The purpose of the Bill of Rights is to protect individual liberties even if a majority wants to take them away

Tuesday, December 18, 2012 by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...) Tags: Bill of Rights, liberties, Republic

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(NaturalNews) America is a Republic, not a Democracy. And in a Republic, individual liberties are protected by the Bill of Rights, even against majority opinion. Just because a majority of citizens, for example, can be emotionally manipulated into trying to take away the right to bear arms, for example, doesn't mean they can override the Bill of Rights.

No President has any power over the Bill of Rights. No member of Congress has any power over the Bill of Rights. No Senator has any power over the Bill of Rights. And a majority of public opinion has absolutely no power over the Bill of Rights.

Even if 99% of Americans disagree with what I write here on Natural News, they have no power to selectively criminalize that speech and abolish the First Amendment. Even if 99% of Americans disagree with the right to due process and wish to execute would-be "terrorists" on the spot, without being charged, without trial and without legal representation, they have no power to abolish the Fourth Amendment.

Similarly, even if 99% of Americans wish to ban a certain class of "arms" and abolish the Second Amendment, they have no power to do so. The Bill of Rights protects individual liberties even if they are unpopular.

The Right to Bear Arms is arguably the single most important liberty of all, because without it, the People have no ability to defend all the other liberties. Without the Second Amendment, there is no First Amendment, Fourth Amendment or Fifth Amendment. Why? Because once the people are disarmed, the government inevitably oppresses the populace and crushes all freedoms. The result is tyranny and dictatorship, which is exactly where Obama is taking America right now.

The Bill of Rights places limits on popular desires to destroy individual rights

The Bill of Rights is the founding fathers' way of saying "NO!" to big government, popular opinion and socialist-leaning collectivists who desire to strip away the very rights that made America so abundant and successful over the last two centuries.

The Bill of Rights is the big "NO!" to people like Obama, Bloomberg, Feinstein, Pelosi and anyone who tries to destroy (or even erode) the divine rights of American individuals. The Second Amendment, for example, says that the right to bear arms "shall not be infringed." It does not say that the Right to Bear Arms is only valid until some crazy person shoots up a room full of children, after which the Second Amendment automatically expires.

"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is," says Thomas Jefferson, "...to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

Notice that Jefferson did not say the Second Amendment was about hunting or sport shooting or even home defense. The Right to Bear Arms is about arming the citizenry against the government. That's the whole point of it. Thus, any restriction on "assault rifles" or other weapons in the hands of the citizenry creates a dangerous imbalance where the government has more firepower than the people. That imbalance is undemocratic and historically leads to obscene abuses of individual liberties, often followed by genocide (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc.).

Outrage at one psychopath confers no moral authority to strip divine rights from everyone else

With all this in mind, the fact that millions of Americans are outraged at the senseless killing of children at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut does not give anyone the moral right to dismantle the Bill of Rights. Even if banning guns made children safer (which it does not, as criminals will never follow gun bans), the promise of saving children does not justify placing the entire nation at risk of government oppression and eventual mass murder.

People who oppose private gun ownership think that if you ban guns, you'll save the lives of a few dozen children. They're wrong, but even if they were right, they fail to see the larger picture: Banning guns from the citizens will lead to millions of deaths when the next tyrant comes to power and exploits a disarmed citizenry in the manner of Adolf Hitler. Obama, in fact, may already be that "next tyrant." Perhaps all he's waiting for is an opportunity to disarm the public, then roll out his military dictatorship plans. Sandy Hook may have given him precisely that opportunity.

Mark my words: We are playing with dark, historical forces here. We are walking the thin line of freedom, and if we give up our guns because of the psychotic behavior of a single deranged individual in Connecticut, we will lose all our freedoms soon thereafter.

Why 100+ million Americans will not go along with a gun ban

Of course, any effort to disarm Americans can only succeed if the people themselves decide to go along with it. A few of the more easily hypnotized Americans have already done that, lining up to turn in their guns yesterday during "gun buyback" programs staged in a few large cities.

But they are the tiny minority of gun owners. Virtually all other gun owners equate their gun ownership with a sense of self preservation. They are not going to simply hand over those guns to the government just because people who despise guns achieve a screaming crescendo of insanity on the subject.

Mark my words: most gun-owning Americans will never turn in their guns... and certainly not following the screaming of a bunch of deranged anti-gun zealots who have no historical understanding of the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment, civil liberties or the rise of government tyranny.

Any effort to try to forcibly disarm those Americans can only result in mass violence -- and isn't that something we're all trying to avoid?