"Democracy Lost" Or, Editors Slept Through Civics Class

     Bemoaning the "undemocratic" results* of the latest push for gun control has become a common refrain on the Left.  Even granting their phoney-baloney poll results ("90% in favor of background checks"  -- extrapolated from a small sample via leading questions), it's a meaningless question.  Or worse; because if "Democracy wins," Constitutional government loses.

     "The right to keep and bear arms" like "religion," "the press," "peaceable assembly" and "petitioning the Government for the redress of grievances" is, by express Amendment, not up for a vote.  And yet it was, and the United States Senate was only saved from screwing up the Federal government even worse than it already is by the requirement for a (mild) supermajority.  --Sure, the party with a slim majority condemns this provision but they never forget that some day they, too, may want that power.

     Personally, I don't think it goes far enough.  If 60% is good, why not 75%?  If a measure is so bad that a quarter of Senators vote against it, it's probably pretty bad.

     And on the subject of bad ideas--  The Senate, or a good majority of them, are quite comfy with the notion that nothing is outside their legislative purview.  "There ought to be a law!" is their rallying-cry, not "Are we permitted to make a law about this?"  It doesn't bode well; in the long run, it means we will all lose -- everyone except those with the price of a Senator, anyway.  We can fight to slow the trend, as was so successfully done with the badly-drafted "Universal Background Checks" bill, but we're winning battles in a war we are all losing.

     Keep up the good fight but remember it's a long, long way from won and just as long as Congress believes there's nothing they can't lay holt of, it's not over.  They've been chip, chipping away at the 4th and 5th Amendments for a good long time now, to make you "safe."  Funny, I feel even less safe....
____________________________________
* Link goes to the Concord (NH) Monitor.  With all due respect to the Free State Project and the freely-armed granola-eaters of Vermont, I consider the Northeast a lost cause from Maine to Delaware.  They've largely destroyed or scorned their gun culture. It would take a generation or more to recover, if ever -- and that's not the direction things appear to be trending.