I would like you to close your eyes for a moment and imagine a place, well wait, don’t close your eyes because you won’t be able to read this, but none the less, imagine a place where the Constitution is the world’s most perfect document and its laws are sacred, clear, easy to understand and without limit. It’s a place where speech is always free no matter what people say and everyone can own any gun and carry them around like their the Lone Ranger. It’s an easy to understand place filled with good guys, we’ll call them conservatives, and bad guys, we’ll call them the radical-Left-elitist-Liberal-gay-minority-FASCIST-communist-party goons. It’s a place where things happen for a reason, by God, and are not tempered by an intrusive evil gov’ment.
Welcome, to Republican Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s empty head.
Yesterday, during the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ted Cruz took all his Senatorial seniority (about a month and 2 weeks) to battle against Senior Senator of 20 years and champion of gun control Diane Feinstein. In Cruz’s head, it’s probably David and Goliath, yet tell me the version in the Bible where David throws a rock and it doesn’t even hit Goliath, then David runs away and tells everybody what tough guy he was, and you would be correct.
In a heated exchange, Cruz attempted to lecture Diane Feinstien about the Constitution, making, what must have seemed to him, a big Constitutional argument. He pointed out that Feinstien’s bill, which exempts certain weapons, seemed comparable to a law that banned books, with exceptions.
“Would she consider it constitutional for Congress to specify that the First Amendment shall apply only to the following books and shall not apply to the books that Congress has deemed outside the protection of the Bill of Rights?”
Then he lobbed in an attack using the Fourth Amendment, suggesting the same point only using “search and seizures” and the law exempting it from certain people.
“Likewise, would she think that the Fourth Amendment’s protection against searches and seizures, could properly apply only to the following specified individuals, and not to the individuals that Congress has deemed outside the protection of the law?”
Let me tell you how the world works little boy!
Oh no he didn’t! He brought out subtle references to book banning and burning, and the seeming second class citizenship of a particular race or people as if this law were a Fascist subterfuge aimed squarely at the Constitution and the liberty and freedom of the Freedom loving American people. How dare she?
The Senior Senator wasn’t having any of that. She turned to the youngster and looked him dead in the eye as if almost astonished that this guy even had the nerve to bring up such a stupid argument, (which it is), then showed the junior why 20 years of experience matters, both in debate and knowledge.
“One, I’m not a sixth grader,” Feinstein fired at Ted. “Senator, I’ve been on this Committee for 20 years. I was a mayor for nine years. I walked in and I saw people shot with these weapons.
“I’m not a lawyer, but after 20 years, I’ve been up close and personal with the Constitution. I have great respect for it. … So I, you know, it’s fine you want to lecture me on the Constitution. I appreciate it. Just know I’ve been here for a long time.”
“I thank you for the lecture. Incidentally, this does not prohibit — you used the word ‘prohibit’ – it exempts 2,271 weapons. Isn’t that enough for the people of the United States? Do they need a bazooka? Do they need other high-powered weapons that other people use in close combat? I don’t think so.”
Feinstein announcing the murder of Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk to a stunned San Francisco
What Feinstien is referring to is the reason she got involved in the Gun Control Debate in the first place, the shooting of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. An incident she is well know to have witnessed personally, though I’ll bet Cruz hasn’t even heard of it.
Instead, a snubbed Cruz, holding on for dear life to his McCarthy-esque composure, pretends he is still in command by saying “nobody doubts” Feinstein’s “passion” or “sincerity” before pointing out she didn’t answer the question. Don’t get excited there little lady, men are talking! Wow, luckiest person today is Ted Cruz’s wife, he must be a real charmer. Feinstein quickly jumped in and answered the question, “The answer is obvious. No!”
From there, Cruz’s little argument was shredded by Democrats on his committee. Patrick Leahy of Vermont was quick to point out that Texas, Cruz’s home state DOES limit books. The Texas Board of Education, frequently restricts books they deem too Liberal or just don’t like because it leaves out all that important scientific knowledge garnered from the Bible.
LEAHY: I appreciate that discussion of books. I know that you have that in your state of Texas, where your educational boards tell people what books they should and shouldn’t read in schools, something that we would not do in Vermont.
Chuck Schumer and others pointed out that Child Pornography is not protected speech either. For that matter, yelling “Fire” in a crowded theater is also not protected speech.
What Cruz doesn’t get is that law is not absolute, because it is not easy to define a law. When Ted Nugent threatened public officials openly making references to a gun, is that breaking the law? Normally threatening the President is, yet Nugent is walking free right now because making a martyr of him isn’t worth it, despite the fact that it is illegal. This is what is often called a gray area, since human beings have to use reason to determine Nugent’s fate. Church and State is another gray area the GOP gets wrong and the right of police to search and seize your property has been debated since the founding, often with Conservatives siding with the Police (just not on gun control). There are limits to the laws in the Constitution just as there are limits to anything. Law, especially, is a complex thing, where a simple phrasing can mean the difference between life imprisonment and complete acquittal. The fine letter of the law is where the rubber meets the road and the Constitution affects people in their everyday lives, in the courts. That is why there is a Judicial Branch of government, set up by the Constitution, to interpret the laws that many believe the Founding Fathers left deliberately vague so they could get the Constitution ratified by the states in the first place.
The Second Amendment:
A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
It states a purpose, a means to an end that is not about liberty or gun ownership. To have a well regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, so the people have a right to bare arms. Owning a gun is not the right, having a well regulated militia in which you have a right to bare arms is. That means that under the advice and guidance of a state-run militia commander, you may bare arms. Since a well regulated militia is not really necessary any longer, it really is the weakest law in the Bill of Rights and could be subject to removal. However I don’t believe it was the Founding Father’s intention to ban weapons, too bad they didn’t tell us about the right to bare arms OUTSIDE of a well-regulated militia. Perhaps it was a given, since having a weapon on the frontier was going to be necessary to settle the lands and kick the American Indians off the land. That being said, a musket is a far cry from an automatic assault weapon with extended ammunition clips and a night-vision laser scope used with Teflon-coated hollow-point bullets. I highly doubt the Founding Fathers would agree that a machine capable of killing a hundreds of people in a few minutes should be a natural right.
Seems pretty far from an absolute to me and that is why there is so much debate about this. Claiming that limiting one gun is the same as limiting them all is about as removed from reality as you can get. To be clear, I am not against a right to bare arms. I just believe there are limits. Just as Born Again Christians think the 1st Ammendment has limits, like having pornography piped into their homes through broadcast television, I don’t want mentally ill people walking the streets with better weapons than the police, who would be the ones to stop them. I also don’t want yokels in some backwater owning a tank and setting up their own little private armies. I also don’t want concealed weapons let into bars because of idiots like Ted Cruz who think that guns will keep everybody peaceful like some kind of Mutually Assured Destruction pact. Drunk guys with guns is a bad idea that even the old West didn’t abide. Most towns required you turn in your riffles at the Sheriff’s office, including Dodge City!
If Westworld has taught us anything, it’s that guns and bars don’t mix, especially when Yul Brynner is a spiteful malfunctioning robot
Having rights requires responsibility. We have a right to go where we want to go, buy a car if we want to. Do we have a right to drive? Nope. It requires a license. Why? Because cars kill people so we want to make sure you are mentally and physically capable, as well as skilled, to drive . Are the Tea Baggers going to go after the DMV next because it is a symbol of Marxist tyranny? Are you starting to see where I’m going with this?
Ideological purity is fun when you’re in college or a teenager mad at your folks. It impresses the ladies, (or guys, or whomever you are trying to impress) and gives yourself a feeling that you are fighting for what’s right. Then you meet reality, and reality shows you that life is more complex than you thought. There are few absolutes in life, except life itself. You are either alive or you are dead, you can’t be both. Yet laws don’t work that way, even murder is cloudy. Conservatives have even created an alternate reality where everything is absolute and easy to understand, despite the fact that their reality is almost entirely relative.
Allowing unlimited gun sales is what we have now. It can’t get any more free unless you throw in a free RPG when you purchase a tank. Look where it got us! Sandy Hook was only one of many shootings THIS YEAR! Yet the Republicans circled the wagons and stood to protect the rights of gun manufacturers over the lives of children. Their big solution? Arm the teachers. In the process, a teacher training got shot! So we dilly dally and talk while the victims of countless shootings mourn and cry and shake their heads at a world, and especially Congress, that have gone absolutely mad with cynical indifference to the suffering and loss that they experienced.
Yet try telling that to McCarthy wannabe Cruz (no joke, the man has even claimed to have a list of communists), He continued on after his humiliation as if he was some bad ass who won some bar brawl, even though he’s the one with two black eyes and his buddies went home without him. Can you believe this guy went to Harvard and served on the law review? Can you believe we are only 2 months in to the next 6 years with this idiot? Can you believe that idiots like Cruz are even allowed into the Senate? If ever there was a place that needed a test to get in to prevent dangerous things from happening, it is the US Senate.
Here is some nobody freshman senator, a Tea Bagger too, by the way, and he has the nerve to talk down to a 20 year, distinguished politician with a record on gun rights that most Americans agree with.
Perhaps, it is because Cruz hasn’t seen what Feinstein has. In the Moscone-Milk Assassination, Feinstein saw the horrors of gun violence up close and personal in a way that most people don’t, and shouldn’t, see. It was an incident that isn’t too far from the types of violent shootings we have seen recently: a person of questionable sanity, Dan White (or at least that’s what his defense was saying) violently murdering multiple people with the intent to kill more, in some sort of skewed revenge slaying (that makes little sense to most people), using specialty hollow-point bullets designed to explode in the cavity at close range. Feinstein discovered Milk’s destroyed body and checked for his pulse. Her finger slipped into the wound on his wrist as he lay bleeding from 2 fatal wounds to the head. She was so traumatized that the medical staff tended to her. Yet she pulled herself together and announced the death of the Mayor and first gay Supervisor to the city of San Francisco.
The Moscone-Milk Assasination is what drew national attention to Feinstein, though before going on to be Senator, she was elected as Mayor of San Francisco twice, including during the 1984 Democratic Convention, initiated the rebuilding of the beloved Cable Cars and was voted the “Most Effective Mayor” by City and State Magazine in 1987. She earned her way to the Senate in a time when women were still being kept from governing.
After becoming Senator, on July 1st, 1993, another shooting struck San Francisco, the 101 California Street shooting, in which a deranged lunatic with specialty modified TEC-9 automatics murdered 9 and killed 6 for a reason never determined.
Feinstein pushed for a ban of assault weapons and won, it was allowed to expire in 2004 by a Republican Congress. If it had been in place, the mother of Adam Lanza’s mother would not have had the Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle he used to murder 27 people, including his mother and countless small children.
Will an Assault Weapons Ban stop every shooting? No. Though it would have stopped Sandy Hook. Would Background Checks and laws that limit extended magazines stop every shooting? No. Though it would have stopped the 2011 Tuscon Shooting. Could additional laws on specialty ammo or purchasing military grade equipment over the internet stop every shooting? No. Though it would have stopped the Aurora Theater Shooting.
Does doing nothing stop any shootings? No.
Is that what people like Ted Cruz and the NRA want to tell the victims of Sandy Hook? It’s better to do nothing because the mentally ill’s right to guns and arms manufacturer’s right to dump as many assault weapons as they can create and sell is simply more important than your children.
Have they no shame? No decency? How much more blood must be spilled?