CountGlockula
Member
This was in the Orange County Register. Please enjoy reading the article and voice your comments on the site.
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/movie-many-right-2117916-british-sons
http://www.ocregister.com/articles/movie-many-right-2117916-british-sons
Friday, August 8, 2008
The Orange Grove: The founders wanted us to be well-armed
Unlike today's government, they treated citizens as adults
By NICHOLAS WISHEK
An educator from Fountain Valley
I recently caught the movie "The Patriot" on cable. The 2000 movie depicts the events of the American Revolution in the South. The leading character, played by Mel Gibson, a composite of Daniel Morgan and Francis Marion, helps defeat the British under Lord Cornwallis. The movie is above average for accuracy in Hollywood, even if it doesn't come close as a documentary.
What I want to address is from a captivating scene early in the movie. In the scene, Gibson's character sees his second son killed, his home burned and his eldest son taken away to be hanged by British troops. Unlike most 21st-century Americans, Gibson's character doesn't look around for a lawyer. He grabs a bunch of firearms and enlists the aid of his two school-age sons. They catch up with the British patrol taking the grown son to his execution and, basically, massacre them. Both young sons help by killing British soldiers.
How many modern-day Americans would even dream of doing the same? Not many, I'd wager.
More importantly, how many could? I'm military-trained, but neither of my grown sons has even fired a gun. At ages 12 and 10, as were the apparent ages of the boys in the movie, I cannot even imagine my asking them to do what the boys in the movie did. My question is this: Does this make America a better, safer country? Or does it make us less safe, and less self-reliant? My vote is the latter. A citizenry that is not willing to defend itself is not a citizenry that can guarantee that they will continue to be free.
In the wake of the recent Supreme Court decision upholding an individual's right under the Second Amendment to own guns, I would like to point out a couple of important implications that "The Patriot" highlighted. For starters, we have been given the right to protect ourselves from danger, whether foreign or domestic. To give up that right is going against the well-reasoned intentions of our founding fathers.
Another, even more important consideration is this: The founders expected citizens to be able to have guns as good as, or better than, the standard military weapons of the time.
In "The Patriot," the guns Gibson's character and his sons used were clearly long rifles, weapons that could hit a man-size target up to 300 yards away. The British soldiers had smooth-bore muskets, probably the Brown Bess, which weren't likely to hit anything reliably from more than 50 or 60 yards. To me this means that the writers of the Second Amendment wouldn't have had any problems with private citizens today owning automatic weapons, possibly up to .50-caliber machine guns.
How about handguns? Give me a break. There is no way that they could have imagined banning pistols. They wanted to give us the right to protect ourselves.
The difference is that they trusted common citizens to be able to make responsible decisions. Our current government doesn't trust us nearly as much. Why else would we have seat-belt laws, bicycle helmet laws and hands-free cell-phone laws? The list goes on and on. The truth is that they don't trust us.
It is amazing to me how anti-gun advocates can always point out how many accidental shooting deaths occur each year but never mention how many lives are saved by someone having a gun besides just the bad guys. How many horrific shooting sprees, like the one at Virginia Tech last year, might have been avoided or reduced if citizens, as the founders, could have protected themselves?
Our Nanny State, in trying to protect us from ourselves, has taken away too many of the basic rights our forefathers fought for and sometimes died for. Good movie, "The Patriot." If you've never seen it, you might consider renting it. It might remind you that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."
One unalienable right the framers didn't enumerate, because it was so obvious to them, was the right to be treated as a responsible adult, not as a child.
