{"id":78264,"date":"2018-03-14T20:01:25","date_gmt":"2018-03-15T00:01:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=78264"},"modified":"2018-03-14T19:27:15","modified_gmt":"2018-03-14T23:27:15","slug":"the-difference-between-a-right-and-a-choice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=78264","title":{"rendered":"The Difference Between a Right and a Choice"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-77928 aligncenter\" src=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/colt-defender-209x300.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"209\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/colt-defender-209x300.jpg 209w, https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/colt-defender-232x333.jpg 232w, https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/colt-defender.jpg 365w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 209px) 100vw, 209px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Seems there\u2019s this desperate need\u00a0to impress everyone, by people in the business of so-called journalism, being inflicted upon us these days with how simpatico they are, how in tune they are to whatever they think the current vox populi consists of.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s baloney. It\u2019s virtue signaling from a bunch of self-involved, attention-grabbing twits and nothing else.<\/p>\n<p>This involves the most recent column in the Chitown Tribune by someone named Dan Moran, a columnist, who says he inherited a bunch of guns from various members of his family. He says that he used to hunt when much younger, but doesn\u2019t go hunting now. What this was leading up to was his desperate need to let the silly, whining, self-terrorized gungrabbers \u2013 people who are just <em>positive<\/em> that they will be next (and probably have wet dreams about it, too) &#8211; that he\u2019s on their side, whatever that means. So he informs us, after a prolonged whine of excuses with examples, that he made a date with the local po-po to turn in his guns for destruction, and was assured they were put in the evidence locker, slated for destruction. He says he got a notice to that effect, too.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHey, LOOK!\u201d says he, \u201cI got rid of <em>all<\/em> of those nasty, scary inanimate objects that can\u2019t function without a live human handling them! I\u2019m <em>such<\/em> a good guy!\u00a0 Pat me on the back! Buy me a pizza! I\u2019m on <em>your<\/em> side! <em>I\u2019m one of you!<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He could have simply taken them to the nearest gun shop with his FOID and sold them to a dealer, taken home the cash, and walked away feeling maybe just as virtuous, but did he do that?\u00a0 No. He had to broadcast to everyone what a <em>wonderful guy he is for being so abundantly stupid<\/em> that he missed that very obvious other choice. His excuse was that no one could get hurt by them now. He did not say whether or not anyone ever <em>had<\/em> been hurt by them prior to his Virtue Signaling Episode IIIa\/IV(b).<\/p>\n<p>As stultifyingly dumb as that makes him, I took the time to peruse the language of the U.S. Constitution, trying to find anything that says ownership of weapons of any kind is a requirement for U.S. citizenship.\u00a0 I found nothing. It is a choice we have. Some of us want them. Some do not.<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s what I found with a little effort on my part: \u201c\u2026.<em>provide for the common defence\u2026.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s easy to understand. In Them There Olden Times, the militia ranks were filled by local people, the common people, who came here to escape the grinding tyranny of despotic rulers like Oliver Cromwell and Mary Tudor in the beginning of that exodus, and the Prince Regent later on, who succeeded his crazypants father, and the horrifying bloodbath that Robespierre inflicted on anyone who caught his eye. As time went on, as we know, coming here was to find a way out of famine and poverty when late blight fungus killed off the main source of food for the Irish and Swift wrote his snarky essay \u2018<em>A Modest Proposal<\/em>\u2019.\u00a0 People came here from all over, set up housekeeping and started farms and shops and businesses, which is what this country was about then and always has been, no matter how much the leftreds want to chop it into splinters. But I digress.<\/p>\n<p>The phrase \u2018<em>for the common defence<\/em>\u2019 in that opening paragraph is preceded by \u201c<em>We, the People<\/em>\u201d, meaning <em>all of us<\/em>, <em>not just certain ones<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Many of Those in High Places now and in the past seem to think that this is inapplicable now, that they know better than we do what we need and\/or want.. On the contrary: it is absolutely applicable now, more than ever. It gives us choices. Frankly, not one of those greedy, self-serving slobs in office has the faintest idea what I need or want.<\/p>\n<p>We have the right to decide what to do with our lives, what we want to do for a living, eat, wear, read, etc., where we want to live, and whether or not we want to serve in the military, among other things. Yes, we have had drafts in the past but at present we do not. Military service is a choice. I made that choice twice, and then the war was over, so I left the military and did other things.<\/p>\n<p>And that brings me to this bit of thoughtful prose: the 2<sup>nd<\/sup> Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America: \u2026the <em>right<\/em> of the people <em>to bear arms<\/em> shall not be infringed.<\/p>\n<p>Read that carefully. It says <em><u>the right&#8230;to bear arms<\/u><\/em>. Nowhere in that Amendment does it say <em><u>must bear arms<\/u><\/em>.\u00a0 It is a choice. You can choose to have weapons, or choose not to.<\/p>\n<p>As I have repeatedly indicated, a weapon can be anything from a 9-inch cast iron skillet and some hornet spray or cooking spray with flour, to a multi-round firing rifle that may or may not be useful for hunting in the autumn, winter and\/or spring (turkeys!) I usually do my hunting at the grocery stores and farmers\u2019 markets, although I have found a few turkeys in the aisles at the local bank and Walmart. I\u2019m quite sure that I can use my short sword to carve a turkey, if I have to.<\/p>\n<p>Therefore, when I ran across that virtue-signaling, self-important half page op-ed by this Tribune twit, letting all of us know what a saint he is for being dumber than socks on an elephant, my response was to point and laugh, because Danny boy, you had other choices but you didn\u2019t take them. \u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.chicagotribune.com\/suburbs\/lake-county-news-sun\/opinion\/ct-lns-moran-never-again-walkout-st-0314-20180313-story.html\">http:\/\/www.chicagotribune.com\/suburbs\/lake-county-news-sun\/opinion\/ct-lns-moran-never-again-walkout-st-0314-20180313-story.html<\/a><\/p>\n<p>That does not make you virtuous, Dan. It makes you desperate for attention and praise which, in my view, you don\u2019t deserve. You could have sold those guns to a dealership and donated the cash to a really good cause.<\/p>\n<p>But you didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p>That, you butthead, makes you so stupid you don\u2019t even know you\u2019re alive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Seems there\u2019s this desperate need\u00a0to impress everyone, by people in the business of so-called journalism, being &hellip; <a title=\"The Difference Between a Right and a Choice\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=78264\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Difference Between a Right and a Choice<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":653,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[220,82,156],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78264","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-floggings-will-continue-until-morale-improves","category-gun-grabbing-fascists","category-guns"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78264","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/653"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=78264"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78264\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=78264"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=78264"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=78264"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}