Once again, the ‘no right is absolute’ argument is being dragged out, this time as an excuse for flagrantly violating not just the Constitution, but the federal statutes that prohibit the government from collecting information about gun purchases necessary to create a firearms registry.
So once again, it’s worth revisiting why this is possibly the dumbest argument in politics. (Short version: If you think no right is absolute, what exceptions would you say exist to your right not to be raped? Make a list, and post it in the comment section below.)
And although recent blustering over removing the filibuster from the US Senate shows that liberals have severe difficulties grasping the concept of ‘precedent’, it’s worth quoting (again) what Professor Alan Dershowitz of Harvard Law School (no fan of guns himself) had to say about what lies at the end of the road they’re now trying to start down:
Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it’s not an individual right or that it’s too much of a public safety hazard don’t see the danger in the big picture. They’re courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don’t like.
Finally, it’s worth repeating a question asked by some guy at a bill hearing some years back:
After all, if [a] legislature isn’t going to respect the limits placed on it by [its] Constitution, then why should individuals respect the limits placed on them by that legislature — whether regarding guns, or schools, or traffic laws, or anything else?
If we’re going to disregard the big rules, why pay any attention to the smaller ones? For that matter, if words like ‘all’ and ‘person’ no longer mean what they’ve meant for centuries, then why should we pretend that laws, which are made of words, mean anything at all? In other words, if [government] can behave as if ‘all’ doesn’t mean ‘all’, why can’t [citizens] behave as if ‘not’ doesn’t mean ‘not’?
