On The Second Amendment and Presidential Anger

Bumped. With all the rapid-fire stuff this week, @slublog's excellent essay only got like 45 minutes at the top.

...

Charles C.W. Cooke is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers at NRO. See here, here and here for some reasons why. On twitter, he displays a similar talent for making coherent responses to lefty tweets. Such as this one, earlier today.

The tweet from Caldwell illustrates part of the reason I don't trust the left when it comes to issues related to the second amendment - most of their arguments are based in a combination of emotionalism and ignorance. I don't mean ignorance in the insulting sense, but the descriptive. They are ignorant about how guns work. They don't know the history or meaning of the second amendment. They have no idea how gun sales work, whether in a store or at a show. They do not understand why people would want to own a gun, and have no understanding of what it's like to live in rural America, where the police aren't just minutes away.

What makes it worse is that they don't seem to want to know. They are perfectly content in their little bubble of ignorance, speaking to each other in the language of cliche and falsehood. They use phrases like "gun show loophole," "assault weapon," and make utterly laughable statements about what weapons are legal and which are not and they believe their parade of nonsense justifies the limit of a freedom guaranteed by the constitution. They are eager to ban something they don't understand and have no intention of learning anything about.

This has been linked before, but for a thorough and excellent overview of guns and gun control, read this post by author, firearms instructor and former gun dealer Larry Correia. In it, he lays out the reasons why the left calls for gun control, then eviscerates those arguments with facts and reason.

Much has been written about the president's press conference/temper tantrum last night. In his statement, Obama showed why the left seems to have no interest in understanding guns, gun owners and gun culture. The reason is pretty simple: they hate us.

Go watch Obama's statement again - the utter contempt he displayed for those who have the audacity to claim a right protected by the constitution is breathtaking in its nakedness. It's tempting to believe liberal lawmakers don't like us having the ability to own guns because they don't think we can be trusted with them. That is part of it, but based on what we saw yesterday, that might be giving them too much credit.

When the left talks about gun owners, one of their favorite tactics is to make them seem like a strange species - an 'other.' Well, Obama 'otherized' the hell out of gun owners and second amendment advocates yesterday, refusing to even acknowledge their ability to make an argument in good faith and sneering at members of Congress for the earnest belief in the second amendment that influenced their votes against the gun control amendments.

Still, the president wasn't just angry because he lost. He was angry because he lost to people who hold an opinion he's unable and unwilling to understand and who he seems to regard as beneath him. Last night, Obama showed us the anger that lurks under the no-drama exterior and revealed what we on the right have known for years - he's thoroughly a man of the left, and shares the left's contempt for those who believe that the second amendment is not a collective right, but an individual right for a collective purpose - ultimately, the preservation of a "free state." Our belief in individual liberty makes us inconvenient, and our refusal to acquiesce to the Benevolent and All-Knowing, All Providing Nanny State makes us barriers to the goals of the left.