Mike Spenis of Feces Flinging Monkey Comments

on the recent Ohio Supreme Court concealed-carry decision here.

Read the whole comment, but the money quote is this:

"I've long believed that democracies live and die by the education of their people. I suppose we should add that constitutions live and die by the whims of our judges."

As I've written, a right is what the majority of people believes it is. If the majority of Ohioans believed that the right to arms enumerated in the state constitution really existed, then the Ohio Supreme Court would reflect that belief, not decide 5-2 that making concealed-carry illegal somehow didn't infringe on "the right to bear arms for their defense and security."

Which, I believe, is why our school system is collapsing or has collapsed. Connie du Toit said recently:

The other day our Carpenter’s helper heard me say something along the lines of, "it is difficult to conclude that incompetence is the reason why our public schools have deteriorated. There comes a point where you have to suspect sabotage, or a conspiracy."

He asked me if I really meant that.

--

I then went on to tell him about how public schools changed at the turn of the last century. That there were others involved in turning Americans from free-thinking individualists to factory drones. I also added that many people probably went along with it because it seemed like a good idea, but there were certainly enough people behind the scenes, who knew that the goal posts had been moved. THAT is a conspiracy.

Yes. There does come that time when you are forced to don the tinfoil hat.

And then there's this quotation attributed to Justice Antonin Scalia (though I've not been able to verify it):

To some degree, a constitutional guarantee is like a commercial loan, you can only get it if, at the time, you don't really need it. The most important, enduring, and stable portions of the Constitution represent such a deep social consensus that one suspects if they were entirely eliminated, very little would change. And the converse is also true. A guarantee may appear in the words of the Constitution, but when the society ceases to possess an abiding belief in it, it has no living effect. Consider the fate of the principle expressed in the Tenth Amendment that the federal government is a government of limited powers. I do not suggest that constitutionalization has no effect in helping the society to preserve allegiance to its fundamental principles. That is the whole purpose of a constitution. But the allegiance comes first and the preservation afterwards.

Make sure that the children you are educating don't believe in the fundametal principles that founded the nation, and those principles will, inevitably, vanish. The Constitution will become merely words, and words will begin to mean what we want them to mean - and that meaning can change at a whim.

Just like George Orwell described in 1984.

Yes, the Ohio constitution, Article 4 states:

The people have the right to bear arms for their defense and security;
but standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, and shall not be kept up;
and the military shall be in strict subordination to the civil power.

But try to carry a firearm for your "defense and security" in Ohio - either open or concealed - and see how long it takes you to end up in police custody.

A right is what the majority of a society believes it is.

And those of us who really believe in the rights of the individual are losing to the education system that is teaching our children that those rights aren't real.

Tinfoil hat ON.

UPDATE: Clayton Cramer discusses the Ohio Supreme Court decision with his usual thoroughness.