aryfrosty
said:
Owning guns is a right guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. It's worth every fight we enter to preserve it.
NOWHERE in the United States Constitution or the Bill of Rights is found the "right" or the privilege or otherwise to smoke dope or use or deal in any other illegal drugs. Nowhere! You guys who believe people have a "right granted by God to disobey the laws" are perverting the spirit of the law to suit your personal agenda.
I could argue with lots of the rest of this drug stuff, but we'll just continue to talk past each other, so why bother. But this is the kernel of the problem.
The United States government was created to preserve individal liberty. That is the only reason it exists. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed..."
Yes, I realize that the Declaration of Independence is not the law of the land. But it is the spirit of the law of the land, the reason the United States exist.
Liberty means that you and I may do anything we desire. Anything. As long as we do not directly infringe on the liberty of another. The government exists to help control infringements when they happen. Unfortunately, it has become the largest infringer, morphing into a huge mechanism to protect us from ourselves, to try to prevent us from making mistakes instead of allowing us to learn from them, to enforce the majority morality.
The Bill of Rights is important. It states in very plain language, places that government legislation may not go. It's somewhat of a dead letter today, since they've not only gone there, they've built a super highway through the area. What the Bill of Rights is not, however, as elucidated by the Ninth Amendment, is an inclusive list of our rights. It's the other way around. The Constitution is an inclusive list of the government's powers. Anything not explicitly stated there is not their business. They may not restrict our liberty, ever, in any way, unless the Constitution gives permission.
The several states each has its own constitution. I won't discuss state laws here, since that would take a very long time, and since I'm not familiar with most of them. So the rest of this post concerns the federal Constitition and the powers of the federal government.
Show me the place in the U.S. Constitution where the government is given the authority to create new crimes. There are a handful of crimes mentioned in the Constitution. That's all they get.
Show me where the U.S. government is given the power to prohibit possession of
anything. It's not there. They used to know this. Prohibition of alcohol was done as a Constitutional amendment because that's the only way it could be done. Legally. The original marijuana prohibition was done as a stamp tax, on interstate commerce. The same for machine guns and short barreled rifles and shotguns. The original law was a transfer tax. The taxes were made large, in the money of the time, to make it difficult for most people to afford. But they only applied to transfers across state lines, because even a liberal reading of the Constitution allows only that, and even that was stretching the Commerce Clause.
Nowadays, the Commerce Clause has been stretched and pulled like salt water taffy. It's become so elastic that it permits anything the feds want to do. The same elasticity that allows them to prohibit drugs will allow them, and not too long from now, to send their goons from house to house to take away our guns.
Note that I don't recommend ingesting psychoactive substances. Been there. Done that. Learned better. If somebody commits an actual crime, hurts somebody or steals their property, under the influence of drugs, arrest him, throw the book at him. But not because he was high. That's nobody's business. Because he directly infringed on another's liberty without their consent.
The natural consequences of drug abuse are severe and appropriate. We need nothing else. And the government has no authority to provide it.
, Art