The Patriot Post® · Safer Streets 2011: There's No Such Thing as Common Sense Reform of Gun Laws

President Obama has spoken over the weekend in a call for reform of gun laws.

I concur with the President.

For years, I have called for the repeal of all gun laws. It is about time. Let us reason together. Just understand that our idea of reform – 90 million adult gun owners – is the repeal of gun laws, not more gun laws.

There is no such thing as a sensible gun law. In this country, long before President Obama, there never was a sensible gun law. There has always been force and abuse of due process, but no sensible gun law. The short essay is this: Our governments here have no legal authority to make any gun laws whatsoever. How is that possible? They might as well claim the authority to own another human being in the name of safety. These are two rights which are absolute under our system. Liberals think there is no such thing as an absolute right. These are two of them.

The short version is that the second amendment is the lethal force which backs our sovereignty over our officials. We have this peacefully. Because we are the Sovereign and the officials are executives hired as any executives are, they may not make laws which challenge that lethal force in any manner no matter what they claim. Any infringement whatsoever is and always has been a challenge to the force which backs our authority over them, and is therefore a challenge to our sovereignty over them.

All it has done is plumbed the depths of tolerance of the electorate for surrender and has paved the way for bigger proposals and bigger fundings of them. You can see how our idea of reform is in the form of paths back to smaller government. The safe streets will come as an affirmation of a healthy self-rule and not likely before. In this manner, the health of the second amendment is the primary indicator of the overall health of the nation.

The founding fathers knew that our sovereignty would be challenged more by our very own public servants than by any other entity on the earth, so they wrote words of art to make the second amendment impervious to ordinary due process and sway.

The beauty of this truth is that many, many public servants agree with us and understand it the way the Sovereign understand it. Our government is not against us; only a bundle of people are against our bundle of rights, and a small bundle of rights is really all we need to be free. On that, we need to repeal a lot of other laws and fundings, too.

Anybody can call for reform; I’ve been calling for reform in the repeal of gun laws. But many executives will understand that they already have no authority to act, really. Recent court wins for liberty and second amendment affirmations are showing that trend of awakening laymen and officials alike. Some jurisdictions do not disagree with these rulings and dropped their gun laws. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s December, 2010 commutation of a heavy-handed sentence of Brian Aitken is a much better example of common sense and reform. Good one, Governor.

Gun control has never worked for safer streets; it short-circuits safe streets by creating a void in a community’s ability to meet and manage violence in the absence of police.

Courts continue to find that police have no duty to protect individuals from the criminal acts of others. My favorites are Lynch v. NC DOJ and Castle Rock V. Gonzales.

States which have no gun registration have simply stated out loud that they certainly do not need to know where the guns are after all, and registration has not shown that is has solved crimes. Why register guns if it doesn’t help anything? Some states say they don’t need it.

Microstamping is a sole-source concept which also will not likely solve a crime, since it does not identify the shooter, nor the time, nor the place, especially. And did I mention that the technology is not yet perfected? Since it is a valuable technology, no doubt officials will demand it for itself.

But, all of these and 20,000 other gun laws will never touch a single criminal. They do not prevent a single thing nearly as well as the armed citizen does and always has. Where the armed citizen is, so is the law of the community. Gun owners are the law and order people. Gun control is not the law of keeping the peace, it takes the law out of a community and leaves a void it wants to fill itself.

Everybody wants to secure weapons from the psychopaths, to be sure, but this is not going to happen. They always manage to get them no matter what law you write for the law abiding. Murderers generally break a dozen other laws anyway on their way to kill. In this fundamental fact, every single case of a criminal shooting gives testimony to the failure of political gun control. It has proven that there is no such thing as a sensible gun law. Most thugs are already prohibited persons, and the thousands of gun crimes in America means thousands of gun control’s failures. [If you show 3,500 criminal shootings this month, you are showing that you have 3,500 gun control failures. You also have 3,500 interferences with the community’s first line of defense.] Every single criminal shooting cited to sway people against the concept of the armed citizen as an asset actually cites another failure of gun laws and the concept of a disarmed community put at-risk as preferred politically over safer streets.

The second amendment keeps smaller government and gun control grows government. The armed citizen – who is the first line of defense at the scene of a crime against them – does by presence and citizen authority what government can never do by being absent, and becomes a safeguard of the entire country. It does this by having such a face-to-face handle on meeting aggression that no big government can have any credibility in promising to do the job better. This is how the second amendment peaceably fights tyranny. It makes official substitutions look silly and redundant.

Kicking people into more gun control isn’t going to give officials more credibility. The repeal of gun laws will, though. If and only if, of course, they are serious-minded about smaller government.

The only reform of gun laws is the repeal of all gun laws.

John Longenecker is publisher of the Safer Streets Newsletter and Commentary, showing that the second amendment is a mainstream value for smaller government.