The arguments ongoing about new gun control schemes have revealed, again, a stark divide in this country, and I believe that virtually every thoughtful person has already identified this divide and decided to which side they adhere.
Allow me to add my voice.
The divide is over the proper role of government and there are really only two sides. One side believes the government should be energetic--that is, the government should be allowed to exercise enough power to accomplish the goals which society has identified. The other side believes that the government should be less energetic and adhere to a relatively rigid set of rules.
There can be only two sides as you either believe in limited government or you do not. Currently, I believe our government considers itself to have few (if any) limits. For proof I offer you: two recent wars without Congressional declarations; the assassination of U.S. Citizens without trial; the indefinite detention, rendition, and torture of U.S. Citizens; the warrantless searches, seizures, and surveillance on U.S. Citizens and their property within the United States.
It is impossible to offer better examples of limitless power. I suppose pictures of executions of U.S. Citizens in the streets of our cities might finally convince skeptics. But, according to the first iteration of the Patriot Act, those ‘trials’ and executions were conveniently allowed to be carried out in secret. Were there any ‘trials’ or executions under the Patriot Act? I don’t know. They were, after all, secret.
It is also true that it doesn’t matter. The authorization of these activities should be enough evidence for reasonable people. Fear, however, makes people less reasonable. And that is the atmosphere in which the Patriot Act was passed.
So, did you give the government the power to take away your right to be free from unreasonable search and seizures, to be free from the loss of life, liberty or property without due process of law, to the right to a trial by a jury? You did. So did I. Are we going to allow our government the power to disarm us too?
You see, when you ask your government to protect you without holding them accountable to the rule of law, you give them perhaps more power than they should have. It should be evident then, once you grant a government extraordinary power, you will never get it back. You also lose the ability to say how that power is used. If it is used in ways that negatively impact you and your family you have no recourse because the government is only doing what you gave it the power to do.
These ideas are relatively simple and these questions have already been answered many times over the course of history. The question, “how much power should the government have?” has been answered in virtually the same way throughout history. The answer has almost always been not very much. Yet, Americans continue to demand more and more of their government by empowering it with more and more control over our lives until now we expect it to accomplish tasks that it shouldn’t accomplish. We also expect our government to do things it can’t do.
Why do we ask our government to do these things? That is a good question.
Citizens should at least ask the question every so often if their government is too powerful. What is wrong with this? Is it unpatriotic to ask this? I believe that it is unpatriotic to remain silent while everyone else’s rights are taken away.
If you argue that citizens have nothing to fear in America as long as the Federal government is focusing on terrorists you should reread a little history. The focus of the Federal government is on terrorism, both foreign and domestic.
The trouble is that the people who are defining those terms--foreign and domestic terrorism--are the same people who will be conducting the searches and arrests without meaningful oversight.
How would we know if our government is acting constitutionally if any proceedings were kept secret? And would we care?
This isn’t exactly difficult to understand. But I think the American people have looked the other way as long as they weren’t directly affected. However, I submit to you that the American people have been directly affected.
If we learned nothing else from history, we should have learned that when the Nazis began to take the rights of Jews away, their fellow citizens were cutting their own throats--quite literally--by not standing up for them. So, German citizens were directly affected by the actions of their government in their treatment of the Jews. What they should have known from history is that once you empower a government to take anyone’s rights away, you empower them to take yours also.
Let me add one other idea. It would have been very easy and convenient to use historical references to the Founders to back up the assertions found here. It is also unnecessary. Today the American people are just as qualified through the use of reason to find the best way to govern.
The advantages the Founders had were that their immediate experience with the British government gave them a ready example of a government that was too powerful-the other, that they had a more comprehensive background in political history and philosophy.
It should be evident, even self-evident, that a limited government is the only proper government.
We forget this lesson at our peril.