The Second Amendment Is NOT for Duck-Hunters

Sometimes the arguments advanced against the Right to Keep and Bear Arms seem like bric-a-brac; the Scary Story stuff about typically law-abiding citizens suddenly going nuts and shooting up Summerfest, or a playground, are actually given credibility.

But after you've read the post linked here, some of you may come to the realization that The 2nd has another, far more serious, purpose.

"Geek With a .45" tours #60 Andrassy Street in Budapest.

Approaching Andrássy street, we hopped off and walked the few blocks to number 60. Along the way, Madga explained that the museum was housed in what used to be the headquarters of the various political and secret police organizations that had terrorized Hungarian society.

...the Hungarian communists set about grasping Hungarian society by the throat, implementing the complete horror show, systematically setting out to destroy the Hungarian way of life and replace it with a Sovietized collectivism. Hungary was placed under total surveillance, with tapes and cameras running day and night. A shadow army of informants was formed, completely permeating the society. Files and records were kept on every person that came to their attention. A slip of the tongue could prove painful, if not fatal.

To keep people in fear and off balance, and to prevent the widespread but weak and ineffectual resistance movement from attaining any coordination or coherency, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people were arrested and sent to concentration camps. Thousands of executions were held. People would be abducted from the streets, stuffed into the black cars. Some were never seen again, others would appear months later, their bodies and spirits broken under torture. Those who received trials at all were given "due process" in kangaroo courts, sometimes for show, and sometimes to simply cloak the proceedings under the color of law. People were beaten, tortured, starved, dispossessed of their property, resettled, incarcerated or tossed into camps daily.

One in three families were directly abused in some way, shape or form.

True, we Americans have some wrinkles to sort out regarding our own freedoms, but our own people who think that we're living in some sort of a "police state" haven’t the slightest fucking clue what a real police state is.

He quotes Solzhenitsyn: (The Gulag Archipilaego)

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, polkers, or whatever else was at hand? After all, you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you'd be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur -- what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"

Some good writing describes reactions at a reception held later that day:

The few folks from Western Europe shook their heads in abject disbelief. The thought of doing such a thing was utterly alien to them, and they objected. "We have no means to do anything like that!"

...The majority falls prey to the delusion—popular in some circles - that ordinary people are too careless and stupid to own guns, and we would be far better off leaving all weapons in the hands of professionals on the government payroll. But the simple truth - born of experience - is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people.

The payoff paragraph:

The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for reelection and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees. However improbable these contingencies may seem today, facing them unprepared is a mistake a free people get to make only once.

...no fucking IDEA of what a police state really is....

HT: Grim's Hall