By ‘Bill of Rights’ they mean the 2nd and 10th amendments
One of the most ridiculous arguments made during the debate about background checks was, “Why pass new laws? Criminals won’t follow them anyway. Stick to legislating against those who actually listen — like gays and women.”
This isn’t an argument against a particular law — it’s an argument against the rule of law.
You might remember the “rule of law” from the Clinton impeachment era when Lindsey Graham joined Republicans in trying to remove the president over an affair. That didn’t work. And apparently the lesson Graham — who is so desperate to avoid a primary challenge that he’s considering surgery to make him resemble Joseph McCarthy — learned after 9/11 is that the Constitution just wasn’t applicable anymore.
I mean how would the victors of the Battle of Yorktown ever imagined actual warfare in America!
Graham wants the suspect in the Boston bombing, an American citizen, to be held as an enemy combatant even though he has no affiliation to Al Qaeda, which is the only reason a someone can be named an enemy combatant. Why is this young man to be robbed of his rights? Because he has “ties to radical Islamic thought.”
Ties to “thought.” Not to actual radical Islamists plotting against the United States.
And this is a guy who is so worried about depriving potential terrorists their Second Amendment rights that he wouldn’t even vote to expand background checks — even though criminals wouldn’t follow that law anyway.
This belief that the law should bend to your will is even more dangerous than the belief that laws have no purpose since certain people won’t follow them.
We have workplace safety regulations to save lives. And Graham is right, the criminals won’t follow them. That’s why we have regulators that need to check up on them and make the businesses so sure they’re about to be checked out that they follow the laws that save lives.
The Majority Report‘s Sam Seder made the point that we’re willing to go to great lengths to prevent lives being lost to terrorism yet we do nothing to protect the thousands of Americans who die each year as result of negligent employers.
The factory owners in West, Texas may be responsible for more deaths than the two suspects in Boston and they likely won’t even be charged as criminals.
We need laws that criminals wouldn’t normally follow and we need the funding to hire regulators and law enforcement to make sure they do. And foremost we need lawmakers who believe in the laws they were elected to uphold. Lawmakers who won’t bend to gun manufacturers get in the way of law enforcement.
The First Amendment was designed to protect speech we didn’t want to hear And the Constitution only matters if applies to all citizens, regardless of how they look or think.
