LEFTISTS URGE AMERICANS TO BETRAY THEIR OWN GOD-GIVEN RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS

PART THREE

The Power of Emotional Rhetoric Shamelessly Exploited to Undermine the Second Amendment

People like New York Governor, Andrew Cuomo and Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA), know full well the power of rhetoric. And, as they are well versed in it, they know how to use it. They know the power of persuasion. They know how to woo some members of the public—those susceptible to their vitriolic, superficial, and specious polemics. They have mastered well the art of rhetoric and they know well the power of fallacious argumentation.

Cuomo and Swalwell appeal unashamedly, unabashedly, and irresponsibly to raw emotion rather than to reason as they impose their personal abhorrence of guns onto an ill-informed public. And these sanctimonious fomenters of public guilt, don’t stop there. Cuomo and Swalwell attempt to foster a sense of collective guilt in gun owners as a class; simultaneously and deliberately rousing rage in the antigun mob against guns and gun owners. Cuomo and Swalwell strongly suggest that gun owners bear a measure of responsibility for every horrific act of gun violence that occurs. And that, too, is in vein with their vision for this Country–an enclave of Socialism. Socialism, as conceived today, embraces a broad  economic, social, political, and cultural belief system predicated on the tenets of Collectivism.

The tenets of Collectivism do not cohere with the notion of a fundamental right of the American citizenry to keep and bear arms, independent of Government say-so. And, those who adhere to the tenets of Collectivism, such as Andrew Cuomo and Eric Swalwell, do not accept the Lockean view that there exists a set of fundamental, natural, and unalienable rights inherent in the people–rights that exist independent of and that therefore, in the purest sense, transcend all Governmental authority to prescribe, regulate, ignore, amend, or abrogate. One such fundamental, natural, unalienable, sacred right, intrinsic to and inviolate in each American citizen is the one codified in the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution: the right of the people to keep and bear arms. 

Concomitant with their belief in the tenets of Collectivism, as a product of economic and political Socialism, Cuomo and Swalwell attempt to create, in the gun-owning public, a sense of collective guilt, for having—as Cuomo and Swalwell see it—the temerity to dare exercise the fundamental right to keep and bear arms. Cuomo and Swalwell create myths surrounding guns and gun ownership. They audaciously argue that it is the gun, itself, an inanimate object, rather than the sentient miscreant–the lunatic or the criminal–who bears moral responsibility for gun violence. Cuomo and Swalwell, and others like them, including the Press, seek, by extension, to assign and cast moral and legal blame, too, for gun violence to those who revere the Second Amendment—namely NRA, its members, and anyone else who seeks to preserve and strengthen the right of the people to keep and bear arms.

Through their appeal to emotion, Andrew Cuomo, Eric Swalwell, and others like them, attempt to foment societal rage against both guns and the gun-owning public. These new modern-day witch-hunting moralists, seek to burn both guns and gun owners at the stake for having dared to revere, even adore, the Bill of Rights that the framers lovingly bequeathed to the American people for the very purpose of securing, for the American people, freedom and liberty, against tyranny.

But, it is tyranny that Cuomo and Swalwell want, and it is tyranny upon the American people that the American people will most certainly get, if Cuomo and Swalwell, and others like them, prove successful in foisting on the American people, a vision of the world at odds with the vision of the founders and one the founders sought to cement through the creation of a system of checks and balances in Government; and through incorporation into the Constitution–the blueprint for the new Nation they had conceived–a set of natural, fundamental, unalienable rights: codified in a document called the Bill of Rights. 

But, if the Collectivists’ vision for this Nation takes root, Americans will see the realization of that vision decimate all that our founders created and that so many in our Nation had given their lives to preserve.  As a dense thicket of weeds overtakes and squeezes out a carefully planted and tended garden, we will see all that our founders held dear smothered and blotted out.

The destroyers of our Nation–these callous, pretentious grand inquisitors, Andrew Cuomo and Eric Swalwell–will not hesitate to impose harsh punishment on each gun owner who fails to surrender their firearms to Governmental authority. And Americans would see this if the machinery of mass confiscation of guns that Cuomo and Swalwell, and that others like them, seek, were implemented.

And implementation of the Collectivists’ design for a new America—a new Collectivist world order—will be set in motion if these Democratic Socialists (as they apparently prefer to call themselves) ever gain the reins of the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Branches of Government.

The Power of Appealing to Emotion Over Reason

The ancient Greek philosophers—whom the founders of our free Republic clearly were certainly mindful of and clearly held in great esteem, and for whom our moral philosophy derives—referred to the fallacy of appealing to emotion as “argumentum ad misericordiam.”

The Greeks knew that rhetoric devoid of reason is dangerous because of its very power to persuade the unwary. We see constant use of this fallacy by unscrupulous politicians today. With a deceptive air, along with a curt smile, or grimace, these politicians deliberately mislead the public. They do this to encourage the public to accept, as good, and virtuous, and well-meaning, policy that is, in fact, pernicious; policy that is detrimental to Americans’ well-being, and to the well-being of the Nation.

Those Americans who are easily moved by emotion have shown themselves to be sensitive to and amenable to the efforts of Cuomo and Swalwell to rein in this presumed plague of guns in America. Unfortunately, there are plenty of them. If Andrew Cuomo and Eric Swalwell succeed—and with their comrades in the mainstream media to assist them in their endeavor–they may yet succeed, albeit not without an ensuing bloodbath. Of that Cuomo and Swalwell, and other antigun zealots, would do well to consider.

Will the Collectivists win? Will the Second Amendment teeter and, ultimately, fall? Andrew Cuomo, Eric Swalwell, and other Collectivists like them, would be ecstatic when or if that happens; and they are doing everything in their power to see that it does happen. Those who hold the Bill of Rights most dear must see to it that it doesn’t.

______________________________________________________

Copyright © 2018 Roger J Katz (Towne Criour), Stephen L. D’Andrilli (Publius) All Rights Reserved.