Shameful

Shameful---violating what is considered to be just, moral, or decent; offensive

Webster’s

The president is not happy. He is petulant and pouting. He’s been waiting a long time, most of his adult life, to put an end to the individual citizen’s right to own firearms in America. Every chance he’s had since he entered the crooked world of politics in the state of Illinois, and during his brief time in the US Senate, he has voted to erode this right. The president may have been a Constitutional professor, but on his own he’s decided that the 2^nd Amendment is somehow the only amendment among the ten in the Bill of Rights (actually nine, for the 10th was to apply to the states and the people, and it states that clearly) that was not intended to convey an individual right. 

The president might suggest that those brilliant men who founded this country must have been sipping the brandy late into the night when they came up with that one. The reality that these men were all well-educated and experienced, schooled in the sordid history of the world, and intimately, personally, and painfully acquainted with tyrannical government and the application of an armed citizenry in resistance to that government, apparently didn’t persuade them to include a 2^nd Amendment specifically to preserve an individual right to preserve freedom with firearms. It must be a mistake on our part to think such nonsense. 

Two centuries ago, the founders must have instead foreseen the National Guard. Yeah, that’s what they must have meant. Brilliant prescient men hoping to preserve a republic responsive to its citizens, men who opposed oppressive government and the whole notion of a standing army, for standing armies were always looking for something nefarious to do, would choose for the protection of liberty in the face of an army…. the reserve branch of that army.

Make no mistake…the man is not stupid. Far from it. He’s had a lot of determined help to get to where he is now, and his handlers have, ah, handled him well. He has surrounded himself by folks who feel exactly as he does.  He sees himself as poised to irrevocably alter the future of our country. And that would require disarming the populace. But his efforts have not been met with universal acclaim. 

Our president has a little trouble understanding why this is so. Our president has been exceptionally well schooled in the criticism of the American way of life, and the need to end so much of the nonsense that his subjects have clung to for all these generations. He sincerely doesn’t understand why many of us do not feel the same. In our president’s mind, he’s got it right and we are misguided fools who cling to obsolete notions of self-reliance, hard work and honesty, God and guns. And we should be dismissed, re-educated, or put away for the good of….him, I guess.

The president has his vision for the future of America. Trouble is, we keep popping up, getting in his way.

Who’s we?

Well first, who is them?

I’ll start with the president, who is a firm believer in the incompetence and inabilities of his subjects, who is a firm believer in the need and usefulness of an all powerful government to take care of and control such people, who is a firm believer in himself as the dude ordained to be put in charge of all of this. He likes being the dude in charge. And he views his subjects with disdain.

Next would be the folks who put the president in charge, who thus elevate themselves to power, and also those who populate all the levels of the president’s government, who are motivated to perpetuate their position and their power.

And…then there’s the educators, media types, and community organizers who likewise feel that the government does a much better job of keeping people in line than the citizens themselves. You know….most all of these folks. For they also benefit from a government in charge of all, as long as they toe the party line.

If you dismiss those citizens who don’t much care about anything, and simply consider the rest of the people who do, about half of this rest think the government does a better job than the people of keeping folks out of trouble, and keeping them toeing the line. And this half will gladly turn the reins over to government and then relax to enjoy the progress. They be the them, too.

The other half of citizens who do care, the ones who prefer to make their own decisions, direct their children in the right ways, and who profit or lose on their own genius or mistakes, would be the we. We would prefer to limit the scope of government control, for rather than not trusting ourselves, we don’t much trust government, or more specifically….the people of government. Like the dude. Which might explain why we are so fond of the Bill of Rights.

Our president, when he became the dude, promised to change everything. That’s how he got that far. Promises. He promised all the benefit that a government could possibly shower upon the masses, and then he promised that none of the nastiness that flows downhill from government would actually flow.

The president would have the people dependent upon a government to provide all of this and that, regardless of cost. He promised to make all fair, by bringing down success. He would engineer prosperity. He promised that everyone would be safe from “gun violence”. He eventually promised much, regardless of what he could deliver. He would make everyone happy. He smiled a lot. No surprise this appealed to them. 

Some of the president’s wishes came true, and he was happy. But we were soon alarmed at his actions, the insanity of the cost of it all, and the cost to our freedom, and we began to oppose him. This made the dude unhappy. He was clever enough to tone things down just enough to get himself re-elected. Then he set out yet again on his quest for total government control. 

Shortly after our president was returned to office, a madman murdered twenty little children. This allowed our president to act very sad. He cried in front of cameras. Then he loosed a litany of lies about firearms and the people who own them, and the people who buy and sell them, and the people who defend that right. And then he lied some more, as did the them. He told us he supported the Second Amendment, and he wasn’t going to take away the citizens’ guns, and then he set out to do just that. But only because of common sense. And this made the them happy, and they heaped support upon him.

And we said, “Wait a minute.”

You know the rest, and so you know that the new gun restrictions were not at all about saving the children, and they were roundly criticized as useless against criminals but harmful to the good people, and they were eventually pared down to only the least offensive, and even this was voted away in the Senate this week. And now the president is petulant and pouting. He says it is a “shameful day for Washington”.  Most of them agree. 

About all you hear now is how horrid a result this is. Every politician whose name you recognize from the one party is enraged. That which passes for news coverage is enraged.  It’s almost as if there is no other opinion, for little or nothing is heard from any other side. The voice of another side doesn’t exist to our news media. So why oh why didn’t gun control pass?

The blame for the outrage against common sense is laid at the feet of the National Rifle Association, for they are so powerful. They are the gun lobby, and they want more guns so more children will die, for this empowers the gun makers who only want more people to die. And the Senate lawmakers cower before the powerful gun lobby, and thus they are cowards, and that is shameful. So says our president, and his party, and his media.

It’s funny how when you never get to hear an opposing argument, you never know there is one. This is almost the same as if it doesn’t exist. So then it all appears as if the president has no opposition. It’s only the evil NRA that opposes common sense, and wants children killed. Apparently, nobody else says a word in opposition to the president, for he is the good guy here.

We are the other half, the half who doesn’t exist, and we purchased 20 million firearms since the president won re-election. Because we wanted them, and this is still allowed by a government that increasingly denies that this is a citizen’s right. And we have increased the ranks of the evil NRA. We didn’t do this because we are evil. We did this because we fear our own president.

We see things in a different way, not surprisingly, than them. We see an individual right in the Second Amendment. We see much usefulness in citizens owning and using firearms for good. We see a firearms industry which produces a legal and important product, puts 33 billion dollars into the economy, and employs twice as many people in manufacturing as General Motors. And we see a different definition of shameful behavior. 

The president is furious with senators who voted against his gun control measures, suggesting that they were intimidated by the reality that they would be voted out of office by Second Amendment supporters. Yet this president did not pursue his own gun ban agenda prior to his run for re-election, fearing it would lead to his defeat by supporters of the 2^nd Amendment.

We think it is an outrage when the president views the murders of 20 children as a fortuitous event, an opportunity to press his gun ban agenda. Some mayors, a vice president, governors, and various other representatives and senators were also celebrating, and they are all from the same party. The president doesn’t call this unified exploitation of dead children politics. When the president goes down in defeat….THAT is politics.

The president sends Air Force One to fly in the families of dead children, so he can benefit by surrounding himself with them and their grief, and the media praises as he “make hay while the sun shines” over the graves of their dead children. (And yes, a politician in the president’s party actually said this) Then he states that millions of us phoning and emailing our elected representatives to express our opinion in opposition to his, is shameful. We are extremists.

And so, yeah… we think the NRA is the good guy, and the president and his cronies are not. 

Sadly, the president doesn’t respect the will of the people. 

Wow, what a difference from what we hear from them. We know our opinions exist. We wonder why our president, and his party, and his supporters in the media, don’t want our opinions heard. But we do know that petitioning our elected representatives fits the plan of the founders, and the iron rule of a president does not.