Culminating months of political maneuvering that justifiably leery Americans observed with suspicion, the California Assembly Thursday passed a resolution calling for a US Constitutional Convention to undermine the inherent right to keep and bear arms that the Second Amendment explicitly makes off-limits from infringement by all forms of government.
His pet political subversion would be called the “Twenty-Eighth Amendment,” and one particular report on the vote illustrates not only the dangerously deceptive way Newsom and his allies attempt to manipulate the language to mask their intent, it also sheds light on how some news outlets also participate in this vast form of often subtle propaganda.
Get ready, because the report from Taryn Luna, for the LA Times, is almost transcendent in its assumptive embrace of biased lingua in order to hide what actually is going on, and the deception begins in the editors’ choice of headline:
“California lawmakers pass Newsom's call for U.S. constitutional convention on gun control”
…Which perpetuates a widespread and longstanding linguistic myth that members of state governments are “lawmakers” and hides the true difference between Natural Law and statutes.
“Law” is immutable, natural, and eternal, philosophically acknowledged through millennia as discernable through inductive and deductive reasoning and, most important, recognized as immutably infused into nature by God, the Creator. Statutes, on the other hand, are commands, prohibitions, and punishments made up by human beings claiming the ability to take tax money from others and then use that tax money to write their commands, prohibitions, and punishments as the standards by which everyone else must operate, on threat of additional aggression by those politicians.
Statutes pertain to the edicts of the generic state, and the Law is Natural Law. If politicians pass a statute, it’s not a universal “law.” In fact, the very fact that the state gets its funds by transgressing the right of people to own property means that everything the state does runs counter to Natural Law.
Related: Gavin Newsom Proposes Constitutional Amendment to Curtail Second Amendment Rights | MRCTV
And that’s just the troubling headline. Keep in mind, this LA Times piece is not labeled as an editorial. It’s purportedly “journalism.” Yet the “reporter,” Ms. Luna, opens with another sign that one ought to be wary of the content, writing:
“California lawmakers on Thursday approved Gov. Gavin Newsom's resolution calling for a constitutional convention of the states to consider a new amendment on gun control, a politically astute yet seemingly unattainable proposal from the Democratic leader.”
How a “journalist” can feel comfortable determining that Newsom’s move is “politically astute” is a mystery, unless Luna also is moonlighting as a political consultant for the Governor.
For a better assessment of the resolution, as proposed in June, one can turn to MRCTV’s Craig Bannister, who wrote at the time:
“Newsom’s proposed amendment would raise the minimum firearm purchase age nationwide from 18 to 21, mandate universal background checks, institute a waiting period for gun purchases and prohibit civilians from purchasing so-called ‘assault weapons.’”
Which gives observers pause to recognize that such a proposal indicates that any supporter of it tacitly is admitting that they cannot impose any of these “rules” and mandates and prohibitions without breaching the Second Amendment and, more deeply, infringing on the right to keep and bear arms they so clearly want to breach.
Yet, at the LA Times, Luna depicts the potential of government attacks on the right to keep and bear arms as “gun control protections.”
Which is simply and absurdly untrue.
“Robert A. Schapiro, dean of the University of San Diego School of Law, and other scholars note that it's hard to imagine that the gun control protections would be approved even if a convention were called.”
Curious… that term “gun control protections.”
Such a soft-sounding label. Yet it presents the breathtaking question of how a reporter can depict as “gun control” actual threats of state armed violence against people who peaceably want to exercise their natural right to keep and bear arms, and it also makes one wonder how a reporter also can depict such state aggression as “protection.”
At least she and Shapiro have the “difficult to approve” part right.
As Craig Bannister pointed out in June, the Founders made the process for starting a “Constitutional Convention” a long and difficult one. Newsom’s California call must see 33 other states join before it can be heard in the US legislature, where it must be passed by two-thirds of the House and Senate, respectively. Then, the convention could occur, but any changes to the Constitution would, in turn require ratification of three-fourths of the state legislatures.
Those are tough hurdles to jump. Of course, if one looks at the origins of the US Constitution, one sees that the so-called “Founding Document” itself was not really the “founding document” it often is purported to be, and that it replaced the extant Articles of Confederation in a manner prohibited by the Articles.
According to the Articles of Confederation, which ran from 1777 to 1789, any amendments to it had to be passed by one-hundred percent of the existing States. Alexander Hamilton and his centralizers knew that they could not impose on Americans a central bank and central taxing powers like tariffs and excise taxes via the Articles (which had no provisions for them), and that his crowd couldn’t succeed in amending the Articles to add such powers to steal. So he and his cronies got tricky. They originally claimed they wanted to “amend the Articles,” but when they generated enough attention, they switched tack and called to toss the Articles altogether and create a whole new rule book. Many of the initial signers of the Declaration of Independence were so offended by the deceptive operation that they refused to attend the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787.
And, of course, the great Nineteenth Century abolitionist, legal scholar, and philosopher Lysander Spooner has offered us the even deeper insight that no one can forcibly sign a “ruling document” over anyone else alive, nor for anyone to be born in future generations. To claim the power to do so is arrogant and assumptive.
Related: Gavin Newsom Calls For a 28th Amendment to Overturn Gun Rights | MRCTV
In fact, it's enslaving, at its most fundamental level.
Which brings us back to rights and law. The machinations of man always seem to be couched in rhetoric and in illegitimate assumptions of power via the “statutes” they write and call laws, even as they impose their will on others.
But Natural Law prohibits people from imposing their wills on others. We have the right to control our lives and property and to defend them with firearms, period. Those rights last through the ages, they are inherent, and always stand, regardless of what the "Statute Writers" might try to do, or, perhaps, someday, get away with doing, to the US Constitution.
That lesson rises out of this news like a compass-setting star, as does the realization that, by calling for this convention, Newsom and his elitist gun-grabbers implicitly acknowledge that they cannot impose their gun-grabs without breaching the Constitution as it stands.
At least they’ve tipped their hands in this poker game they force onto us.
Of course, that doesn’t mean they won’t keep trying to cheat.