Renowned Liberal sees the light

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Naomi Wolf rethinks firearms

Like so many liberals, Wolf never questioned her assumptions on firearms and their owners, until she was threatened, and learned to be free of fear.

Published by Don Tabor

I am a former Chairman of the Tidewater Libertarian Party and was the 2007 LP candidate for the 14th district VA Senate. Previously, I was the Volunteer State Director for the FairTax. I am married 50 years with two grown children and 5 grandchildren.

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30 thoughts on “Renowned Liberal sees the light”

  1. I actually thought this was going to be a serious argument for keeping firearms. It wasn’t. I’m not even going to get in to her fevered diatribes about Bill Gates’ “fetish-y, psychotic adolescent fantasies” or her fear of armed men knocking at her door.

    Silly me, I thought she had actually had a face-to-face, real-life experience with a gun in her hand. If she did, I missed it among all the garbage.

    This is a true story.

    I once had an encounter with four escaped convicts. They came to the stable at the Presidio one morning when I was there alone. I didn’t know who they were at first. I noticed they were dressed funny for San Francisco’s chilly weather. They were wearing nothing but t-shirts and grey pants. They were asking about money. I told them the army wasn’t renting horses anymore and there was no money in the office. They asked about drink machines. I told them the army had the machines removed because they kept getting broken into.

    About that time, a retired Colonel was driving up, as he did every morning, to groom his horse and ride to the beach. I noticed he stopped short of the stable parking lot and parked in a fire lane behind the paddock. What I didn’t know was, he had been listening to the radio and heard the description of the car the four escaped convicts were driving. He saw the four men and called the MPs from his car.

    The four guys drove off just before the MPs arrived but the Colonel came to my office as soon as they left. The MPs arrived shortly after that and I got the full story of what had just happened.

    The MPs told me how lucky it was that I was wearing my Bowie knife. Then they taught me a lesson I never forgot. They said convicts, hardened criminals who had been around, had absolutely no fear of a woman with a gun. Whether it’s true or not, they believe a woman won’t shoot… at least not right away. A woman will hesitate. And all they need is 5 seconds to take that gun away and use it on you. But the other thing they honestly believe is, a woman with a knife will cut you. They said the Bowie knife is probably the only reason they didn’t attack first and look for money afterwards.

    I took the lesson to heart, but I never believed I would hesitate to shoot if attacked. I was wrong again. Years later, living on a little farm out on 13th Division Prairie, a pack of wild dogs broke into my barn and attacked my sheep one night. When I turned on the outside light, the pack charged out of the barn, straight for me. I had my gun and I had a bead on the pack leader… and I hesitated. I hesitated killing a dog. I did pull the trigger, but if it had been a human, I can’t honestly say I would have pulled the trigger in time.

    Again, another MP told me, it wasn’t an unusual response. Training men to pull the trigger on another human being in combat is one of the hardest things the army has to do. You think it’s easy. It’s not. The first time in combat, many men freeze.

    Also, having a gun in the house isn’t the “protection” many people think it is. That gun is used to kill more family members than intruders. Again, I had a nephew who proved that point. He came home from work depressed for lunch one day. He called his girlfriend and told her she needed to come to the house. When she asked why, he wouldn’t say. She refused to take time off from work without a reason. He put down the phone, went into the bedroom, got my brother’s gun and blew his brains out on the living room sofa. To this day, nobody knows why. But if that “protection” hadn’t been in the house, I might still have a nephew.

    The best gun safety is to take guns out of the hands of people who don’t need them. And no civilian needs a military weapon.

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    1. RE: “The best gun safety is to take guns out of the hands of people who don’t need them.”

      No thanks. I have known people who died by gun, but I still don’t want that kind of “safety.”

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  2. Dr. Wolf’s parsing of the text of the 2nd Amendment is particularly good.

    I am also itrigued that she has begun to see the 2nd Amendment as an ultimate defense against tyranny. What a long, strange trip it’s been.

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  3. Dr. Wolf has absolutely no understanding of the Second Amendment or where it came from.

    I’m sure this must have been brought up in this forum at least some time in the past, but conservative Chief Justice Warren Burger once said, “The Gun Lobby’s interpretation of the Second Amendment is one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American People by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies – the militia – would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.”

    What he didn’t say was, those state militias were, in fact, slave patrols. I went into this in great detail on another post many moons ago and don’t feel like repeating it all again, but briefly, the South feared the federal government might one day step in and disarm their militias.

    Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution, gave the federal government the power to raise and supervise a militia.
    It could also allow that federal militia to subsume state militias and change them from slavery-enforcing institutions into something that could one day free the slaves.

    The South refused to sign on to the Constitution unless their slave patrols were protected.

    The Second Amendment was never meant to put a gun into the hands of any and every nut who wanted one.

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    1. I suggest you read Scalia in Heller for the derivation of the 2nd Amendment.

      That “Slave Patrol” garbage has been long refuted, it was made of whole cloth by Carol Anderson of Emory and has been widely quoted by gun control zealots because they want it to be true,

      On the contrary, gun control laws are rooted in racism, to keep Blacks unarmed in the face of the KKK

      https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/07/31/opinion/very-racist-history-gun-control/

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    2. RE: “Dr. Wolf has absolutely no understanding of the Second Amendment or where it came from.”

      Where is she wrong in how she parses the text? It should be noted that Wolf’s interpretation is consistent with Warren Burger’s, as well as Antonin Scalia’s parsing of the same text. Both justices found that the 2nd Amendment does not confer unlimited rights, but Scalia (in Heller) found, like Wolf, that the text establishes an individual right to own and carry guns.

      Your “slave patrols” argument is also weak, since the Constitution doesn’t specifically mention the use of militias to patrol slaves.

      It is hard for me to imagine that a constitution created after a successful revolution would somehow make future revolutions more difficult by creating a tyrannical government.

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  4. Sorry, but when Wolf said the WHO would lock you up, I think that set the tone for paranoia sold by the right.

    What made more sense was this:

    “ I did not buy the handgun, as I need a class and a permit and four references. That is as it should be.”

    Gee, proof of competency, standing in the community…what a novel idea.

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  5. Am I reading this right? Do you gunhumpers actually believe you need a gun to protect you from the “tyranny” of your own government?

    THAT’S WHAT VOTING IS FOR!

    And no, you whinny little babies, you have never faced “tyranny.” Losing an election is not tyranny! Having to wear a mask to the grocery store to protect yourself and others during a pandemic is not tyranny. It’s called accepting you won’t always get your own way. It’s called accepting you sometimes lose. It’s called being an adult.

    I’ll tell you when you can start to worry about tyranny. When you have a President who loses an election and tries to declare Martial Law to stay in power, that’s when you need to worry about tyranny. But then, you’d be one of the ones humping your guns, marching in goose step right beside him. So long as he was throwing the “right people” into the ovens, you’d be fine. You wouldn’t recognize tyranny until it bit you in the …. oven.

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    1. I find it amazing that liberals wail about the riot on Jan 6 as though it were a threat to the republic, yet don’t see the need to deter a real insurrection by enabling the people to preserve the Rule of Law if a rogue regime will not.

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      1. I have never seen logic twisted into such a pretzel!

        If you have been paying any attention at all to the Congressional Hearings on January 6, which you obviously haven’t, you would know that those riots (at least you’re finally admitting they weren’t just peaceful patriotic protestors) were just one part of a complex scheme to illegally overturn the election. That is the definition of a “threat to the republic.” It was in fact, an effort to ditch the “Rule of Law.”

        If you are suggesting that this real threat to the republic should have been met with armed resistance, I suggest to you that the Constitutional process we are now using is the better solution.

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        1. “I have never seen logic twisted into such a pretzel!”

          It happens a lot on the right when they are shown to be zealots of the wrong kind. They love liberty for themselves, try to SAY they want liberty for all, but when it comes down to it, they twist themselves so much, chiropractors won’t even touch them.

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        2. Armed resistance is only justified when the government will not be restrained by the Rule of Law.

          Had a President remained in office after his term by unlawful means, that would be the time for armed resistance.

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      2. It was NOT just the riot, but the reasoning behind it and the rhetoric that drove it. The attempted autoglope failed because Mike Pence KNEW the law and understood it completely. Even his staff knew that they did NOT want Ron Johnson handing him the slate of FAKE electors from Michigan and Wisconsin.

        The rogue regime ended on January 21, 2021. Get over it.

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      3. 1/6 was the most visible effort by Trump to steal the election. A lot more was planned, even before the election.

        Not the subject here until you made it so.

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  6. Scalia was a tool of the NRA.  Nothing he says is of any interest to me. 

    That “slave patrol garbage” may be refuted but it is not disproven.  It is totally true.  I have seen the documents proving it.  There WERE slave patrols in the South.  Census records document who served on them.  And we are not talking about “gun control laws.”  We are talking about the Second Amendment and where it came from.  The KKK didn’t exist when the Second Amendment was written.  

    The Revolutionary War ended in 1783.

    The Articles of Confederation (1781-1788) were abandoned.  They weren’t working.  There were 10 Presidents between 1781 and 1789 (No, George wasn’t actually the first. Surprise!) and nothing was getting done. 

    The founding fathers got together to try again.  This time, they wrote the Constitution.

    The Constitution came into force in 1789, but the antifederalists in the South were not happy.  The Constitution had to be amended, so 10 amendments were proposed to ease the fears of the states’ rights antifederalists.

    The South particularly feared Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution.  It gave the federal government power to raise and supervise militias.  It also had the potential to allow the federal government to subsume state militias.  If that happened, those militias could go from protecting slave owners to freeing slaves.  The South wasn’t about to let that happen.  

    George Mason wrote:  “The militia may be here destroyed by that method which has been practiced in other parts of the world before; that is, by rendering them useless, by disarming them.”

    And good ol’ Patrick Henry wrote: “In this situation, I see a great deal of the property of the people of Virginia in jeopardy, and their peace and tranquility gone.” (That “give me liberty” BS was only for guys like him, not everybody.)

    James Madison’s first draft of the Second Amendment looked like this:

    The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free COUNTRY: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.

    Of course, the South didn’t like that “country” part. So that had to go. The second draft looked like this:

    A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free STATE, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

    They dropped the bit about religious scruples. Nobody cared about that. But they wanted to be sure it was the STATE that owned the militias, not the COUNTRY.

    But, why would a state need a militia? We were told in school it was to protect it from local uprisings. But what kind of “uprisings?”

    Shay’s Rebellion (1786-1787) Was put down by the Massachusetts state militia. Massachusetts wasn’t Jonesing for a Second Amendment, the South was.

    The Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 was put down by George Washington’s national militia. The rebellion was efficiently crushed and the state had nothing to do with it.

    So why were state militias so important? And only to the South?

    In the South, militias were used as slave patrols.

    Georgia laws required all male plantation owners or their employees to be members of the Georgia militia. Militia members were required to make monthly inspections of slave quarters to insure no unauthorized weapons were there. They were to apprehend and give 20 lashes to any slave found outside of plantation grounds.

    In North Carolina, slaves could be beaten by the militia for being outside after 9pm or being in town on the Sabbath without written permission.

    Slave patrollers were free white men between the ages of 18 and 45. And there were advantages to being a patroller.

    First, of course, was to protect your “property.”

    Then, like any soldier, you were exempt from any murder charges or “property damage” you may do in the line of duty.

    But best of all, you were exempt from federal taxes for any year you served on patrol.

    And if you don’t believe there were slave patrols or that they were exempt from federal taxes, I refer you to Norfolk County Virginia Tithables, 1766-1780, Compiled & Published by Elizabeth B. Wingo & Bruce Wingo.

    Therein you will find the names of local men who were marked as patrollers. e.g. HODGES, SOLOMON, Patroler.

    Ol’ Solomon didn’t pay any federal taxes that year.

    I won’t go into all of the militia acts again. Suffice it to say that state militias evolved into the National Guard and they are the only “militias” necessary for the “security of a free state.”

    As for Supreme Court decisions on the Second Amendment:

    United States v. Cruikshank (1875) said blacks didn’t have the right to bear arms. That wasn’t revoked until 1966.

    Presser v. Illinois (1886) said citizens had no right to form their own militias or to own weapons for military purposes

    Miller v. Texas (1894) said the Second Amendment did not apply to state laws. States could regulate guns any way they chose.

    Robertson v. Baldwin (1897) said laws regulating concealed weapons did not infringe upon the Second Amendment.

    United States v. Miller (1939) said federal and state laws could limit any weapon types not having “a reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.” e.g. It was illegal to transport sawed off shotguns across state lines.

    Then came the first ever ruling by the Supreme Court to put guns into the hands of private citizens with little to no limitations.

    District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) said individuals have the right to possess and carry weapons… with no definition of “weapons.” If you think you need to carry an AR-15 to the grocery store, that’s fine. I’m waiting for the perp who thinks he needs a shoulder mounted missile to get a cheeseburger.

    The gun industry was so delighted with Heller, Smith & Wesson issued a special “Heller commemorative revolver.”

    Then came the stand your ground laws, spreading like a cancer through every state in the union, sponsored by ALEC and the NRA. Unfortunately, those laws do not pertain to women in domestic violence situations nor to black men who shoot cops who are breaking in, with a no-knock warrant, to the wrong home. Those laws weren’t written for them.

    So please don’t try to tell me that the Second Amendment was ever meant to protect innocent people from the bad guys. The Second Amendment was meant to protect slave owners from slaves. Period!

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    2. Nice job. Great job really.

      I predict the following rebuttals based on past postings:

      “So what”

      “It’s deterrence, you don’t understand”

      “I don’t care”

      And perhaps a smattering of insults from our local parachuting trolls.

      Illegitimi non carborundum, fake Latin or not, it fits in todays America.

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      1. It has been a busy day.

        I haven’t had time to read Thomas’s decision yet nor Ms Radford’s lengthy reply yet, so I won’t comment until I do.

        I’ll try to get to them this evening.

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    4. An ad hominem attack on a dead man is not a good start.

      Certainly slave patrols existed. That is not proof they were the reason for the 2nd Amendment. Keep in mind that the framers of the Constitution distrusted government more than I do. It was always their intention to keep the government subordinate to the people.

      There was always distrust between the industrial and agrarian states, and with good reason, And not all were about slavery.

      You don’t give your sources, but you might want to check them. For example, you claim that service in these slave patrols exempted men form Federal taxes.

      Prior to the 16th Amendment there were no individual Federal taxes from which to exempt them. The Federal government was financed by tariffs and duties and levies on the States.

      United States v. Cruikshank (1875) said that the Bill of Rights did not apply to states. It has since been reversed. I don’t know where you got your interpretation.

      Presser v. Illinois (1886) Same thing, that the 1st and 2nd Amendment only applied to the Federal govt. Also reversed.

      Miller v. Texas (1894) Ditto

      United States v. Miller (1939) Miller is one of the most bizarre cases ever, It was an affirmation of a lower court ruling. Miller was in prison for life on another charge, bank robbery, and did not even mount a written defense on the gun charge as it made no difference to him. Only the prosecution case was presented. Even so, Scalia cites Miller in Heller, as SCOTUS in Miller conceded an individual right to keep and bear arms and only convicted Miller on the sawed off shotgun charge BECAUSE IT WAS NOT A MILITARY WEAPON. So if you want to go by Miller, then ARs are most certainly protected by the 2nd Amendment.

      Have you ever actually read Scalia’s decision in Heller? Before calling him names, I suggest you do and tell me where he is in error.

      Oh, and stand your ground has been the law in Virginia since before the Revolutionary War, It derives from English common law. You need not retreat before defending your life if you are in a place you are legally entitled to be and had no part in initiating the altercation.

      So, if you ae attacked by a rapist, you do not have to see if you can outrun him before defending yourself. How is that a cancer?

      Your analysis is at best a gross revision of history,

      Period.

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  7. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Bin Laden are dead. I feel no obligation to refrain from saying they were vile, disgusting, men. Same goes for Scalia.

    Yes, slave patrols did exist. And the threat of them disappearing is exactly why the South demanded the Second Amendment.

    I disagree that the framers of the Constitution distrusted government. They created government. They distrusted bad government. That is why they were so careful about writing the Constitution. Personally, I think they did a pretty good job.

    Here’s an example of some of the perks of being a slave patroller in Tarboro, N.C.: https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/tarboro/summary.html

    You can see that tax exemption is among them. Laws varied from state to state. Some states exempted patrollers from public, county, and parish taxes.

    Yes, the federal government was funded primarily through tariffs and levies but for the part that was left over, the government added up the overruns, divided that amount among the white males listed on the census, and sent out bills. They weren’t much and everybody got billed the same amount, no matter how rich or how poor they were.

    In the United States v. Cruikshank, the defendants were white men who had killed more than sixty black people in what was known as the Colfax massacre. They had been charged with conspiring to prevent blacks from exercising their right to bear arms. It essentially said, the Constitution did not guarantee blacks the right to bear arms. It said citizens must look to “municipal legislation” when other citizens deprive them of such rights. It wasn’t overturned until 1966.

    Presser v. Illinois – Herman Presser headed a German-American paramilitary shooting organization and was arrested for leading a parade group of 400 men, with military weapons, with the declared intention to fight, through the streets of Chicago. It was a violation of Illinois law that prohibited public drilling and parading in military style without a permit from the governor. In this ruling, the Supreme Court upheld Crookshank and upheld the States’ authority to regulate the militia.

    Miller v Texas – Franklin Miller was convicted and sentenced to be executed for shooting a police officer to death with an illegally carried handgun in violation of Texas law. Miller sought to have his conviction overturned, claiming his Second Amendment rights were violated and that the Bill of Rights should be applied to state law. The Supreme Court disagreed and said that Texas gun laws could stand.

    I have given you all the reasons I think Heller was one of the worst, if not the worse, Supreme Court decision ever handed down. (Although I expect the current Supreme Court to challenge that record.) I suggest you give me all the reasons you think Scalia was correct.

    Stand your ground laws and “no retreat” rules are not the same thing. Under the no retreat rule, you do not have to retreat before defending yourself if you did not provoke the altercation. However, if you were at fault, you can not stand your ground.

    In stand your ground laws, all you have to do is prove you felt your life was threatened and you can kill someone.

    Of course proving that “threat” varies greatly depending on your race and gender. A black woman in Florida, who shot (but didn’t kill) her husband because he was beating her, ended up in jail. A black man who shot a cop who was breaking into his home, with a no-knock warrant, and had the wrong house, also ended up in jail. A white man who killed a black man for shoving him out of the way in a parking lot got off clean. And that is why this law is a cancer.

    Your rebuttal is at best a display of right-wing paranoia.

    Period.

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