There is something appropriate about the simultaneous appearance in today’s news of the Supreme Court’s decision on gun rights and Kagan’s first day of hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee. The SCUSA decision effectively re-instates the right of any law-abiding citizen to own a gun and protect his family, his own life and his property from unlawful invasion. What the ruling boils down to is that if a burglar or serial killer enters your home or other property with criminal intent you have the legal right to shoot him/her dead. You don’t have to read him his Miranda Rights or check that he has a weapon, just have reason to believe that his presence in the circumstances puts your life and property at risk. One would think that every sane person would be pleased at the ruling.
The objective research of crime statistics in the USA provides overwhelming evidence that legal gun ownership drastically reduces burglary and robbery, for the criminals who prey on the weak and vulnerable are deterred. When I lived in the UK, a country where the law-abiding have long been deprived of the right to own and bear arms, burglary had become so commonplace, that the police often reacted with indifference. It is a short step from denying the law-abiding the means of resistance to empowering the criminal, for the criminal not playing by the rules acquires the power of oppression. One consequence of disarming the good is to create a genuine victim class. I am not talking here about the usual ‘victim’ classes, who are not really victim classes at all, but the real victim class in Leftist-dominated societies. This victim class consists of those who work hard, save their money, look after their kids and their homes, live by a Christian-based moral code and are law-abiding. Societies that prevent these people from protecting themselves travel, slowly but surely, to a radically new destination. The reason for this is that the Left politicizes crime just as it politicizes every issue, for the Left believes that EVERYTHING is political and not moral. Thus, to the Leftist, abortion is a political issue, as is marriage, as is entertainment, as is the countryside and as is education. We in the West live in Societies that have become wholly politicized, thanks to the assertiveness of Leftist ideology, now promoted by the MSM (Mainstream Media). The rest of us have no choice but to recognize the political context of all issues or be defeated and destroyed.
Here is where I am going! In the UK I spent quite a lot of professional time in criminal law courts over some 20 years. I saw the pendulum swing away from the law-abiding and more and more to the criminals and the feckless. As the Law Schools and Higher Learning places fell to the Leftists, so in time did the Courts and the Legislatures. At first it was the police who found themselves pilloried in Court cases and pilloried in the Media. In due course local criminal court precincts became carnivals for the newly-defined oppressed. The accused criminal would arrive outside the Court house where he/she would be surrounded by (unemployed and welfare-supported) friends. The real victim of crime would stay out of sight, as would the genuine witnesses, fearing the hostility of the mob, intimidation, and most likely a day of reckoning down the road. The police, lacking the moral support of politicians and academics, began to treat all outside the Court house as equals. As a consequence the good citizens, in a minority because their peers were at work, dreaded the days of judgment. Inside the Court house, the judiciaries, from local magistrates to Judges, all increasingly chosen for their Leftist views, looked on approvingly as decent citizens were humbled in the witness box. The criminals, freely represented by an army of legal experts usually swaggered from the Court house with a slap on the wrist. The victim of crime avoided the Town Center and many neighborhoods for the next year or two.
There is a thread that runs from macro legal decisions to the micro at local level. A society that upholds capital punishment for murder and upholds the right of home-owners and law-abiding citizens to be armed does not lead inexorably down to a society where at local level, the mob rules the Court House. The truth is that those who oppose capital punishment and who wish to ban guns for the law-abiding are motivated by political ideology. These are the people who are outraged when a homeowner shoots dead a burglar yet who are curiously unmoved and philosophical when a homeowner is murdered defending his family or property. There is a wholly political divide between those who feel for the criminal class and those who feel for the homeowner. For a Leftist it does not matter that the murdered homeowner be old, sick and defenseless, his/her demise is akin to a leaf falling from a tree. A thug shot dead is somehow a valuable life taken too early and the Media rolls out tales of a college course just about to be embarked upon, a life just about to be turned around and a devastated mother or pregnant girlfriend mourning an irreplaceable loss.
Obama is on the side of the criminal. He will not say so publicly, but all community organizers are on the side of the criminal! His mentors in Chicago see the criminal Classes as the oppressed who have the potential for revolution. They see the law-abiding Christian folk as obstacles to their revolution. We can be sure that his nominee for the Supreme Court vacancy, Elena Kagan, shares all his views. She will not say so in the Senate Hearings, but she is absolutely and ideologically opposed to allowing the law-abiding to have guns and she is just as determinedly opposed to capital punishment for murderers. She probably has a very personal interest in promoting same-sex marriage and erasing Christianity from the public place. She does not support free speech. Like Obama and all Leftists she views the Constitution as an obstacle to the kind of society she has yearned for her whole life and she will relish setting the Constitution aside on every occasion. The Senate Hearings are a farce, for Leftists, believing that the ends justify the means, are prepared to lie through their teeth. The Media is salivating over the appointment of Kagan, for the Media Class knows exactly where she will stand once on the Court. All Media writers and reporters are busy ‘presenting’ her with affable photos and a benign history. It is for the power to appoint Supreme Court Justices like Kagan (above all else) that the Media Class placed and keeps the incompetent Obama in the White House.