NRA Calls for Armed Guards In Schools
While I agree with LaPierre’s quote below, his suggested remedy is foolhardy.
WASHINGTON/NEWTOWN, Connecticut (Reuters) - The powerful U.S. gun rights lobby called on Friday for armed police in all U.S. schools within weeks as Americans remembered the victims of the Newtown, Connecticut, school massacre with a moment of silence.
National Rifle Association Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre said attempts to keep guns out of schools were ineffective and made schools more vulnerable than airports, banks and other public buildings patrolled by armed guards.
“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” LaPierre said at a news briefing, calling on lawmakers to station armed police officers in all schools by the time children return from the Christmas break in January.
Our schools are still some of the safest places in the country. It’s not that I object to armed guards in schools, but I think it won’t make any difference. Many schools are quite expansive and to hope that a single armed guard can be in the right place at the right time to avert one of these incidents is a bit of wishful thinking. At the same time, it’s a massive new expense. Consider that there are roughly 100,000 public schools in the country. If we conservatively estimate that a fully-burdened guard (including salary, benefits, equipment, training, etc.) costs $75,000, then we’re talking about $7,500,000,000 in additional spending per year. And for what? The off chance that once a decade one of these guards might be in position to avert a tragedy?
There are better ways to go about protecting our kids in schools, although we must come to grips with the fact that nothing will ever make them 100% safe.
It’s an impractical suggestion.
Personally, in terms of technology, I think its better, and more effective, to re-think schools away from the 19th century, centralized factory model.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 22, 2012 at 0910 hrs
^^^^ This. ^^^^
Posted by hsgbdmama on December 22, 2012 at 0935 hrs
LaPierre wasn’t offering a solution; he was launching a membership campaign by further stoking this delusional belief that some liberal boogeyman is trying to take everyone’s guns. I’ve heard commentators from all political stripes pan LaPierre’s suggestion for the same reason as Owen.
And for a guy who claims to love the constitution, LaPierre sure seems willing to throw the first amendment under the bus (his attacks on violence in movies and video games) in an attempt to shield the second amendment from regulation.
As it goes, all these movies, songs, and video games are also a part of popular culture in western Europe, and somehow they aren’t killing each other as a result, so LaPierre might want to join Mike Huckabee on the bench thinking about his self-serving social theories that are entirely unsupported by data.
Posted by Recess Supervisor on December 22, 2012 at 1054 hrs
Columbine had an armed officer and that made no difference.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 22, 2012 at 1131 hrs
There were plenty of well armed and well trained personnel at Fort Hood. The shooter there left 13 dead and 30 wounded. If shootings can’t be prevented by arming people on a military base, they can’t be prevented anywhere.
Someone might want to let Sheriff Clarke know that this proposal is almost as foolish as a grown man pretending to be a cowboy.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 22, 2012 at 1235 hrs
@TMKE: Perhaps you’ve never been on a military base. They have “armories” there. Those are places were soldiers’ weapons are LOCKED UP.
The only people on base with weapons at the ready are MPs. All the others are unarmed unless they are in a field exercise.
@RS: The US has five times the population of England (and multiples of any other European country, too.) Gee. How is it possible that we have more…....
Nevermind.
Anyhow, Owen’s right. Arm the teachers. Works very damn well in Israel.
Posted by dad29 on December 22, 2012 at 1738 hrs
Seems LaPierre was just following in the footsteps of Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer. Similar response in the media? I won’t hold my breath.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 22, 2012 at 1805 hrs
Wouldn’t arming the teachers make them responsible and liable to protect the children. When another incident happens then you will blame the teachers for allowing it to happen. I agree that if someone wants to kill bad enough, they will likely succeed. We need to get to the root of the problem which is the mentality of the killer. In England I would guess that they have 20% as many killings as we do here by Dad29s assertion. That number for England is almost non existent. Recess Supervisor is correct in stating that the NRA is only looking to fire up their membership and increase donations. Not to mention the usual scare of taking everyone’s guns away so that their real benefactors will have another windfall.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 22, 2012 at 1838 hrs
Wouldn’t arming the teachers make them responsible and liable to protect the children.
Only those that choose to carry. I have a feeling that teachers already feel personally liable to protect their children. We should, at the very least, allow them to do so.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 22, 2012 at 2314 hrs
Dad29, I’m referring to per capita rates of gun crime and gun deaths. I’m sorry if that wasn’t clear, or clear to you.
Posted by Recess Supervisor on December 22, 2012 at 2353 hrs
RS, let’s adjust the figures to reflect drug-trade gun murders and see what happens to the per-cap.
Posted by dad29 on December 23, 2012 at 0719 hrs
I’d like to see the suicide rates in Europe versus the US and also a racial breakdown of our gun violence here. In addition the video game sales in Europe versus the US.
Heck, I’d like to see all these statistics broken down into sub categories.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 23, 2012 at 0952 hrs
LaPierre is just deflecting from the real issues for the benefit of his constituency (brilliant deduction I know!). The fact still exists the easier they are to obtain the more likely they are to be used. In one of the earlier rants about this someone said if we didn’t have guns we would have mass killings with a guy with a knife. Yeah, maybe but he’d do a lot less damage in 2 minutes and be a lot easier to tackle to the ground. LaPierre is even seen as nuts by Newsmax, that liberal news service:
Breaking from Newsmax.com
NRA’s Vision of America ‘Repugnant’
By Margaret Carlson
Wayne LaPierre, chief executive officer of the National Rifle Association, must think that most Americans are as monomaniacal as he is. At his much-awaited press conference Friday, he cited every reason but guns for the shootings in Newtown, Connecticut. His vision of America is a country awash in military-style assault weapons.
The thought of stationing armed guards at every school is repugnant. It’s also impractical. The same goes for building a database of the violently mentally ill. Even if we spent the billions of dollars necessary to make these ideas reality, we wouldn’t be any safer. To understand why, all we have to do is subject these ideas to the same test LaPierre uses when asked about stricter gun-control laws: Would they have stopped the massacre in Newtown?
Let’s take the database first. Leave aside the notion that conservatives hate the federal government keeping information on people. Collecting it would be a nightmare, requiring that other laws protecting medical privacy be pushed aside.A federal database wouldn’t have stopped Adam Lanza, either, because he wouldn’t have made it into LaPierre’s database. He wouldn’t have been in anyone’s files. He apparently was a loner who’d given no sign that he would turn into a monster. There’s no evidence that he so much as shot a BB gun at a neighborhood mailbox. He was an example of the classic “keeps to himself” profile—until he wasn’t.
As for schools, even if we put armed guards in every one of the 100,000 or so public elementary and secondary schools in the U.S., would they have been able to stop Lanza? He had hundreds of rounds of ammunition when he arrived at Sandy Hook Elementary. What kind of escalation in firepower would you need to supply to the unemployed security guards and laid-off police officers LaPierre wants to hire to defend against that?
What a world LaPierre wants us to live in — all because he believes the Founders envisioned citizens armed with assault weapons defending themselves against a corrupt government. Sadly, I’ve yet to hear a Republican in the House disagree with him.
(Margaret Carlson is a Bloomberg View columnist and former White House correspondent for Time magazine.)
© 2012 Bloomberg News. All rights reserved.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 23, 2012 at 1348 hrs
RS, let’s adjust the figures to reflect drug-trade gun murders and see what happens to the per-cap.
Yes, because nobody in Western Europe uses drugs. And once we dispel another of your fairy tale beliefs, you’ll just find another one.
Funny how people who are supposedly so numbers-driven when it comes to the economy choose to believe in guns the same way they believe in God.
Posted by Recess Supervisor on December 23, 2012 at 1355 hrs
Steve, even if we stipulate that there is a racial component (which seems borderline ridiculous, but let’s roll with it), are you then going to claim that it’s not your problem to deal with because you’re white, or not poor, or not a drug user?
The longer you guys want to sit around trying to prove it’s not your socioeconomic group that’s the problem, the more the rest of us reasonable people are going to think some of you are nuts. And trust me, I treat the “let’s get rid of all the guns” crowd with the same amount of dismissiveness and ridicule. When all is said and done, this is an American problem because everyone who lives here has to deal with it. Whether it’s the prevalence of gun ownership, poverty, economic inequality, violence in society, drug use, mental health - we all have to deal with it. And frankly, other than building more jails, conservatives aren’t so keen on fixing any of these other possible causes either. Funny how the right pretends to be all about mental health issues now. I remember a closed-door Assembly caucus not so many years ago where I got to listen to all your state-level conservative heroes bitch and moan about mental health parity, and why do we have to mandate that insurers help addicts or people with other behavioral problems.
We could put 100 experts in a room. 99 could say it was the availability of guns in our society and 1 would be John Lott. And many of you would run to John Lott because he’s enabling you to believe what you want to believe is correct.
I could give a flip about firearms. I’ll support whatever the majority of the data supports. And while there’s room to argue some of the socioeconomic factors, it’s nearly universal in its conclusion that more guns mean higher levels of gun-related crime.
Posted by Recess Supervisor on December 23, 2012 at 1408 hrs
Whatever, RS. You don’t need to know drug-crime stats b/c ‘everybody has drugs.’ OK, sure.
And guess what: all those drug dealers have guns! They didn’t buy them legally. They are available on a worldwide market—the market you so vociferously support, remember?
Disarm yourself, please. Make one less gun “available.” It’ll make a difference to world peace!
Posted by dad29 on December 23, 2012 at 1643 hrs
Guess what? RS sounds reasonable and dad29 sounds like a typical gun nut to which RS refers. Hopefully sanity will prevail.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 23, 2012 at 1909 hrs
Here’s the thing… many of us gun owners and 2nd Amendment defenders are your neighbors. We vote. We contribute to our communities. We love. We are normal Americans.
The more you degrade us as “typical gun nuts” and the like, the more you alienate us. The more you infer that we are insane, the more you classify yourself as such.
Whether you like it or not, there are hundreds of millions of gun owners in this nation. You can choose to engage us or dismiss us. But we’re here.
Posted by Owen on December 23, 2012 at 1914 hrs
Owen, I get that. I have relatives who hunt. No need to patronize here. But when your side has guys like LaPierre out there, and guys who will basically say (as Steve has elsewhere on your blog) that our gun violence problem exists because America has black people, it’s pretty friggin’ hard to engage in any kind of rational discussion.
To that end, this gun debate that has emerged is oddly similar to the fiscal cliff debate, in which you’ve got some conservatives who think you can just gut government tomorrow and have everything be okay, and some liberals who think you can just tax a handful of really rich people and fix all the problems.
The issue with public discourse in this country isn’t problems between the left and right anymore. Increasingly, it’s that sane, rational people are forced to negotiate with extremists on every issue.
The NRA has 4 million members in a nation of 310 million. Roughly 5% of our nation hunts regularly. I’m pretty happy to consider their views in accordance with the size of the constituency they represent.
Posted by Recess Supervisor on December 23, 2012 at 1944 hrs
“Increasingly, it’s that sane, rational people are forced to negotiate with extremists on every issue.”
In other words… you don’t get that. You would consider me an extremist whom you would disregard. You would regard me as insane. That’s fine. You do so at your own peril.
Posted by Owen on December 23, 2012 at 1950 hrs
Owen, what’s your position? I’m not even sure I know. What do you think is the answer, and based on what data?
Posted by Recess Supervisor on December 23, 2012 at 1952 hrs
I suppose I should add that my question presumes that you agree that the remarkably inflated rates of gun violence in this country vis-a-vis other nations is a problem and you believe something should be done about it. If you don’t feel that way, I suppose you could say that too.
Posted by Recess Supervisor on December 23, 2012 at 1954 hrs
My position is that any supposed remedy to such things should 1) work and 2) be substantially sufficient to justify the infringment of constitutionally protected natural rights.
Call me extreme…
Posted by Owen on December 23, 2012 at 2001 hrs
That’s fair. Your second point is also quite nebulous. Which is not to say I think it’s an illegitimate position, just one that can be conveniently altered given how abstract it is.
I’d be curious to hear you define something that you would consider to meet your second criteria. Can you throw out a few examples?
Posted by Recess Supervisor on December 23, 2012 at 2016 hrs
It’s really up to those who wish to infringe upon our rights to make arguments to justify such. Make an argument and I’ll consider it.
Posted by Owen on December 23, 2012 at 2022 hrs
Conveniently for you, by that logic we could be here all day, with me offering suggestions and you saying no to each of them. I was attempting to skip all the inefficiency and allow yourself to demonstrate that, in fact, point 2 isn’t simply ideological inflexibility masquerading as a genuine willingness to thoughtfully and proactively engage on an issue.
If you were serious about any limitations, you would know well where your own line is and you’d have zero problems articulating it. That you either can’t or won’t speaks volumes.
Posted by Recess Supervisor on December 23, 2012 at 2036 hrs
Again. Our right to keep and bear arms is a natural right enshrined and protected in our constitution. It is your task to give reasonable arguments to justify infringing on that right. Your inability to articulate an argument speaks volumes.
But to appease you, I think that the virtual ban on fully automatic weapons is a justifiable infringement on that right. I also think that the prohibition on artillery and nuclear weapons is justified. The public good outweighs the individual right.
Do you have any arguments for further infringements than already in place?
Posted by Owen on December 23, 2012 at 2043 hrs
Why do we do require screening and training of police officers yet members of the general public are able to arm themselves with little scrutiny at all?
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 23, 2012 at 2055 hrs
Because police officers are empowered to impose the will of government on others. Private citizens are not.
Next.
Posted by Owen on December 23, 2012 at 2059 hrs
And a private citizen with a gun can force their will upon others?
Try again:)
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 23, 2012 at 2111 hrs
Weak.
Posted by Owen on December 23, 2012 at 2117 hrs
How so?
Why don’t you articulate the difference relative to the empowerment of each and the force of arms?
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 23, 2012 at 2124 hrs
Why don’t you?
Posted by Owen on December 23, 2012 at 2126 hrs
Thanks for offering an example, Owen. Since you asked, I’m quite happy to entertain just about any restriction under the sun in this area provided that the goal which we as a society establish (whatever that goal is) is something that could be believed to be reasonably established by that restriction.
I suspect the difference here is that you want to underpin your argument with the natural rights assumption that second amendment advocates so often lead with, as though the presumption of correctness is on your side (i.e. everyone should be able to own whatever weapons they want) and everyone else is required to show why gun ownership should be restricted.
If natural rights have always existed, then societies and cultures would always have had ways to communicate them. If one considers the work of legal philosophers like John Austin and H.L.A. Hart, they’ll point out that old European texts (the origins of our own society) neither have words to describe rights nor duties. The lack of their existence would support that the notion of natural rights was in fact a political construct developed during the Enlightenment. After all, one of the fundamental tenets of the construct of language is that we invent words to describe the things we observe, or feel, or believe.
Accordingly, I would posit for the sake of argument that on principle the “right” to gun ownership is no more necessary or eternal than the “right” to get personalized license plates. Both are the artificial constructs of law to serve a societal purpose, and can be modified or revoked if society wishes to change its position.
Posted by Recess Supervisor on December 23, 2012 at 2136 hrs
I don’t see any difference relative to the empowerment granted and the potential for an imposition of will.
Yourself?
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 23, 2012 at 2139 hrs
Of course you don’t. Tyrants never do.
Posted by Owen on December 23, 2012 at 2202 hrs
Tyrant? You flatter me sir:)
It’s a little early to be wrapping yourself in the flag isn’t it?
Or is it that you don’t see any difference either?
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 23, 2012 at 2209 hrs
Anywhere you place the line as to what weapons are legal vs. illegal is entirely arbitrary and subject to sentiments of the time. I think current sentiments are screaming loudly for the line to be moved to disallow more types of guns.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 23, 2012 at 2222 hrs
And I’d suggest that someone who regularly exhorts the purchase of ammunition because a government overthrow is imminent is borderline nut-jobby.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 23, 2012 at 2225 hrs
More “living, breathing constitution” drivel. “Current sentiments” have zero authority to infringe upon people’s rights. None.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 24, 2012 at 0307 hrs
How about more living breathing children?
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 24, 2012 at 0830 hrs
I have asked this a number of times and have yet to get a response. I constantly hear call for reasonable restriction of weapons and access…I want to know what reasonable is. I also want to know how such restrictions would change in any way, shape, or form the outcomes of some evil nut from taking out a bunch of people.
Posted by fishaddict on December 24, 2012 at 0840 hrs
Wrong. The concept of ‘natural law’ existed for quite some time; TA derived it from Aristotle:
Furthermore, Thomas distinguished four kinds of law: eternal, natural, human, and divine. Eternal law is the decree of God that governs all creation. Natural law is the human “participation” in the eternal law and is discovered by reason.[74] Natural law, of course, is based on “first principles”:
. . . this is the first precept of the law, that good is to be done and promoted, and evil is to be avoided. All other precepts of the natural law are based on this
If ‘good is to be promoted,’ and governments exist, it is their duty to ‘promote good’. Since all that exists is ‘good,’ life itself is a good, and governments should promote life.
But governments are secondary to individuals and families. Thus, the primary promoters of ‘the good’ are virtuous men/women.
Correlative to ‘promotion of the good [and] avoidance of evil’ is the duty to protect ‘the good.’ Thus, the primary duty of governments (and individuals) is to administer justice. Such justice requires force in many instances. But recall: the government is secondary to (virtuous) individuals and families.
Thus, individuals and families also have a duty to protect ‘the good’, including life itself.
It is reasonable to postulate that government may utilize greater force than individuals in pursuit of justice (the good.) Thus, for example, governments may utilize jails, or organized police entities, where individuals/families may not do so except under extreme circumstances.
However, there is no bar to individuals/families protecting ‘the good’ through force of arms.
(The citation is from Wiki….)
Posted by dad29 on December 24, 2012 at 0852 hrs
Same question to you fish?
Why do we do require screening and training of police officers yet members of the general public are able to arm themselves with little scrutiny at all?
Is the screening and training of police officers reasonable?
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 24, 2012 at 0859 hrs
Citizenship and the exercise of the Bill of Rights doesn’t require training or screening from the Central Scrutinizers of your regime.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 24, 2012 at 1036 hrs
Looks like the firemen need armed guards too.
And Dad29, while I appreciate the reference to Aquinas (who was a bright, bright man), he didn’t talk about duties or rights. You’re the one using those words in an attempt to prescribe how one goes about upholding the concept that “good is to be done and promoted.” Natural law and natural rights aren’t the same thing.
Aristotle himself suggested that “natural justice” was a type of political justice, and as such would then be a construct of man. He did spend a lot of time talking about virtue and honor, but never talked about the natural rights of man. You’re attempting to infer that certain things would logically follow from Aristotle, but he was a pretty through writer (there probably wasn’t much on TV). If he wanted to articulate a theory of natural rights, or if such a theory was even contemplated by the philosophers of his time (per their written work it does not appear to have been), surely he would not have omitted its discussion.
Natural rights do not necessarily follow from natural law.
Posted by Recess Supervisor on December 24, 2012 at 1146 hrs
David Gregory and Barry Soetoro send their kids to schools that have armed guards. http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/12/23/School-Obama-s-Daughters-Attend-Has-11-Armed-Guards-Not-Counting-Secret-Service
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 24, 2012 at 1519 hrs
So the guy that shot the firemen to death was already a murderer, and already out of prison. Not legal for him to have a gun, either. Own it, liberals.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 24, 2012 at 1649 hrs
I love how all these folks screaming for armed teachers were the same ones not even a year ago bitching about how much teachers get paid. So I guess we’d hire more officers for the schools ? And who buys the ammo/gun/training for said arming of teachers/others ?
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 24, 2012 at 1729 hrs
“More “living, breathing constitution” drivel.”
Yeah, if the Founders had intended us to alter the Constitution, they surely would’ve included some kind of process to do so.
Oh, wait…
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 24, 2012 at 1853 hrs
Good luck trying to put that toothpaste back in the tube. And then good luck trying to enforce it. Little Barry might be able to get people to vote for him for free phones and condoms. Getting people to use force against other Americans in the pursuit of this idiocy will be another thing. Knowing that your boss will watch you die and then go back to bed for his Vegas trip doesn’t inspire a lot of loyalty.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 25, 2012 at 0646 hrs
Natural law and natural rights aren’t the same thing.
That is what is called “sophistry.”
Aristotle himself suggested that “natural justice” was a type of political justice, and as such would then be a construct of man
So ‘justice’ does not entail rights and obligations?
Moreover, Ari—unlike TA—was operating without God. He suggested ‘natural justice’ because he saw that such justice should be common to mankind. Ari had to call it ‘political,’ which does not make it any less correct.
It is clear that Ari, TA, (etc.) spoke more of “obligations” than of “rights.” But it is silly to read ‘rights’ out of the discussion—or, as you say, logic will be violated.
Posted by dad29 on December 25, 2012 at 0856 hrs
And so long as you’re attempting to connect ‘rights’ to ‘natural law,’ you may as well look up the Magna Carta, too.
”...that the Church of England shall be free, and shall have all her whole Rights and Liberties inviolable...
especially:
29. NO Freeman shall be taken or imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or any other wise destroyed; nor will We not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the land. We will sell to no man, we will not deny or defer to any man either Justice or Right.
So were these ‘rights’ natural?
It is necessary to remember that any discussion of politics must become a discussion of theology, for all politics is based thereon. When you concede that in the Judaeo-Christian society, “rights” exist, NOT because of politics, but because politicians are subordinate to God.
“God-given” rights did not emerge suddenly in 1750. They were there all along, thus “natural.”
Posted by dad29 on December 25, 2012 at 1407 hrs
My argument is not at all sophistry, and it saddens me that you’re so hasty to dismiss it. Laws and rights are not identical. They never have been. Likewise, a system of justice does not by its creation require natural rights as an underpinning. And your suggestion that politics must by necessity derive from theology is a weak attempt to establish as a given something that you cannot and could never prove.
The Magna Carta is filled with discussions of political rights, but no discussion of natural rights - not even the passages you quoted. Political rights have always been established by man as a way to accomplish goals that are deemed beneficial to society. The opening of the Magna Carta is trying to establish the inviolable supremacy of the Church of England - a political objective. What our founders tried to do was take documents like the Magna Carta and filter them through a prism of natural rights proposed and expounded upon by many of the great philosophers of the Enlightenment. But either way, it’s still an artificial, political construct.
Rights and obligations are not the same, and the former is not by necessity read into the latter. Your implication in #52 suggests that the greatest scholars of past societies were somehow too hasty to ever discuss the notion of rights, so you choose to find them between the lines. I think if the concept of natural rights existed in Greek and Roman societies, their philosophers would have written about them. They wrote about darn near everything else, after all.
I suspect we could maybe agree that many past societies (Greece, Rome, Egypt, Israel) were heavy on the notion of obligation and duty. But rights don’t derive from duty by necessity either. The Bible goes on and and and on about obligation and duty - whether to God, to a spouse, to mankind, etc. It doesn’t speak of individual rights.
Now, I should be clear to acknowledge that some of what you would probably consider to be natural rights are things that I would consider to be good ideas. My point is that they’re all political constructs, in the sense that they were espoused at a particular point in time to address a particular issue or to advance a particular cause by society or a group therein.
Anyway, Merry Christmas.
Posted by Recess Supervisor on December 25, 2012 at 1929 hrs
Umnnhh….Merry Christmas.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Until, perhaps, the “Enlightenment” philosophers did not discuss natural law (or rights) extensively because they did not question the nature of man.
Further, to dismiss the MagCar as a document ‘concerned with the supremacy of the church of England’ is problematic, because the “church of England” did not EXIST until Henry VIII founded it.
It was a document which was concerned with the rights (!!) of Englishmen—really, barons—vis-a-vis those of the King.
You may SAY that ‘rights’ are strictly a political construct, but that assertion is only made by political people. The theological construct was set in stone with Moses. It’s called the Ten Commandments—wherein the rights to life and property were delineated.
The entire J-C tradition, later including the entire West, came from that legal framework—until politicians began abrogating those rights.
Posted by dad29 on December 27, 2012 at 0728 hrs
By the way, your assertion that ‘natural rights’ are a latter-day invention is purely Wilsonian.
Or so implies George Will, here: http://rap.wustl.edu/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/George-Will-lecture-text.pdf
He does, properly, name Luther as the Revolutionary leader.
Posted by dad29 on December 27, 2012 at 0838 hrs
I misspoke on the Church of England. My apologies.
But in turn, your characterization of the ten commandments as a rights-granting document is preposterous. The ten commandments is a list of obligations. Suggesting otherwise would be as silly as suggesting that Americans have the “right” to pay income taxes.
Posted by Recess Supervisor on December 27, 2012 at 1214 hrs
Oh, really?
If God forbids murder, it is because He is the Author of Life; that is, by nature, man is ‘entitled’ to his own life so long as God grants it.
If God forbids theft, it is because man is entitled to his property (properly used) so long as he owns it.
Etc., etc.
You choose to ignore the logical implications of those “obligations”—which is not a wise choice.
IOW, you choose to ignore the nature of man—as a creation—in order to deny ‘natural’ rights.
We’re back to sophistry with you.
Posted by dad29 on December 27, 2012 at 2110 hrs
Gee, Dave, you libs don’t seem to mind when your Messiah arms the Mexican drug lords.
Let’s see now
Drug lords or school teachers…
Drug lords or school teachers…
Drug lords or school teachers…Hmm.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on December 28, 2012 at 1124 hrs
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