The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. No, no, never, never, uh-uh-uh.
Period. Full stop. The Second Amendment is explicit and absolutely absolute. If you insist on continuing this silly conversation about gun control, well, you leave my no choice but to shoot you. I have that right.
What's that? Murder laws? Please. Try reading the Constitution for a change. It says nothing about murder. Why give me the right to own firearms but prohibit me from shooting people? That would be stupid.
Sure, there are other laws regarding murder, but they're not in the Constitution. So I choose to ignore them. Yamhill County Commissioner Lindsay Berschauer has my back. She wants to turn the county into a Second Amendment Sanctuary.
At last! We're finally applying the concept of "sanctuary" to deadly weapons instead of poor people.
In Lindsay's lurid fantasies, no county employee could enforce state or federal gun laws -- including background checks, regulations on sales and transfers, and restrictions on ammunition and accessories. Some state law says you can't pack a rod because you're "dangerous"?
Fuggedaboutit.
County officials won't hassle you. They get it. You go out on a blind date. The dame gets mouthy. You need to be prepared. Don't like it? Take it up with the Second Amendment.
Lindsay can be a bit mouthy herself at times, what with taking a man's job and all, but under that ritzy $10 hairdo of hers, she has a point. She knows her stuff. It doesn't matter what they do in Salem or D.C. The Constitution is the final word on everything.
So I personally look forward to Lindsay taking down the stupid metal detector you have to pass through just to attend a county commission meeting. You know those guys won't even let you bring so much as a pocket knife in the courthouse? I once had to walk all the way back to my car and put my machete in the trunk.
This is what happens when you elect Democrats. Suddenly, you're no longer allowed to bring a machete into a county courthouse just to give your legal argument a little extra oomph.
As a respected member of Fourth Estate, I never go anywhere without my pen, notepad and machete. Not only is the Second Amendment absolute, so is the First Amendment.
Congress will make no law abridging the freedom of the press. None. Zero. Zip.
That means that I, as a credentialed member of the news media, can do whatever I want, whenever I want. If I want to show up at Lindsay's doomsday bunker (you know she has one) at midnight with my machete and 50 of my closest newsroom buddies ... hey, freedom of the press. Look it up.
Once you embrace the Constitution, you can cherry-pick whatever laws you want to obey. The Oregon Constitution, for example, says legislative sessions should be open to the public.
If that public happens to be in the mood to break doors and windows, attack legislators and spread the plague, you know what they say in the GOP. You can't make the omelette of freedom without bashing a few eggheads.
When the Oregon Constitution was chiseled in stone in the 1850s, the wise white men who wrote it said absolutely nothing about Zoom meetings or attending meetings and submitting testimony electronically.
Why? Obviously, they disapproved of 21st-century technology.
They wanted the public in the building, regardless of even the most extenuating circumstances. So when a mob of respectable lunatics came kicking and screaming Dec. 21, state Rep. Mike Nearman, R-Independence, did what any patriotic idiot would do. He let them in.
Mike and Lindsay obviously got their political science degrees from the same chewing gum wrapper.
They realize they must obey inviolable constitutional absolutes and ignore all those weak-need feather merchants and their incessant whining about public safety, common sense and baseline sanity.
The state and federal constitutions supersede all of that and establish edicts that give no quarter to interpretation by anyone other than Lindsay Berschauer, Mike Nearman and a few hundred of their gun-toting, window-smashing friends from the National Alliance of Angry White Mobs.
Booyah, I say because I'm macho.
We live in dangerous times. And dangerous times call for dangerous people. Otherwise, everything would be a lot less dangerous. Why is this so difficult for people to understand?
Mike Nearman articulated it at a town hall Feb. 16 in way only Mike Nearman can that doesn't at all sound like he just chugalugged a quart of cough syrup.
“A republic is based on the rule of law," he said. "That means we have a Constitution. There’s one transitional state. It’s between a republic and an oligarchy, and it’s a whatever-you-want-to-do-ocracy, or a whatever-you-can-get-away-with-ocracy and that’s kind of what we’re in right now."
Wow. If that isn't straight from the horse's ... I better say "mouth."
Such impassioned political oratory reminds me of a simpler time, specifically my boyhood days at Barnett Elementary School when Marvin Klomp realized his 3-minute oral report on civics was actually supposed to be eight minutes.
More importantly, Mike is right.
We live by the rule of law. What kind of country would we have if people in public office simply did whatever they wanted or could get away with? What if they took it upon themselves to decide what laws we should follow and what laws we should simply ignore?
God only knows what kind of anarchy we would be allowing to flow through the Capitol doors.
We must follow the Constitution. And the Constitution says grab your guns and clubs. It's a free for all. Apparently to have law and order, we have to have anarchy.
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