So I’ve been listening to various pundits talk about the Dallas shooting, and I’ve yet to hear mentioned what I thought was the most immediate and important lesson that shooting must have now made clear. This point has to have been made elsewhere (and probably in a better and more succinct way), and somehow I’ve just missed it, but – still – I felt the need to express it myself.
If – as the NRA and the gun-fondlers it represents (the ones who subscribe to the maximal interpretation of their “2nd Amendment Freedom”) – are sincere in their beliefs, then what happened in Dallas is exactly what they have told us over and over again is supposed to happen.
For how many years have these people repeated that “From time to time, the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants”? For how many years have we been forced to listen to heavily-armed yokels argue that no regulation of guns, no restriction on the kind of guns one can own, no registration of guns, no required training for the possession of guns ever can be permitted, because that would be the tent under which the camel slips so that the government can then ban all guns entirely? And, most importantly, how many times have we had to listen to the argument made by Ted Cruz and others of his ilk that:
The 2nd Amendment to the Constitution is a Constitutional right . . . to serve as the as the ultimate check against governmental tyranny – for the protection of liberty.”
Okay then, let us now recap what just happened in Dallas.
As near as I can tell, a heavily armed American looked at a bunch of news stories and concluded for himself that in this country the police – who are, in fact, the government – have been murdering American citizens, people of color like himself, without due process or other constraint. That conclusion is, of course, pretty much the definition of what governmental tyranny looks like.
And so this man elected to exercise his 2nd Amendment rights in precisely the way he has been taught by the NRA and the gun nuts that he is supposed to, and he took up arms against what he and he alone had determined was a tyrannical government.
I make this point because, after Dallas, I think it is important to push back whenever we hear this odious claim being raised by the ammosexuals. In fact, the 2nd Amendment does not exist to enshrine the right of anybody like Micah Xavier Johnson, or Cliven Bundy and his supporters, or anybody else to take up arms and commit violence against other people whom they have decided are “tyrants.”
If the government passes a law or a regulation or commits an action you think is unjust, then the only recourse we have as Americans are at the ballot box and in a court of law; if you are a patriot, if you really believe in this country, in our Constitution, and in the rule of law, then you also have to believe that these two protections must be sufficient in and of themselves.
The United States Constitution is not just an historical document, it is the United States’ founding document. It created us, not the other way around. It enshrines what this nation is and who its people are supposed to be.
And the United States Constitution is also a document of its time, forged from the Age of Enlightenment, and chief among its virtues is the underlying faith that we are capable of governing ourselves and that political disputes are to be resolved politically, through argument and reason, and never by the threat or exercise of violence. When people like Ted Cruz suggest otherwise, they need to be publicly shamed forevermore with the bloody example of Dallas and with the well-earned epithet of “traitor.”