Letter to an Ignorant Hero

It is more than a little sad that a man like Mr. Crumbo put his life on the line in dangerous combat missions in the service of a Constitution and Bill of Rights he clearly knew nothing about.

As various other posters to the op-ed linked above have made clear, the 1994 "assault weapons" ban did not ban so much as ONE assault weapon or machine gun capable of firing one shot per trigger pull. It was, for all intents and purposes, a law to ban scary looking features on some firearms, and did not in any way affect their lethality or rate of fire.

The Second Amendment that Mr. Crumbo so clearly does not understand was not written to protect your hunting rights. It was written by a group of very wise men who had just watched a army comprised largely of civilian militiamen defeat one of the most formidable land armies on the planet. The Second Amendment was expressly written to protect the rights of following generations to own arms that would be suitable for them to use as militiamen if the need again arises, as it has repeatedly through American history, most recently (to my knowledge) in the Battle of Athens/McMinn County War in 1946.

The semi-automatic intermediate-caliber rifles that mimic the look and feel of today's modern military weapons, far from being something not protected by the Second Amendment, are the very weapons that should be most protected by a Right that ensures Americans never again need feel the boot of a tyrant on their necks. It is perhaps the Right most singularly responsible for ensuring that our United States boasts what may be the oldest continuously-functioning government on Earth.

The Second Amendment was never about home defense, or hunting, or target shooting. The clear purpose of the right to keep and bear arms was to create a nation of riflemen, a citizenry armed with weapons suitable for use as a militiaman.

If former Navy SEAL Kim Crumbo is the weapons expert he claims to be, perhaps he can point out a civilian weapon more suitable for the militia use imagined by our Founding Fathers that the very semi-automatic rifles that he now says should be banned.

I thank Mr. Crumb for his service, and hope that he uses his retirement to educate himself about a Constitution he defended, but so clearly never understood.

(h/t NC Tea Party Revolution)