Right to Keep and Bear Arms is a DKos group of second amendment supporters who also have progressive and liberal values. We don't think that being a liberal means one has to be anti-gun. Some of us are extreme in our second amendment views (no licensing, no restrictions on small arms) and some of us are more moderate (licensing, restrictions on small arms.) Moderate or extreme, we hold one common belief: more gun control equals lost elections. We don't want a repeat of 1994. We are an inclusive group: if you see the Second Amendment as safeguarding our right to keep and bear arms individually, then come join us in our conversation. If you are against the right to keep and bear arms, come join our conversation. We look forward to seeing you, as long as you engage in a civil discussion.
Thomas Jefferson described
the need to have the people's rights codified thus:
"[A] bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse."
--- Thomas Jefferson December 20, 1787
That quote comes from an American Civil Liberties Union site.
In 1787 the Constitution of the United States of America, in its original form, lacked such a list of prohibitions of government action against individuals. For the first 102 years of its existence, the Bill of Rights -- the common name for the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution -- protected individuals against the federal government's propensity to overreach.
The Bill of Rights arose from opposition to potential oppression.
Then a court reporter's account of a Supreme Court case from California, as recorded by a clerk either careless or cunning, extended those rights to corporations. The results of that -- including the depredations wrought on American citizens by those corporations and their political minions ever since -- are worthy of more than one other diary. But this diary is about the Bill of Rights, which protects citizens: ordinary Americans, born in the USA.
But the protections sometimes fail.
In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks, we've seen these protections weakened through legislation like the USA PATRIOT ACTS and FISA. We've all seen what the War on Terror has wrought in our nation since 2001. Let us not forget the egregious failures to protect our citizens arising from the War on Drugs as well as the War on Terror.
One such failure is the story of Esequiel Hernandez, Jr. He'd just turned 18, still hadn't finished high school, and had gone out into the pasture with his family's goats after school on a May afternoon in 1997 when a USMC sniper team assigned to drug interdiction along the Rio Grande encountered him.
According to the team leader's report, Hernandez fired the rifle he carried to protect the family herd in the direction of the team; subsequently the team stalked him for 40 minutes before Corporal Banuelos shot Hernandez, who bled to death before help arrived. Even Texas Congressman Lamar Smith couldn't get all the answers the boy's family wanted.
Another such failure occurred all the way across Texas, in the Panhandle community of Tulia, when a rogue investigator, his work funded by special anti-drug trafficking contracts, obtained fraudulent warrants to arrest 46 persons. Forty were black; the other six were either Latinos or dating blacks.
These incidents occurred during the Clinton administration -- and the Federal department of justice chose not to prosecute the men who stalked and shot Hernandez -- a Marine sniper team working in full field concealment, carrying fully automatic military-issue weapons and wearing highly-effective camouflage called ghillie suits, their operations a secret from the Texas communities in and around their operations area. To his credit, President Clinton shut down the military's drug-interdiction operations after the Hernandez shooting;
the DoJ also tightened the rules for use of its anti-drug grant moneys after the Tulia incident.
But then, in 2006 the Bush administration sent armed troops back to the US Border. By 2009 Arizona had countless "Border Activists" like Shawna Forde "protecting" the state.
A jury in Pima County, Ariz., deliberated for four hours over two days before deciding that Shawna Forde, 43, should pay the ultimate penalty, the Arizona Daily Star reported. She joins two other women on Arizona's death row.
Forde was convicted Feb. 14 of first-degree murder in the May 30, 2009, deaths of Raul "Junior" Flores, 29, and his daughter, Brisenia Flores, 9. She was also found guilty of attempted murder in the shooting of Gina Gonzalez, Flores' wife and Brisenia's mother.
Prosecutors said Forde decided to target the house in Arivaca, Ariz., because she believed Flores was a drug smuggler and would have cash in the house. She wanted money to fund her border protection group, Minutemen American Defense, prosecutors said.
If Brisenia's mother hadn't been able to shoot one of the assailants they might never have been caught.They broke into the house in the dark, were dressed to conceal their identities, and fled before the police arrived despite a call to 9-1-1. Brisenia's mother Gina's 9-1-1 call reveals the intruders shot her too. It takes almost 20 minutes for law enforcement to reach the woman on the phone, whose husband and daughter -- shot so she couldn't testify against her father's murderer -- are dying in their own home.
American citizens Esequiel Hernandez and Brisenia Flores -- just like Christina Taylor-Green, killed in January this year in Tucson -- had their futures cut short. These were not terrorists, criminals, or "illegals" "invading" the United States. Was Esequiel Hernandez threatening a full-concealment USMC Sniper Team working drug interdiction? Was Brisenia Flores a threat to Shawna Forde and her avariciousness? To whom was Christina Taylor-Green a threat?
How fragile are our inalienable rights?
Judging by what happened in Redford in 1997 and in Arivaca in 2009, the right to life for an American citizen who's already been born resembles crystal for its fragility. "We hold these truths to be self-evident" ... except when it's more convenient or more profitable not to do so.
What will you do to defend your rights to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness?
I vote. I write and call and visit my Congressional representative; I assemble with my fellow citizens, and I take very seriously not just my rights to freedom from a religion ordained for me by the state or Federal government, to speak my mind and vote my conscience, to travel in my own country without being groped by government contractors, to refrain from testifying in court if it tends to incriminate me, to have counsel or to remain silent if arrested, to a speedy trial by a jury of my peers if indicted, but also my right to keep and bear arms: the others make my life better. The Second Amendment protects my life directly against the unscrupulous and the criminal.