CT Blue

It would be no surprise to hear that Amendments 1 and 3 through 10, possibly 13 and certainly 14 and 15 were being ignored in Texas, but I was stunned to see that the Lone Star State is trampling on Second Amendment rights, the most absolute rights of them all, with nary a word of protest from Rick Perry or other defenders of criminal rights:

Texas authorities said on Friday that they had opened a criminal investigation into last month’s deadly explosion at a fertilizer plant that killed 14 people and injured some 200 others.

The announcement came hours after a paramedic who responded to the explosion was arrested on a charge of possessing the components of a pipe bomb, though law enforcement officials declined to say whether the charge was related to the blast.

(via New York Times)

The Second Amendment is absolute, permitting of no exceptions. Sure, if the guy actually used a bomb to kill someone, lock him up, but he has an absolute right to possess a bomb, and that’s all he’s been accused of doing. Don’t try to argue that the founders did not have bombs in mind when they wrote the Second Amendment. That’s like arguing that they didn’t have assault weapons in mind, and we know that’s not true. Nor does the argument that they were referring solely to guns wash. The sword was a part of every officer’s kit, and taking a man’s sword was a far greater affront to his honor than taking his musket.

No, “arms” consist of anything that one can use to efficiently kill other people. Why, I’ve been toying with the idea that the whole thing about car registration and licensing is a plot to steal our liberties, because in a pinch, you can use a car to take out multiple government agents at a time. If this paramedic had a well founded fear (and which such fears are not well founded?) that he needed to be able to make a bomb to protect himself from governmental tyranny, where does the government get off telling him he can’t? This puts us on the same slippery slope we avoided by turning down background checks. Who would have thought this threat to our liberties would come from the state of Texas?

Addendum: I used the word “honor” in the post above. This is a word that had great currency at the time of the Founding Fathers, though both the use of the term and the behaviors associated with the concept have fallen out of use. So, for those of my readers that might be puzzled, I’ll attempt a brief explanation, incomplete as it will be due to that brevity, though it has precious little to do with our sacred Second Amendment rights.

As with so many things in our history, this word, and the concept it encompassed, was subject to a North-South dichotomy. Here in the North, for the most part, the word was used to refer to a code of conduct that promoted probity and disinterestedness, particularly in a politician. While he was a Southerner, George Washington may be said to exemplify this view, but let us not forget the irascible John Adams. A man (women didn’t count) who valued his honor would attempt to live in accordance with the view that his personal interests were secondary to the interests of the people, and that telling lies for political gain was unworthy of a gentleman. It is not at all difficult to criticize the moral blindness of some of these men on particular subjects, slavery being among the foremost, but the fact is that they actually did try to live in accordance with this creed, as they understood it.

In the South, the term had a slightly different meaning. A man was not required to actually adhere to any particular standard of conduct, except that he was required to fight a duel when anyone claimed that his conduct did not conform to these principles, whether the criticism was objectively justified or not. It was apparently believed that winning a duel somehow established the justice of one’s cause, though how this opinion hung on in the Age of Reason has never been explained. Andrew Jackson might be considered to exemplify this understanding of the concept. This attitude was not limited to the South, witness Alexander Hamilton’s fate, but the farther north one went, the more foreign this view of the concept became.

This is but a capsule summary of this concept, which figured so much in the self conception of the 18th century man. There are some who argue that our nation at present might benefit somewhat by a reintroduction of the Northern practice, but most observers agree that it is unlikely to happen, for the lesson has been learned that succeeding at the political game, like playing Hamlet’s recorder, is “as easy as lying”.