Quote:The world is full of people with grievances. Whether it's militia in Montana, or fundamentalist Muslims in the Middle East, or this nut in Dallas, it seems like more and more people have powerful grievances and are willing to take out weapons and do something illegal, immoral, and stupid.
To me, the question is, if people want to preserve the 2nd Amendment, and the 1st Amendment, how do we stop this without heavy surveillance of everyone? It seems like we're going to have to make a choice between the 1st Amendment, the 2nd Amendment and the 4th Amendment. If everyone has a right to own guns, and everyone has the right to free speech, then we will have to do away with the 4th Amendment and closely watch everyone all the time. Because the 2nd Amendment gives everyone the ability to kill a lot of people before the police can react to it, and the 1st Amendment gives everyone the right to incite these crazy people.
Really, bottom line, the 1st Amendment says you can say whatever you want, the 2nd Amendment says you can own guns, and the 4th Amendment protects you from warrantless searches, seizures, and wiretapping. So the BIG question is, can the Constitution survive with all these weapons and crazy people? It seems like it's going to be very difficult if not impossible to deal with this stuff and still adhere to the Constitution.
Humans aren't like this. We've been turned into this, slowly conditioned over the course of decades to go from a people capable of intelligent discourse to one that believes violence is the only way to deal with an uncomfortable situation, resolve your concerns or get your point across. It's going to take a long time to fix this, but the first step is to chase the demagogues who've been taking us down this path, and the ones who currently fan the flames for personal gain, away from positions of power. The oligarchy of fear created by political dynasties like the Clinton and Bush families and perpetuated by reality TV stars like Trump and agenda-driven manipulators in disguise like Obama is what has you thinking that the First, Second, Fourth and Fifth Amendments can't coexist, and there's where your logic is flawed deeply:
they coexisted for centuries. Everything over the last 50 years, from the Cold War to the Civil Rights movement, the war on drugs, the war on terror, 9/11, Boston, Paris, Dallas, even Supreme Court decisions on abortion, gay marriage, they're all somewhere between false flags designed to drive us apart and convenient coincidences capitalized upon by those perpetuating their power.
How? Because the "news" media is complicit. They're accessories to it, knowingly or not, when they inject political commentary into the reporting that should just be presentation of the facts. You could go back to the days of William Randolph Hearst for that. Yellow journalism of the type we see today directly manipulated the US into the Spanish-American War. "Safety" videos in the 1950's about how to protect yourself from an atomic bomb detonation were thinly-veiled propaganda designed to promote xenophobia. The war on drugs involved the creation and distribution of crack throughout African-American communities to increase crime in those areas and drive a wedge between "them" and "us". The carefully crafted reaction to, possibly the carrying out of, the 9/11 attacks just to make sure Americans remembered that Islam is a "religion of war and hate". All the politicians of today are doing is capitalizing on the fever pitch and bringing things to a head so that the very few at the very top can get what they've been after for decades: martial law, suspension of the Constitution in the interest of "national security", a police state and, most importantly, total and unchallenged control.
It's on us to stop them. That's what the right to vote is all about. How do you influence people to vote these monsters out of office? The First Amendment. What protects those utilizing the First Amendment from being harassed out of existence? The Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth. What recourse do we have if a tyrant strips us of those rights? The Second Amendment. It all goes together. By driving us apart, they take away our willingness to work together and keep them from gaining total control in a democratic fashion. By teaching us to fear one another, they increase our willingness to surrender the Fourth Amendment and prompt people to feel the need to be armed to protect themselves from each other. By taking away the Fourth Amendment, they're free to search anyone, anytime, any place, for any reason. If they get their hands on the Second Amendment, they'll be able to systematically disarm us by forced searches on the street and forced entry into our homes. Without arms, instituting martial law by force would be as easy as child's play.
We can't lose guns. The First Amendment isn't what holds the Constitution together. It's the Second. I see that now; I finally get it. Everything else in the Constitution is a bunch of words, written under the assumption that we'd all have enough sense to remember what they mean. We don't. The Second Amendment is the only true balance that the Constitution gives us to protect ourselves from tyranny. I'm not advocating violence against police, government, fellow humans, any of that. I think guns are a terrible necessity, but they are a necessity. If the Second Amendment is taken away, what's to stop a true dictator from seizing power and taking everything else?