Telling the Truth About the Second Amendment

I’ve been quite open about my former liberalism. I am dismayed at today’s liberals with their whiny hypocrisies, their belief that the only good person is a victim, and general childishness. I certainly resent their opposition to the Second Amendment. It wasn’t always thus, but it’s true now.

Their media is worse on Second Amendment issues. Every gun use is evil, statues with guns in them are evil, and gun owners are white and male and redneck and evil.

Every now and again, though, someone makes a statement in a liberal forum that bears repeating. Camille Paglia is a liberal and libertarian at the same time. She is published in Salon magazine, a very left-wing institution. She writes a column that periodically answers readers’ letters. A man from Brooklyn wanted to know her stand on the Second Amendment. Here is what she had to say in total:

As a Salon columnist (dating back to the founding of Salon in 1995), I have tried to provide a forum for defenders of the Second Amendment to make their case. The Northeastern major media, which remain heavily liberal, rarely permit these voices to be heard.

I do not own guns and have no interest in them. (Swords, those Homeric and chivalric emblems, have always attracted me more.) But as a libertarian, I read the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights as granting to private citizens the right to bear arms against the potential abuses of a government turned tyrannous. Furthermore, should police authority evaporate after a cataclysm of storm, flood, earthquake or terrorism, citizens have a right to defend their families and property against criminals and looters. If food and water are in short supply over a protracted period, expect predators and violence.

The horrendous problem of illegal guns now rampant among the urban underclass cannot be solved by depriving all American citizens of their Second Amendment rights. Major cities must address their internal problems, which include improving public education and vocational training, creating job-rich public works projects, and instituting on-the-street neighborhood policing. The major media, concentrated in their metropolises, should stop extrapolating their local issues to the nation as a whole.

I don't know if her solutions to urban violence would work, but I would have a lot less problem with liberal media if they could say the TRUTH about the Second Amendment.