Gun control or Safer Streets: You can't have both. [A short second amendment primer.]

Gun control or Safer Streets: You can't have both. [A short second amendment primer.]

Posted by John Longenecker on Friday, January 14, 2011 12:13:32 PM

Safer streets are evidence of a healthy self-rule, the very kind the Founding Fathers insisted on. America is a place where our values system is an aggregate of working safeguards of our liberty, our sovereignty, and our total way of life here. It is comprised of marriage and family, personal and professional integrity, good faith and the reasonable expectation of good faith, and a spirit of personal independence as a matter of personal dignity. In short, there is little for public servants to do beyond the enumerated powers they are supposed to have. The problem begins with powers servants are not supposed to have.

How are gun control and safer streets incompatible?

In 1987, Billie Boggs was a homeless lady in the City of New York. The story can be found by Internet search term Billie Boggs and is commented in my book Safer Streets 2010. Thumbnail, it was a case that compelled the government to release homeless people from the protection of psychiatric incarceration and other plans where they were kept against their will, and against their civil rights. President Reagan is often blamed for ejecting the homeless from such shelter, but among the facts are the details that the New York Civil Liberties Union showed that Billie Boggs was not so incapacitated and not worthy of incarceration. She was to be released. The significant highlight of the case was that people were rounded up to get them off the streets for cosmetic purposes without regard for their rights to refuse. When the case was litigated by the NYCLU, the idea of hospitalization of the homeless for some passed into history.

Civil rights are always going to be dissolved incrementally entirely because they are safeguards which make the ambitious public servant’s tinkering an unwelcome redundancy. What the second amendment does is make gun control unnecessary as well, because it is the armed citizens who manage around 2.5 million times annually to stop a crime in progress in the absence of law enforcement. This is a very good safeguard against violent crime (when the right is respected). It means 2.5 million acts which were not completed. Though police cannot be everywhere, citizens are everywhere.

John Longnecker's latest- go and read.

WP