Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Do You Have The Right To Life?

Most people think of that phrase in connection to the abortion issue, but I am not talking about that. I am talking about the right not to be killed by another human being or group of human beings.

If you believe that you have the right not to be killed, what do you have the right to do to prevent being killed?

In 1776The Declaration of Independence says that you have the right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

In 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly declared in article three:
“Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person."

In 1950, the European Convention on Human Rights was adopted by the Council of Europe, declaring a protected human right to life in Article 2. There are exceptions for lawful executions and self-defense, arresting a fleeing suspect, and suppressing riots and insurrections. Since then Protocol 6 of the Convention has called for nations to outlaw capital punishment except in time of war or national emergency, and at present this pertains in all countries of the Council. Protocol 13 provides for the total abolition of capital punishment, and has been implemented in most member countries of the Council.

In 1966, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly.
“Every human being has the inherent right to life. This right shall be protected by law. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his life.”—Article 6.1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights

In 1982, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms enshrined that
“Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.”
—Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms

In 1989, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC).

The Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany holds the principle of human dignity paramount, even above the right to life.

The Catholic Church has issued a Charter of the Rights of the Family in which it states that the right to life is directly implied by human dignity.

There are many tangents that you can get off on from this subject, abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, etc. But where these things tend to divide people, there are several things that people tend to agree are more or less universal truths. Once you are born, you are definitely alive, if you take a breath. If your brain is functioning, you are alive. People who believe in a creator, believe that whatever it takes to sustain that life, is not just a right but a responsibility, because your body is God's temple.

But there are some people who believe that it would be more appropriate to defend an animal, like a whale, than to defend a human life. If a cathedral were being desecrated, some people believe that it would be mandatory to protect it. But what about the human body/temple?

Legally, you have the right to self-defense. But it is sad that we have strayed so far from morality, to need laws to say so. Morality should be a higher standard than the legal system.

Why does morality matter? Because inherent in the right to live, is the value of your life. If something has a value, then there will always be something that has a higher value or a lesser value. If you live your life in an immoral manner, and given the chance to redeem yourself, rehabilitate yourself, or whatever term you find appropriate, then I don't feel that your life is as valuable as someone who is moral. Morality has within it certain things that seem to be universal, regardless of religious beliefs.

Generally, if you infringe on my rights, you have exceeded yours. This brings us to the idea that rights come with responsibility. You have the responsibility not to infringe on my rights, and if I have the right to live, I have the responsibility to stay alive to the best of my ability. We both have the responsibility to protect the lives of others, and that requires us to make decisions on who to protect and who to protect them from. In other words, we have to have the morality to decide who is the bad guy and who is the good guy to decide who has priority.

I do not think that anyone has the right to take that responsibility away from me. I am not saying just that they can't take away my right to live, but that they cannot take away my responsibility to others.

The US Government has within it certain factions who think they can and will and they are being influenced by people in other countries and members of the United Nations. They are not doing this on any moral basis. If they were, how could they say, "Give me your sons and daughters, so that they can go to another country, to kill people in order to protect the innocent. They may die in the process, but because we belong to the UN, we have the right and responsibility to do this." And then turn around and tell you that you do not have the right to have a gun in your home in order to protect your family, who you would rightly consider to be innocent and a priority, when a man in a ski mask comes through your door with a gun or knife or crow bar?

The government is telling us that they have the right to decide our sons and daughters are expendable, in order to protect innocents, that they have the right to require our children to kill in order to protect the innocent, but you and I who were considered intelligent enough to elect them, do not have the right to do that.

It does not really matter whether or not you believe that it is o.k. for ordinary citizens to own guns. What the real issue is here, is whether or not we want to allow people we elected to have that right if we do not.

The politicians have muddied up the water on this issue so much that people either believe that every life, no matter how worthless it is, should be saved, or they believe that everybody else but them is less valuable. Neither is morally right. Many people believe that the only reason human life is superior to say, a cow, is that we are better at killing than cows are and that rights don't factor into it. This devalues the cow and the man. Man has a greater value than the cow, but he has the responsibility to only kill the cow if necessary, and the right to decide for himself when it is necessary, based on those universal truths I spoke of previously. You can't find many people who will tell you that the desire to see blood and inflict pain on the cow are necessary. So, it could be easily said that it was a universal truth that it is not necessary to kill a cow under those circumstances.

At some point, mankind needs to determine, once and for all whether or not abortion is murder, because if it is, then those who kill abortion doctors to prevent murder, are not much different than a US soldier killing the enemy to prevent their government from committing atrocities against their own people. The only difference is that we have been programmed to believe that our government is much wiser than we are and they alone can make such decisions, But if they are elected by ignorant incapable men and women, are they not a defective system? Rather than teaching that in order to be a good citizen, you have to obey your government, we need to teach our children, that if you seek public offices, you are accountable to your electorate just as much as they are to you.

The very reason we have multiple branches of government was because the Founding Fathers knew that sometimes, the rights of the majority, would tend to overrule the rights of the minority unjustifiably. You might be the lone voice crying in the wilderness, but that does not mean you are wrong. Stop giving your voice to the government. When they speak for you, they need to be sure they have your support.

If society is corrupt, then the police officers that are drawn from it, are corrupt. A badge does not impart divinity.

Do we really want our government or any other one to have the same authority and power that Hitler had?

"This year will go down in history! For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!"
---Adolf Hitler 1935

These same governments, which I quoted, like our US Declaration of Independence, The Bill of Rights, European governments, the United Nations, etc. that have said we have the right to life, want to take away our right to defend it.

I maintain that if we should not have guns, then neither should the police, government or military, because they come from within our ranks. In the same vein, law enforcement personnel ought to stop lobbying for gun control laws, else they find themselves patrolling the streets with billy clubs and no guns. Look to England for an example.

The United Nations could enforce gun control on us even if we don't sign the treaty, by saying that if laws were considered standard in all other member nations, then it is binding on us too. In 2008, the only two countries that voted against establishing these international norms, were the US and Zimbabwe.

These people try to say that small arms are what are killing people in wars. That is a bunch of malarchy or our government is wasting a lot of money on big guns. We didn't go to Iraq to take hand guns, we went to find 'weopons of mass destruction'. Don't be foolish enough to assume that wars are fueled by small arms trade. They will use small arms if they have to, but the difference between men and boys has always been the size of their toys, and they will work to acquire big guns, as more cost effective.

Proponents of international gun control try to say that there are no laws already in place to deter  gun trade. Yes, there are, people just break them, with the sanction of those same government officials who want to take our gun rights. Iran and Iraq supposedly had weopons laws and treaties, which they broke. Look to the the history of our own government and the Iran-Contra scandal and the more recent problem of the Mexican Drug Cartels using guns that our government gave to them. A Drug-War Plan Goes Awry American citizens didn't do that. Uncle Sam did.

What does Barack Obama support?

  • Endorsed a complete ban on handgun ownership in Illinois.
  • Supports gun bans in any city that wants one, including Chicago and Washington, D.C.
  • Wants to totally eliminate the right of concealed carry nationwide.
  • Voted to make it possible to prosecute innocent citizens who use firearms in self-defense.
  • Voted to allow predatory lawsuits intended to bankrupt the firearms industry.
  • Wants to bring back the failed Clinton assault weapons ban, discredited even by Clinton's own supporters.
  • Voted to ban virtually every type of rifle ammunition used for hunting and sport.
  • Supports gun registration for law-abiding gun owners.
  • Refused to sign a friend-of-the-court brief affirming that the Second Amendment refers to an individual right.
  • Served on the Board of Directors of the Joyce Foundation, the number one source of funds for anti-gun organizations.
  • Supported a ban on gun stores within five miles of any school or park, which would practically eliminate every gun store in the country.
  • Voted to prevent gun owners from knowing when the state of Illinois ran record searches on them.
  • Supports forcing gun manufacturers to embrace micro-stamping, a financially ruinous and technically absurd farce.
  • Wants to create and enforce mandatory waiting periods, under the assumption that only angry people buy firearms.
  • Supports the ludicrous one-gun-a-month rule on gun sales.
  • Supports banning cheap handguns, which would affect black and poor Americans the most, constituencies he claims to champion.
  • Supports banning police departments from reselling firearms, even if the money raised would help purchase new equipment.
  • Supports mandatory firearms training for all gun owners regardless of the cost or consequences.
  • Supports a ban on gun ownership for anyone under 21 years of age, which would help weaken the American hunting tradition.
So, we have him on record saying that we have the right to self defense so long as we don't use a gun to do it. He supports, taking away states rights, by allowing cities to enact laws that are counter to the state gun laws and enact federal laws that override state laws. We ought to be able to sue gun companies. Hello! Why can't we sue GM if a drunk uses a car to kill someone? He wants to ban hunting ammunition. Again, you have the right to live, but not to eat in order to do it. He is willing to resort to sneaky methods of running gun stores out of business. He wants a police officer to be able to violate your rights and run a background search on you in secret, without cause. That has gotten police officers fired for pulling that little trick, in the state of Ohio. If your children are going to learn to hunt, they will have to use your guns to do it, because he doesn't think they should own their own. Poor people won't be able to legally own guns because he wants to jack the prices up on guns.

Rest assured, someone other than Barack came up with these ideas and he is just the puppet, with someone's hand up his rear, moving his mouth.

The UN Gun laws would make more guns illegal than people think. There are many people who have received guns as part of an inheritance passed down for several generations. These guns were made before there was any such thing as registration. If you don't know much about guns, you may be unaware that some guns that require you to pull the trigger, each and every time, can still use a magazine. Any gun with a magazine is deemed a no-no by the UN. There will also be massively large amounts of money, that have to be spent in order to register your guns, in order to see if you are allowed to keep them.

The Supreme Court made a ruling today that says that parents have the right to decide whether or not their children play certain video games, so why do we not have the right to defend their bodies as well as their minds?

The Declaration of Independence asserts that it is sometimes necessary to disagree with your government and if your government are the only ones with guns, how do you go about that? The very first thing the British Government did, was to try and confiscate all of the Patriots' weopons. They had to hide them down wells and bury them.

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.---Thomas Jefferson

Suicide and euthanasia are not as simple as they used to be, thanks to advances in modern medicine. I learned a few years ago, when my grandfather was on life support, that they have medications that literally force your heart to go on beating, indefinitely. If you want to stay off of life support, you better get that in writing, because, if you don't some doctor will be making that call. Their decision will be based on money.

I knew a man who believed in life support, having gone through open heart by-pass surgery, two times in ten years, had the arteries in his neck lower abdomen, and legs replaced by artificial ones and having survived several strokes. He had been on life support many times, only to recover. But when he was in his last days, he wanted to die, and his wife would not allow him to be disconnected from life support, because she said that she did not have the right to decide who lived or died, that only God did. But, I believe that we not only have the right to decide that in certain instances, we have the responsibility. If you believe in God, then he would have been able to maintain the life of the man without life-support, if that were in his divine plan.
Until someone forces me to give up my responsibility to protect my life and those of others, lives that they have a right to, then I will maintain my right to use lethal force to do so.

Forget the Dog, Beware the Owner.







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