View from the Foothills

En route to work today, I caught snippets of an interview of Condi with Larry King (thanks to the Laura Ingraham show for the opportunity). The topic was the second amendment. Not surprisingly, Condi was for it, and she made two powerful points.

First, she told the story of her father and other neighborhood dads in Birmingham, Alabama sitting on the front porch with guns to protect their families from the white supremecists in early 1960's. Condi's point was the that genius of the second amendment is that it recognizes that the ultimate responsibility for safety lies with the individual. Our founding fathers knew that there were situations where the authorities couldn't or wouldn't protect the citizenry, and they wanted to ensure the individual's right to protect himself. The image of Condi's father on the front porch in the heat of the Civil Rights movement is an amazingly powerful illustation of that basic point.

Second, Condi stated the oft overlooked reality that we don't get to "pick and choose" our constitutional rights. The right to bear arms has the same force as the supposedly more valuable rights of speech, assembly and religion contained in the first amendment. They are either all sacrosanct or all not. A simply point, but again powerful.

It is nice to know Condi is as forceful and knowledgable on the domestic side as she is with foreign policy.