Taking a gander at Horwitz's latest attempt to cook liberty's goose

Josh Horwitz, of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, is once again arguing that the people of the United States have no right to resist tyranny (this is far from the first time he has made such an argument)--this time, oddly enough, using Mexico to illustrate his "point."

Here in America we often hear the gun lobby spout off about how freedom is best preserved by unfettered access to firearms, but the current situation in Mexico demonstrates that reality can sometimes get in the way of public relations slogans.

[ . . . ]

Additionally, Vice President Dick Cheney and a majority of Members of Congress recently endorsed an "insurrectionist" reading of the Second Amendment in an amicus brief in the landmark Supreme Court case of District of Columbia v. Heller.* The Court is reviewing a decision by a panel of the D.C. Court of Appeals which held--without precedent--that the Second Amendment, among other things, protects an individual right to possess arms to defend against the "depredations of a tyrannical government." Practically, this would mean that individuals would have the constitutional right to arm themselves and violently overthrow our government once they decided it had become oppressive (not unlike the unilateral action that Timothy McVeigh took in bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995).

Unfortunately for Josh, the argument he never tires of knocking down is a straw man, and is not, as far as I am aware, made by any gun rights advocates. No one, to my knowledge, claims that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to revolt against the government. Such a right does not even make sense--revolution waged with the permission of government isn't revolution.

The Second Amendment exists not to safeguard the right to revolt against the Constitutional government, but to protect the people's means to resist a government that refuses to be bound by the Constitution. While the government adheres to the Constitution, the people are obligated to obey the laws written and passed by their elected representatives. If and when the government ceases that adherence, all bets are off. The Second Amendment is the mechanism by which those "bets" will be rescinded.

I was planning to write more, but other matters intrude. Perhaps later.

P.S. ThirdPower and I seem to be on similar wavelengths again--Days of Our Trailers covered this, too.