In Syria, a gov't makes war on its people. Could it ever happen to US?

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In Syria, President Bashar al-Assad has used the full military power of the Syrian government to suppress the Syrian people for more than two years now. He started by having his army shoot at unarmed protesters and has since graduated to firing ballistic missiles at liberated cities and dropping cluster bombs on opposition neighborhoods. He has murdered tens of thousands of the citizens he is suppose to be leading in a craven effort to make them obey.

The tragedy that is being visited on the Syrian people by its own government is pretty much off the radar in the US, as the media, the politicians and many progressives promote a new campaign to restrict gun ownership in the US in the wake of the tragic massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT

Recently US President Obama has taken out time from adding to his "kill list" of those to be taken out with drone strikes, to support this campaign designed to restrict ordinary people from owning what are considered "military styled" weapons. Forgetting entirely that the reason that the US Constitution demands that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" is because it considers this right "necessary to the security of a free state", they argue that these weapons aren't necessary for "legitimate" reasons like hunting and target practice.

Those that rule us hope to use the tragedy of Sandy Hook to get the worst, by which they mean most effective, weapons out of the hands of the people. In the furtherance of that goal, today President Obama turned his usual Saturday presidential address over to Francine Wheeler, whose son Ben, 6, died in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings last December. In it she talked about her son and what his lost meant and she made an emotional appeal for Obama's new gun legislation:

"We have to convince the Senate to come together and pass commonsense gun responsibility reforms that will make our communities safer and prevent more tragedies like the one we never thought would happen to us."

While Obama refuses to lift a finger to stay the hand of Assad as the death toll in Syria climbs toward a hundred thousand and plays coy about his own authority to kill US citizens on US soil, I suspect Francine Wheeler and many others would never think that we might one day need to go begging for weapons to defend ourselves from their own government like the Syrians are doing now.

In their wisdom, the founding fathers knew better. In the Declaration of Independence, they recognized the right to revolution, saying:

Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

By adding the second amendment to the constitution they meant to see that the people had the tools at hand to do the job.

A powerful weapon in the hands of a madman, as happened in Newtown, is a tragedy, a government in the hands of a brutal dictator, with an underarmed population, as in Syria, is a thousand Sandy Hooks.



Click here for a list of my other blogs on Syria