Did the recent Islamist violence on a London street prove the point of the second amendment, demonstrate the rationale behind it - not per se as understood by gun rights advocates presently but much more importantly as understood by the founding fathers who fashioned it? Ah... yes, I think it did. Essentially, the Bill of Rights establishes clearly the rules and principles by which it will be understood that the government is the servant of the people and not the other way around - the founders saw fit to make the right to own a weapon second only to the right to freely speak ones mind and that's because they believed that a people that surrenders utterly the protection of its freedoms and liberties to an overbearing state truly renders themselves powerless to defend those liberties and freedoms and thusly cedes in essence all authority to the abusive autocracy they have opened the door to. In this sense the second amendment's significance is almost more in its power as a symbol than in any practical application it may have - this is why when liberals attack it what a conservative hears is the expression of a foolishly naive trust in the unfettered growth of government and the coming of a ruinous enfeeblement.
Was not all that distressingly put on display in London? Isn't that what we saw? Powerlessness? A people who looked powerless, felt powerless, acted powerless and enfeebled, standing around forlornly waiting twenty god damn minutes for the few cops who are allowed to carry guns to show up? And don't you dare go on Facebook or some such public forum to express outrage over this sad state of affairs because that's a crime in England - free speech is tolerated but only if you have nice, government approved things to say about people, regardless of whether or not some of them in the name of their god happen to be trying to chop your head off with a meat cleaver. All seems rather pathetic - and this from the country that gave us John Locke, gave us the whole idea of a constitutional democracy, of a bill of rights - that a mere 70 years ago endured the horrors of the blitz in defense of those rights and beliefs - and this is what it's come to. Sad.
One thing it makes clear is that America is now truly alone in the world as last defender of what's left of the Western tradition [although after eight years of Obama even that slim hope may prove moot] - but forget about Europe, they're lost - look at what's happening in Sweden - that's the future of Europe, and what it will lead to is either the accelerated growth of extreme right wing parties across the continent that fractures polities in all sorts of unpleasant ways or Europe simply as a whole rolling over and playing dead. Not sure what would be worse.
