Sipsey Street Irregulars: 'Progressive' in China too lazy to explain 2nd Amendment, probably for the best

Friday, October 4, 2013

'Progressive' in China too lazy to explain 2nd Amendment, probably for the best

The American familiarity with guns is tough to explain to people in China—citizen gun ownership is banned and most policemen aren’t even allowed to carry firearms. When a cab driver asks, I lack the motivation to explain the origins of the Second Amendment or the degree of individual liberty my constitution grants relative to other countries. I could tell the driver that the founding fathers were paranoid about the power of government, so much so that they allowed citizens to carry guns in case they felt the need to overthrow a tyrannical ruler. Of course, owning guns no longer has any use against a government with drones and the H-bomb, so that justification has become anachronistic. Now most pro-gun arguments are based on ensuring individual liberty. I don’t want to explain all this in casual conversation, so I just shrug and say it’s a complicated problem that’s way over my head. I don’t know how to say “anachronistic” in Chinese anyway.

LATER: My comment to the original article --

All in all, I'd say it's a good thing this collectivist author remains in PRC. In fact, I would hope he stays there permanently. There he may serve the government, any government, to his Borg-like content without danger to those of us here who, like the Founders, believe the government should serve the people, not the other way around.

Insofar as his drones-and-H-bombs "resistance is futile" meme, this Borg Unit is as ignorant of the current state of military affairs as he is of the Constitution and the basis of individual liberty. Waging a civil war against your own people on your own soil with nuclear weapons is, to say the least, counterproductive. I would suggest that he study the concepts of Fourth Generation Warfare, especially the prime tenet: that in order to win it is only necessary to target the will of enemy warmakers and decision takers at the highest levels. For that the only requirement is enough individual rifles pointed at the right evil heads. That makes tyranny a personally self-defeating strategy and, green zones or no green zones, atomic weapons count for exactly dick.

"Resistance is futile"? Try and see. Or, as the Sheriff in Silverado advised the curious town citizen, "Hide and watch." From our point of view, if I may paraphrase another line from that movie, "Now we don't want to kill you, and you don't want to be dead." In the meantime, stay in China. You are obviously much more comfortable with the hive-mind of collectivism than with individual liberty.

Mike Vanderboegh

http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com

7 comments:

SWIFT said...: I have a different take on this story. Perhaps the conversation with the cab driver never took place. The Left has a long and sordid history of inventing stories to further an agenda. Some, have even gone so far as to invent a whole series of stories in hopes of a Pulitzer. I do agree that the commie POS should stay in China. What could be a better ending than a Lefty finding Utopia?; October 4, 2013 at 6:56 AM
Anonymous said...: There is so much wrong with just that small blurb posted...; October 4, 2013 at 7:56 AM
Paul X said...: I suspect the cab driver story is true. Why wouldn't ordinary Chinese be interested in firearms?

We get a lot of Chinese and Japanese visitors at Yellowstone. If there is one thing they are interested in, it is guns.; October 4, 2013 at 12:12 PM
Anonymous said...: This avoids the obvious question of how he was going to explain that which he doesn't understand in the first place.; October 4, 2013 at 2:14 PM
Ed said...: He could not answer because as soon as the cab driver said the word "guns", the writer's panties balled up in a wad, twisting up into a knot that left the writer breathless and unable to speak.; October 4, 2013 at 6:59 PM
Anonymous said...: Once China was a great military power with a history of martial arms and arts. Today not so much. For the individual that is. Shows what a real danger Communism really is when it can eviserate the very essence and history of a society. Guess that is the main reason that the Progressives reinvent our history with a negative bent. They are to gutless to take the history of the world at face value as it happened and relate it to the ancient rules of nature.Only the strong survive. The weak and the appeasers are consumed by their fears. For those that wish and are working for America to be weakened. Remember that nature fills a vaccum. And at times that vaccum is filled by evil. Dark consuming evil. The useful idiots will be the first victims of a Communist Regime in this country as they have the world over. Can't have those radicals messing things up once the goals have been achieved.; October 4, 2013 at 9:07 PM
Anonymous said...: which leads me to this, you know who I see at the range all the time? cambodians and vietnamese. guys and girls and they come packin.

ar-15's shotguns, and pistols galore....

they come in big groups and they get to business.; October 4, 2013 at 10:30 PM

"Progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress."

I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman's club is false progress, and of no permanent value. I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave. -- H.L. Mencken

"The Fate of Unborn Millions. . ."

"The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army-Our cruel and unrelenting Enemy leaves us no choice but a brave resistance, or the most abject submission; that is all we can expect-We have therefore to resolve to conquer or die." -- George Washington to his troops before the Battle of Long Island.

"We will not go gently . . ."

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can't be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won't be done. The Founders' Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

-- Mike Vanderboegh, The Lessons of Mumbai:Death Cults, the "Socialism of Imbeciles" and Refusing to Submit, 1 December 2008

"A common language of resistance . . ."

"Colonial rebellions throughout the modern world have been acts of shared political imagination. Unless unhappy people develop the capacity to trust other unhappy people, protest remains a local affair easily silenced by traditional authority. Usually, however, a moment arrives when large numbers of men and women realize for the first time that they enjoy the support of strangers, ordinary people much like themselves who happen to live in distant places and whom under normal circumstances they would never meet. It is an intoxicating discovery. A common language of resistance suddenly opens to those who are most vulnerable to painful retribution the possibility of creating a new community. As the conviction of solidarity grows, parochial issues and aspirations merge imperceptibly with a compelling national agenda which only a short time before may have been the dream of only a few. For many Americans colonists this moment occurred late in the spring of 1774." -- T.H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence, Oxford University Press, 2004, p.1.

Sipsey Street Irregulars

Friday, October 4, 2013

'Progressive' in China too lazy to explain 2nd Amendment, probably for the best

7 comments:

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