This, we are often told, is supposedly the entire purpose of the Second Amendment: To Fight Government Tyranny™ with guns.
According to Judge Andrew Napolitano, the Second Amendment “protects the right to shoot tyrants.” Senate candidate Sharron Angle said that people should, and might, resort to “Second Amendment remedies” if they didn’t like what Congress was doing. Conservative Florida radio host Joyce Kaufman, Chief of Staff to congressional candidate Allen West, said that if people don’t like the outcome of an election, i.e., “If ballots don’t work,” then “bullets will.”
You can see where this is going. And you know there’s a lot more where that came from. (And if you haven’t yet, please turn your irony-meter on.)
Apparently, an American decided today that either Rep. Steve Scalise is a tyrant, that congressional Republicans are tyrants, that Congress as a whole are tyrants, or that all federal officials are tyrants; he didn’t like what Congress was doing (or felt it had “become tyrannical”), he didn’t like the outcome of the last federal election, so he merely exercised his Second Amendment Right to Bear Arms against a Tyrannical Government.
Right?
If the “right to shoot tyrants,” to use “Second Amendment remedies” against Congress, and the idea that “bullets will” “work” where “ballots” don’t, doesn’t mean this, then what does it mean? If this isn’t a “Second Amendment remedy,” what is?
Or maybe the whole “right to shoot tyrants” / ”Second Amendment remedies” thing is, and has always been, pure, unadulterated, well-rehearsed, and well-funded, bullshit.
Of course, anyone reading Daily Kos knows that already. And no one reading Daily Kos expects the Napolitanos, Angles and Kaufmans of the world to reconcile their words about the Second Amendment Right to Bear Arms Against a Tyrannical Government with what happened today, for obvious reasons. I expect there will be a lot of invocation of those words, and many, many others, over the next several days as each “side” bunkers down with its respective spin.
And as noted above, those who have insisted over the years that the Second Amendment grants and protects (and was intended to grant and protect) an absolute and non-infringeable right to take up arms against a tyrannical government must be asked, and must answer: If what happened today is not what it means to take up arms against a tyrannical government, then what is? If this is not precisely what you’ve been insisting that you and all the other Responsible Law-Abiding Gun Owners™ have an absolute right to do, then what is? If you deplore what the shooter has done, that’s commendable, but how do you reconcile that with the absolute non-infringeable right to take up arms against a tyrannical government that you’ve been vehemently championing and protecting like it was your child?
Just in case anyone’s irony-meter is malfunctioning, and in case it’s not already clear, I am in no way suggesting that I believe, agree with or subscribe to the notion that James Hodgkinson [if he is indeed the shooter] had any right to shoot anyone, irrespective of why, let alone to “take up arms against a tyrannical government.” I am not endorsing, celebrating, expressing approval of, pleasure at, or satisfaction with, what Hodgkinson did, no matter how much my GOP-aligned friends may wish that I was.
Nor am I suggesting that those who have insisted that such a right exists and was the primary purpose of the Second Amendment are in any way responsible for what Hodgkinson did. I don’t even know if that was his real motive. And I’m not going to start a debate about gun control, which in this context is really beside the point. All I’m saying is that I would like to hear and read some reconciliation of the purported absolute right to take up arms against a tyrannical government with any other reaction to today’s events. If this was not that, then what is?
In an odd way, I think it would be a shame if Hodgkinson is, in fact, dead, as President Trump has stated but no one has confirmed yet. I might have liked to see him invoke the Second Amendment as a defense at his trial, if only to have it shot down (no pun intended) definitively and finally, once and for all.
Of course, no shooter of a public official that actually went to trial has, to my knowledge, ever invoked the Second Amendment as a defense. I wonder why...