Mental Contortions Underlie Anti-Gun Rhetoric

Years ago, I got very interested in discussing masculinity as a concept. I’d seen way too many so-called guides that basically argued that to be a man, you need to be some kind of ass or player. If you weren’t scoring with a different chick all the time, or you weren’t basically some kind of jerk to everyone around you, you weren’t a man.

I wrote a book about masculinity, and I looked elsewhere for sanity. I’d hoped I’d found it in something called The Good Men Project. Instead, what I found was a leftist website that was more interested in pushing an agenda that would ultimately undermine masculinity than anything else. At the time, it was basically male feminist nonsense, but they’ve branched out into general politics, all of the same leftist variety.

Today, I came across a piece there with the author illustrating the kinds of mental contortions the anti-gun side engages in just to pretend they’re in the right on gun control, constitutionally speaking.

Following the tragic shooting death on January 24 by Border Customs Patrol (BCP) officers of Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse for the Minnesota Veterans Administration, I wrote a meme on social media that included the words:

“Legislators who think open carry and/or concealed carry gun laws should be a constitutional right might want to rethink this!”

I raised the issue of the legal carrying of firearms in some states like Minnesota because the primary difference between federal officials shooting and killing Alex as opposed to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the shooting death of Renee Nicole Good just weeks before on January 7 may have been that Pretti was legally carrying a holstered handgun with him and Renee was not. Both of these demonstration observers, however, were killed by federal officers.

A man responded to my meme asserting that “Open and concealed carrying of guns is an inalienable right.”

To this I replied: “I think you are confusing the issue with Thomas Jefferson’s famous words in the Declaration of Independence in which he wrote:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

Nowhere in the Declaration of Independence or in our Constitution do they claim that any person has an “inalienable right” to either open or concealed carrying of a weapon. The Constitution’s Second Amendment, however, states:

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Now, I’m not going to get into what follows, at least some of which is blasting Trump’s post-Pretti comments. I’ve blasted them, too, after all.

However, let’s look at this for just a moment and recognize what we’re seeing.

The author argues that the right to keep and bear arms isn’t an inalienable right, and he thinks that the person who said otherwise was confused by Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence.

Oh boy.

First, let’s note that Jefferson never said that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were the totality of inalienable rights. He expressly says, “among these,” meaning there are others.

Further, the Founding Fathers were generally all believers in natural rights. Those were the inalienable rights Jefferson talked about in the Declaration, but didn’t try to completely list.

We also know that the Second Amendment enshrines one of those natural rights, the right people have that cannot and should not be touched.

The person the author is speaking to, by saying open or concealed carry is an inalienable right, was correct, because the Second Amendment protects one of those rights, one that the author correctly quotes by including, “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Bearing arms, much like the name of this very site, means the carrying of guns. As it’s a right that shall not be infringed, means open or concealed.

But that doesn’t get mentioned, really. Oh no, the author argues that because there’s not a “unitary standard” across all 50 states, then the Founding Fathers couldn’t have meant open or concealed carry as part of the Second Amendment.

Considering how there are remarkably inconsistent voting laws, just to name another example of a right, this seems like an awfully silly line of so-called reasoning.

See, the problem here is that the author read all of this, then has to twist himself to interpret the simple words of the Second Amendment in some way so as to make his point, rather than conceding that the person who prompted the piece may have been right.

The author, Warren Blumenfeld, is as anti-gun as they come, apparently, and he’s most definitely someone who has no interest in admitting he’s wrong about the right to keep and bear arms. Instead, like most anti-gunners, he twists and turns literally everything he can into some justification for something that’s plainly never expressed in the Constitution itself, all because it doesn’t make the point he wants it to make.

Once, I’d hoped I’d found sanity at The Good Men Project.

Instead, I found a sea of crazy that just had a different flavor from the Andrew Tates of the world.

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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