QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 9:51 A.M. ET:  From Kevin D. Williamson, at NRO:

Just as state schooling is not about education, but about the state, gun control is not about guns: It’s about control. A citizen who can fend for himself when the predators come or the schools fail is less inclined to look to the state for sustenance and oversight in other areas of life. To progressives, that’s an invitation to anarchy. To the men who wrote the Second Amendment, it was a condition of citizenship in a free republic. It’s what free men did, and do.

COMMENT:  Well said.  The obsession with state control on the part of the Obama administration has reached a level we haven't seen since the late sixties, when the American left had its last great fling.   That sure ended well, didn't it?  Our cities were awash with crime, and the American military was regularly trashed.  Ah, wasn't it a time, wasn't it a time. 

The fact is that many on the left really don't believe in individual freedom.  They have contempt for the very "masses" they claim to serve.  Thus, anything that gives power to the individual is considered a threat to "the collective," especially if that power is held by one of those dumb, uninformed, ill-bred Americans, the kind who watch Fox News and eat meat. 

I am not a gun nut.  I think there are reasonable standards that can be applied to society to keep guns out of the hands of those who shouldn't have them, like criminals or the insane.  But I'm also a strong believer in the Second Amendment because it is the consummate statement in the Constitution of the supremacy of the people over their government.  In America we trust the people so much that we permit them to keep and bear arms.  Contrast that with the situation in every dictatorship I can think of.

I fear that our fundamental freedoms are in great danger, greater than at any period in my lifetime.  The danger is from within, not from without.  And it comes from the self-appointed "good people." who only want a better society, and will destroy everything we have in order to get it.

It's not the first time this has happened.

July 19, 2010