Let me ask you a question you may not have considered: Who is the law designed to protect? The powerful and the well-armed don’t need protection. The framers of the constitution devised all those artful measures for managing our differences precisely to overcome the age-old tyranny of the strong over the weak.
You are students at an elite university in upscale Westchester County. How many of you have been in a fight? Punched someone in the face? Fired a gun? Killed anything larger than a bug? Do you really want to start a fight with millions of NRA members living in the middle of the country, people who keep a rifle in their pick-up and go hunting every weekend? These people, who may live 100 miles from the nearest sheriff’s station, can fend for themselves. Can you?
Your rhetoric about violence may push the country closer to rampant lawlessness. Perhaps that gives you a thrill of transgressive titillation. But if open conflict comes, it won’t be a game for the amusement of children playing at “war.”
A cynic who thinks you should face the consequences of your juvenile fantasies might paraphrase Menken by saying, “Give the students what they want – good and hard.” I won’t be that cynic. Instead, I’ll urge you to think carefully about what civil breakdown looks like. You may see it soon enough in Zohran Mamdani’s New York. You may be wishing for more law enforcement — even from the federal government — before too long.
Your posturing about violence is thoughtless and dangerous. The rule of law exists to protect people like you, and when it breaks down, the people most likely to get hurt are you.
Cut it out.
— Diodotus in Playing ‘War’ at Sarah Lawrence
The Rule of Law means the law is written down so everyone knows ahead of time what is permitted, what is forbidden, and what is mandated. It also applies to everyone, rich and poor, powerful and weak.
It’s a myth, a fig leaf covering up Rule of Men. The proof is in how an appeals court can reverse a jury 1-2, reverse themselves en bank 8-7, and the Supreme Court can reverse back again 4-5. Each step takes a year or two, and the justices have the brightest law clerks, the best law libraries, a pile of amicus briefs telling them how to think, and all the time in the world to debate the issue — and yet they somehow still differ on what the law means in that particular case. Men interpret laws, and laws mean only what those men decide, after years of study. Mere mortals have no hope of guessing what justices will decide years after they committed what they did not think was a crime.
This didn’t matter back when government’s meddling consisted of running the post office, starting wars, and raising revenue through low taxes.
We don’t have that kind of government any more. The day-to-day meddling really took off after LBJ and Nixon, the EPA, OSHA, vehicle design, CAFE, 55 mph, Prop 65, the War on Poverty, climate change, Jeffrey Epstein, you name it.
That’s why people don’t have faith in the Rule of Law. It doesn’t apply to everyone, and no one really knows what laws mean. Remember “We had to pass Obamacare to know what was in it”? Not even the legislators know what they vote for, and we have a Supreme Court justice, a woman, who doesn’t know what a woman is.
It’s a myth.
**cough cough** en banc
But yes, to support the spirit of what you’re saying, I present to you our California AB63, enacted in 2016, declared unconstitutional in 2017 by a federal judge, appealed by CA and subsequently declared unconstitutional a second time in 2018 by the Ninth Circuit, believe it or not…appealed again and declared unconstitutional a third time in 2019 by federal Judge Benitez, who permanently enjoined two of the law’s four parts…
…then the Chief Justice of the Ninth took a very rare action by calling for his own en banc review (AB63 had not been appealed again by CA), whipping up a not-surprising mix of 11 judges consisting of 8 Dems and 3 Repubs. And guess how the ruling went in favor of that “unconstitutional” law this time?…8 Dems in favor, and the 3 Repubs against. So our statewide ban on the sale/transfer/importation of magazines holding more than 10 rds remains intact ten years later, despite having been properly ruled unconstitutional multiple times.
Remember, a government strong enough to give you the necessities of life is also strong enough to take them away.
The entire article is worth the read, here’s a little more :
““Last month, Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner issued a statement that would have been unthinkable from a major American law-enforcement official a generation ago. Speaking about federal immigration agents, Krasner declared: ‘In a country of 350 million, we outnumber them. If we have to hunt you down the way they hunted down Nazis for decades, we will find your identities. We will find you. We will achieve justice.‘”
The students, Abrams notes, are listening.
What is clear from the article, however, is that these young leftists have a very distorted idea what it means to choose violence over the rule of law. I’m hardly the first person to notice that many of the people interfering with ICE are delusionally imagining they can violently confront armed law enforcement agents without any consequences. At least two people have now lost their lives, but the lesson still has not sunk in. The communists and anarchists in the 1930s, and even the 1960s, were certainly depraved and destructive. But they at least possessed a certain realism or worldliness; they knew that violence is a two-way street, that revolutions are bloody, and that they lead to death and destruction on both sides.”
Yes, they have a VERY distorted view of political violence, and they are well on their way to getting a very rude and personal reality check.
On the upside, it will result in easing the housing crisis, with lots of recently-vacant properties up for sale and rent…
Left wing rules:
If you’re conservative, saying men are not women is literal violence and you deserve to be shot in the neck.
If you’re leftist, throwing rocks and bricks at federal agents, trying to run them over with your car, terrorizing churches, setting fires, and beating up and killing conservatives are all forms of peaceful protest, and anyone who tries to stop you is violating your civil rights.
Conservative rules:
Yeah, left wing rules don’t work for us and we are just gonna shoot you and put you out of your misery.
Why not pick a fight with millions of NRA members? The majority of them are back-the-blue geriatrics who’d shove themselves to the front of the line for a chance to sell their liberty for a 10% bump in Social Security.
The left has demonstrated time and again that they’ll gladly burn, murder and loot for their cause, whatever that may be, while the “legal” system has demonstrated time and again they won’t do shit to punish those rioting lefties and the right has demon time and again they’d prefer to sit on their hands and keep their heads down lest they be called names.
A good starting point is for the right to understand they are being called names while they sit and keep their heads down. Fetal position all you want. They’re just going to keep kicking.
Every one of them considers themself the main character, reinforced by watching movies where a 98 pound woman demolishes a 250 pound male.
It’s not so much the gun skills as the coddling since birth and never taken a punch or fallen out of a tree.
Sometimes it is necessary to water the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and traitors.
The first time it took about 80 years to get to that point. It’s been about 170 years since then. U.S. schools stopped teaching American History (and what made America exceptional) and Civics about a generation ago – about the same time the draft was ended. Until then even the sons of privilege could find themselves doing Basic Training next to a farm boy and a boy from The Hood. There was a leveling experience which the current crop of privileged children have never seen or heard of. Ignorance of history leads to repeating mistakes. We may see that happen again – with the same lessons again taught in blood.
Can you imagine a soi boy standing guard at two in the morning, forty degrees and steady rain?
When one holds the absolute moral high ground, war cannot harm you; only your opponents. It is what comes from generations of participation trophy awards. Evil denies the righteous their deserved comfort, and that is, like, uuuhhmm, like, unfair.