Quote of the day—NRA-ILA

Following the enactment of New Zealand’s Arms Amendment Act in 1992, the government produced a pamphlet for gun owners that explained the new law. A FAQ-style section titled “Some misconceptions about the new laws,” addressed a hypothetical gun owner statement that “It’s my rights to have and use firearms.” In response to this contention, the government stated, “No it isn’t,” and called a firearms license a “special privilege.”

American gun rights supporters know this to be incorrect. In addition to being protected by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, firearm ownership is an individual right that is an extension of the natural right of self-defense. Various governments may choose to respect or disrespect that right, but it is a right inherent to all peoples.

As a matter of policy, and as a matter of rights, the New Zealand Parliament would do well to reject the repugnant attack on law-abiding gun owners outlined in Law and Order Committee’s inquiry report, and instead focus their efforts on more directly confronting the criminal misuse of firearms.

NRA-ILA
April 14, 2017
New Zealand MPs Propose Raft of New Gun Controls
[Read how they slid down the slippery slope from the early 19th century through the early 1900s in The Samurai, The Mountie, and the Cowboy.—Joe]

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4 thoughts on “Quote of the day—NRA-ILA

  1. I suppose the NZ approach comes from the British precedent, where in the 18th century the law said that people were allowed to have weapons “suitable to their condition and degree”. This allowed inferior classes to be judged unsuitable as a matter of law. While the same thing has been attempted in the USA (often successfully in left wing states), the Constitution is clear and contains none of those offensive qualifiers.

    “This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty…. The right of self defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction. In England, the people have been disarmed, generally, under the specious pretext of preserving the game: a never failing lure to bring over the landed aristocracy to support any measure, under that mask, though calculated for very different purposes. True it is, their bill of rights seems at first view to counteract this policy: but the right of bearing arms is confined to protestants, and the words suitable to their condition and degree, have been interpreted to authorize the prohibition of keeping a gun or other engine for the destruction of game, to any farmer, or inferior tradesman, or other person not qualified to kill game. So that not one man in five hundred can keep a gun in his house without being subject to a penalty.” — Saint George Tucker, 1803, Law Professor at William & Mary, soon to be a Virginia Supreme Court Justice, in Blackstone’s 1768 “Commentaries on the Laws of England.”

  2. It’s good to see the NRA starting to come around, slow though at it they may be. It’s clear they don’t quite get it, when they say things like;
    “…instead focus their efforts on more directly confronting the criminal misuse of firearms.”

    It’s in the same vein as “enforce the gun laws already on the books”, which was the NRA/Republican meme for decades. It calls for the wholesale violation of rights using existing laws as a compromise to the wholesale violation of rights using new laws. Otherwise why at all bring up terms like “criminal misuse of firearms” and “gun crime” etc., when simply “crime” would suffice? It is exactly like a KKK member being unable to talk about fighting crime without referring to it as “the negro problem” or some such.

    They’re still attaching “guns” to “crime”, meaning they still cannot, or will not, understand. Instead they’re still seeing things through the lens of the anti rights establishment more than seeing things through the eyes of libertarians.

    This is what happens, especially in the corporate structure wherein decisions are made by committee, board vote, etc., and you’re polling the membership, etc., etc. It’s what happens when you take on a job as a gig, or a shtick, rather than as a moral imperative– You’ll come to see the moral imperative as the enemy of reason, tactical compromise, and so on and on and on, because it’ll be so certain to get you into “trouble”.

    • Yes. Not the “criminal misuse of firearms”, but the “criminal misuse of liberty”, unless even that logism directs too much attention to what the criminal is misusing rather than the actions of the criminal himself.

      • “Criminal misuse of liberty” could be taken to support the leftist notion that liberty is dangerous and needs to be curtailed “for our own good”.

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