LTC Bateman

American Mercenary

Well I finally read the LTC Bateman opinion piece.  You can read the drivel here: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/bateman-on-guns-120313

Make no mistake, LTC’s in the US Army do not put down words lightly.  He meant everything he put onto paper, and truly believes he is smarter than 5 US Supreme Court Justices.  So you have to ask what his agenda is, and why he is making it now?  

What the light colonel failed to understand, which is a discredit both on his education and the Officer Corps, is that the 2nd Amendment doesn’t give a single right.

The Second Amendment ensures a right to the States to form militias, and ensures that the People of the United Stated of America can keep and bear arms completely separate from militia service.

LTC Bateman should know this, having taught military history at the US Military Academy at West Point.  That he doesn’t makes me weep for the cadets who had to suffer through his revisionist agenda.

The Founding Fathers weren’t idjits, and so they understood that to have a militia, you needed an armed populace.  By protecting the right of the people to keep and bear arms as an individual right, that protects the right of the states to keep militias for the defense of the State.

The Bill of Rights is a list of “negative liberties” in that it is a list of things that the Federal Government (and the States by incorporation) cannot do to you.

As far as the list of approved weapons, I think LTC Bateman is horribly mistaken if he thinks that reducing access to any type of firearm will reduce violent crime.  As a history professor I’m sure he could tell us all the wonderful success stories about how gun control reduced murder, rape, robbery, etc.  Oh wait, he can’t.

Personally I don’t know why LTC Bateman has such a hardon for .70 caliber black powder muskets.  According to Wikipedia rifling dates to the 15th Century and those illiterate cousin humping rednecks from flyover country (although in that day I suppose they would call it “portage country”) made the Kentucky Long Rifle an important part of our cultural heritage by not only hunting, but by killing redcoats.

From http://www.revolutionarywararchives.org/longrifle.html

These marksmen were organized into small, independent units and ordered to pick off British officers during the inactivity around Boston after the Bunker Hill fight. Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet said on August 14, 1775: “The express, who was sent by the Congress, is returned here from the Eastward, and says he left the Camp last Saturday; that the riflemen picked off ten men in one day, three of whom were Field-officers, that were reconnoitering ; one of them was killed at a distance of 250 yards, when only half his head was seen.” Such reports caused great indignation when republished in London. The backwoodsmen were called “. .. shirt-tail men, with their cursed twisted (rifled) guns, the most fatal widow- and-orphan-makers in the world”.

So if every point that LTC Bateman made easily refuted by anyone with a lick of history knowledge, and a working understand of a “preparatory clause” in use in the English Language, why did he write his drivel?

Because in some social circles mind, preparatory clauses don’t matter. Repeating firearms, were in use at the time of the American Revolution although the Constitution came after.  Since the Second Amendment was adopted after the revolution was successful, so you should really make the argument that since it was adopted during a time of peace that it was really meant to apply to the population from whom the militias of the several states would be levied.

To at least half of all Americans, truth is anything that advances the cause.  Sure it takes more mental flexibility to be a leftist, one generation claiming that the Democratic party has the platform for the white man and Republicans have the platform for the negro, and the next generation comparing the TEA Party to the armed militia wing of the Democratic party, the KKK.  I guess that once you realize that the truth and facts don’t really matter to leftists that you can give up on the fiction of “being better than them” and getting down to the brass tacks of fighting for your freedom.

Which reminds me of the “fake, but accurate” picture that someone attributed to the Brady Campaign to Disarm Victims, “Rape can last 10 seconds, murder lasts forever.  Don’t fight back” meme that some conservatives claim makes those who repost it no better than the enemy.  Here’s the rub sparky, I don’t care that it is fake because it shows what the enemy truly believes.  There is no “common gunsense” about it, it is their argument distilled to the core, that being a victim is better than protecting yourself.  Put into concrete terms like that, why not post it?  If the truth to the enemy is anything that advances their cause, why not use their rules against them?  Seriously, if you are going to fight, fight to win.

Cause that is what LTC Bateman is doing.

http://randomthoughtsandguns.blogspot.com/2013/12/ltc-bateman.html