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SEIFFE:  A Safer World?

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

By Ralf Seiffe

Last week The Chicago Tribune published another chapter in its unending effort to erase the Second Amendment.  Ronald S. Safer wrote this week’s assault; a tear-stained opinion that exploits the tragic death of honor student Starkeshia Reed.  The former federal prosecutor accuses legislators who did not act to extend the ban on so-called “assault weapons” as corrupt and fearful of the National Rifle Association.  Safer blatantly shows his disgust for the Second Amendment but his argument also shows contempt for the First.  

Mr. Safer holds that the felon who fired 29 shots was able to commit his crime because the National Rifle Association used its political power to “corrupt” legislators.  Mr. Safer apparently believes Congress would have extended the Clinton-era ban but for the influence of America ’s oldest civil rights organization.  He equates the NRA’s political power with fear on Capitol Hill and accuses the organization of employing the political power its members represent to influence legislation.  

Imagine that!  

Apparently, Mr. Safer’s real complaint is that the NRA has assembled its members, spoken freely amongst themselves, published a magazine with relevant stories reporting politicians’ activities and organized to redress their grievances with the federal government.  The result is that they were able to convince Congress not to extend the assault weapons ban.  

These activities depend on the First Amendment not the Second.  For watchers of The Simpsons who don’t know, the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment include freedom of speech, the right to assemble peaceably, the right to a free press and the right to redress grievances with the government.  The NRA availed themselves of each of these.  The only one of the five that they did not use is the guarantee of the free exercise of religion.  

Mr. Safer’s specific points on guns are trite and easily dismissed.  Nevertheless, his opinion deserves wide reading because it demonstrates how a determined effort to destroy the Second Amendment must also corrode the First.  His opinion reveals that the left’s indiscriminate enmity towards so-called assault weapons extends far beyond guns, displaying a deep-seated hostility to and mistrust of our basic constitutional rights.  In this case, Safer says the NRA’s free exercise of its constitutional rights “corrupts” Congress and thereby creates a danger in the community.  While the gangbangers’ already illegal machine guns do pose a threat to neighborhood peace, Mr. Safer’s pen is a far more profound threat to our liberty.

Lest you think this opinion extreme, consider it just another instance in a wide-ranging assault on our basic civil liberties.  By the numbers, here are several other data points:  Republican “maverick” John McCain teamed up with Wisconsin ’s confused Russ Feingold to blackjack American’s First Amendment rights to speak freely at election time with campaign finance “reform”. Their objective can only be to protect their incumbency and, like the gun grabbers, their purpose goes beyond the Bill of Rights.  Its real purpose can only be to frustrate the founder’s goal of a truly representative form of government as expressed in Article I of the Constitution.  The fact that a supposedly conservative president signed the bill and the Supreme Court lent its imprimatur to this constitutional raid shows the danger to be tangible.

The Second Amendment is hamstrung by some 3,200 laws that control firearms.  Gun control advocates pettifog when they tell us the Second Amendment is there to protect duck-hunters.  The best evidence of the founders’ real purpose exists in the restored Governor’s Palace at Colonial Williamsburg.  There, in the foyer of the king’s personal representative, is a rosette of perhaps a hundred muskets, arrayed on the wall to let all visitors know that the force of arms preserved the king’s prerogatives.  This display so repelled the founders that they created the Second Amendment to confirm and document the people’s right to control the government’s access to armaments. That’s why the Second Amendment mentions the third party to the Constitution, the people, specifically.  

This week we learned more about the “Thompson Memorandum” a new threat to the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process.  The Justice Department’s bureaucrats--Mr. Safer’s old employer--have decided that companies cannot use the truth as a defense when the government charges an errant employee.  Last Friday, The Wall Street Journal published an Op-Ed piece entitled “Department of Coercion” that outlines how the DOJ handles corporations when an employee gets into trouble.  Even if there is no intention of committing a crime and even without a guilty verdict in court, Mr. Safer’s old colleagues will use this memo as a letter of marque.  Justice department attorneys have already bagged nearly a half-billion from the accounting and management firm, KPMG making them look more like pirates than lawyers.  

© 2006 Ralf Seiffe

Ralf Seiffe advises business start-ups and product launches from Chicago, Illinois and is a political analyst and columnist for the Illinois Leader and Illinois Review.