Sounds Like a “Reasonable Restriction” to Me

Let’s see:  You’re in a country which is — at least insofar as the riff-raff are concerned — explicitly run according to the precepts of the Religion of Peace.  We ignore for the moment that the personal lives of the super-dooper wealthy, including pretty near all the members of the ruling family, more closely resemble something from the latter days of the Roman Empire, only with less restraint and vastly more money.  One of the precepts of the government is that public practice of any religion other than the Religion of Peace is a disturbance to public order, which is not that far-fetched, in that one of central tenets of the Religion of Peace involves the forcible conversion or extermination of the adherents of any religion other than the Religion of Peace.

 Thus, if you catch, say 40-odd Christians plotting — privately — to celebrate Christmas, well, you’ve done a good day’s work by arresting them and seeing to it that the gross provocation to the adherents of the Religion of Peace does not in fact occur.  Which is what just happened in Saudi Arabia.  This, folks, is crime prevention as it ought to be. 

The Saudis’ swooping down on a house of Christians because they just might be a-fixin’ to observe Christmas is, I humbly suggest, no more unreasonable a restriction on those folks’ freedom of conscience than the proposals by Dear Leader, his unpaid interns (for which read: the mainstream media), and his sycophants in Congress that my rights under the Second Amendment must be infringed (gosh; where have I seen that verb before?) because someone other than I may — just might — use the same freedoms that I enjoy in order to commit something that is and would be a crime no matter whether he used the same rights or something else.  I mean, Adam Lanza’s slaughtering 20 children and six adults (other than himself) would have been the crime of murder whether he did it with piano wire, a machete, a baseball bat, a full-automatic Uzi machine gun, or by tying their hands behinds their backs and shoving tennis balls down their throats.  He’s willing, perfectly willing, to commit mass murder, but Dear Leader expects him to flinch before a ban on scary-looking semi-automatic weapons?  Because the Lanzas of this world just maybe might use a scary-looking semi-automatic weapon to commit mass murder — just like those 40-odd Christians in Saudi Arabia might have provoked the Religion of Peace into yet another public rampage — my ability to defend myself and my family must be pruned back to a level thought “reasonable” by people who receive armed protection whenever they’re out and about.

Many years ago Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., set up a rhetorical question suggested by a particular argument.  He then observed (I’d thought I’d run across this line in a Supreme Court opinion, but a quick Westlaw scan didn’t pull it up; maybe it was in an article, book, or interview), that “to ask the question is to answer it.”  To assert that a liberty interest guaranteed to me by the explicit language of the Constitution itself must be infringed because of what some unknown person, under unknowable circumstances, might hypothetically do if extended that same liberty, is to refute the assertion.