to keep and bear arms to protect their liberty and freedom from being taken from them by force of arms. Whether the force that threaten Colorado's security come from Mexico, Canada, Wyoming, California or the federal government, its security to defend itself from the force seeking to take away its sovereignty lies in the citizens, the militia of the state, having the arms to defend it.

I thought this was rich.....

And in the attack's turbulent wake, Americans by and large rightly refrained from finger-pointing, assigning blame or playing politics with other people's pain.

We sure didn't get that impression on this forum.