It is the Right of Revolution

Why Liberals Should Love The Second Amendment

Liberals love the Constitution.
Ask anyone on the street.
They'll tell you the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a liberal organization. I know liberal couples who give each other pocket size copies of the Constitution for Christmas. Ask liberals to list their top five complaints about the Bush Administration, and they will invariably say the words "shredding" and "Constitution" in the same sentence. They might also add "Fourth Amendment" and "due process." It's possible they'll talk about "free speech zones" and "habeus corpus." There's a good chance they will mention, probably in combination with several FCC-prohibited adjectives, the former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.So.

Liberals love the Constitution.
They especially love the Bill of Rights.

They love all the Amendments.
Except for one: the Second Amendment.[...]

All of our rights, even the ones enumerated in the Bill of Rights, are restricted. You can't shout "Fire!" in a crowd. You can't threaten to kill the president. You can't publish someone else's words as your own. We have copyright laws and libel laws and slander laws. We have the FCC to regulate our radio and television content. We have plenty of restrictions on our First Amendment rights. But we don't like them. We fight them. Any card-carrying member of the ACLU will tell you that while we might agree that some restrictions are reasonable, we keep a close eye whenever anyone in government gets an itch to pass a new law that restricts our First Amendment rights. Or our Fourth. Or our Fifth, Sixth, or Eighth. We complain about free speech zones. The whole country is supposed to be a free speech zone, after all. It says so right in the First Amendment.

But when it comes to the Second Amendment...You could hear a pin drop for all the protest you'll get from liberals when politicians talk about further restrictions on the manufacture, sale, or possession of firearms. Suddenly, overly broad restrictions are "reasonable." The Washington D.C. ban on handguns -- all handguns -- is reasonable. (Later this year, the Supreme Court will quite likely issue an opinion to the contrary in the Heller case.)

Would we tolerate such a sweeping regulation of, say, the Thirteenth Amendment? Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. What if a politician -- say, a Republican from a red state in the south -- were to introduce a bill that permits enslaving black women? Would we consider that reasonable? It's not like the law would enslave all people, or even all black people. Just the women. There's no mention of enslaving women in the Thirteenth Amendment. Clearly, when Lincoln wanted to free the slaves, he didn't intend to free all the slaves. And we restrict all the other Amendments, so obviously the Thirteenth Amendment is not supposed to be absolute. What's the big deal?Ridiculous, right? We'd take to the streets, we'd send angry letters to our representatives in Washington, we'd call our progressive radio programs to quote, verbatim, the Thirteenth Amendment. Quite bluntly, although not literally, we'd be up in arms. (Yeah, pun intended.)And yet...A ban on all handguns seems reasonable to many liberals. Never mind that of 192 million firearms in America, 65 million -- about one third -- are handguns.This hardly seems consistent.Indeed!

And this conclusion:

In no other country, at no other time, has such a right existed. It is not the right to hunt. It is not the right to shoot at soda cans in an empty field. It is not even the right to shoot at a home invader in the middle of the night. It is the right of revolution.

Let me say that again:

It is the right of revolution.