Drizzt
Member
Of Means and Will
William Lolli
GND Contributing Editor
March 22, 2003
Many have read the recent headline and follow-up articles about Iraq’s lack of gun control.
I am referring to both the New York Times and the article by Timothy Noah: Iraq’s Rebuke to the NRA http://slate.msn.com/id/2080201/.
The article sites Iraq’s seemingly ubiquitous guns in every citizen’s home, and then asks:
“The obvious question raised by MacFarquhar's piece is how Iraq got to be, and remains, one of the world's most repressive police states when just about everyone is packing heat.â€
The answer of course is simple: There is a difference between Will and Means.
The 2nd Amendment guarantee’s the individual right to bear arms to preserve the security of a free state. This is a protection of the “means†by which a free people can preserve their freedom.
If people lack the Will to exercise the Means, no power on earth can protect them from domination, tyranny, and oppression.
A gun in your hand does not make you free. The hand must have the will and the desire to be free.
Iraq’s people have been subjected to thirty years of secret police midnight raids, torture chambers, rape, public beheadings and all manner of systematic terror. The nation’s people have atrophied into paralysis.
Freedom is not free. You must want it bad enough to fight for it.
Whether in Iraq or in this country a Bill of Rights cannot preserve a people’s desire to remain free. But it can preserve the means.
And that is what the struggle over gun control and the meaning of the 2nd Amendment is all about.
http://www.gunnewsdaily.com/Lolli/wl47.html
William Lolli
GND Contributing Editor
March 22, 2003
Many have read the recent headline and follow-up articles about Iraq’s lack of gun control.
I am referring to both the New York Times and the article by Timothy Noah: Iraq’s Rebuke to the NRA http://slate.msn.com/id/2080201/.
The article sites Iraq’s seemingly ubiquitous guns in every citizen’s home, and then asks:
“The obvious question raised by MacFarquhar's piece is how Iraq got to be, and remains, one of the world's most repressive police states when just about everyone is packing heat.â€
The answer of course is simple: There is a difference between Will and Means.
The 2nd Amendment guarantee’s the individual right to bear arms to preserve the security of a free state. This is a protection of the “means†by which a free people can preserve their freedom.
If people lack the Will to exercise the Means, no power on earth can protect them from domination, tyranny, and oppression.
A gun in your hand does not make you free. The hand must have the will and the desire to be free.
Iraq’s people have been subjected to thirty years of secret police midnight raids, torture chambers, rape, public beheadings and all manner of systematic terror. The nation’s people have atrophied into paralysis.
Freedom is not free. You must want it bad enough to fight for it.
Whether in Iraq or in this country a Bill of Rights cannot preserve a people’s desire to remain free. But it can preserve the means.
And that is what the struggle over gun control and the meaning of the 2nd Amendment is all about.
http://www.gunnewsdaily.com/Lolli/wl47.html