The Outstater
Sen. Young to the Ramparts
ALLOW ME a short note on Sen. Todd Young’s vote against the Second Amendment.
OK, the senator’s staff would be quick to correct me on that point. He didn’t actually vote against the Second Amendment. He voted in favor of “bipartisan safe communities.” Specifically, he voted to allow government to deny the right to own guns to those it judges mentally ill or immature or without the proper paper work.
“If you are a law-abiding citizen and have not been adjudicated as mentally ill, your Second Amendment rights will not be affected in any way,” the senator promised in advance of this weekend’s signing of the bill into law by Joe Biden.
The problem I have with the senator is that he considers every word in that sentence negotiable. It does not mention, for example, that “law abiding,” “adjudicated” and “affected” include extended background checks for gun purchases, clarification (tightening) of Federal Firearms License requirements, funding for state “red flag” laws and other supposed crisis-intervention programs, plus expanding criminalization of what the government may redefine as arms trafficking and straw purchases,
So, Senator Young isn’t against you owning a gun to defend yourself or your children against either mass murderers or tyranny. He is merely shoring up the mechanisms for the government to take that away.
My reservations about career politicians such as Todd Young were ably expressed several years ago by the columnist Mark Helprin:
“Although most political and ethical issues present opportunities for nuance and compromise, some do not. When politicians engage in doublespeak, they attempt to rob democracy and reason of the element of choice, something that otherwise they inappropriately and promiscuously endorse in an effort to evade moral clarity.”
And the senator is now counted among those who would not let any crisis (school shooting) go to waste. His vote authorized $13 billion to “cure” mental illness (especially in rural areas, for some unexplained reason).
Mental illness, if Senator Young doesn’t know, is the progressives’ latest chimera. It replaces the old revenue-generating standby of urban poverty. Look up the list of new expenditures — they are just the beginning — and see if you can make a plausible connection to protecting the lives of children sitting innocently in school.
Todd Young is not the biggest spender in Washington, nor is he the most hypocritical. He does have a talent for threading the Washington needle. Reviewing his campaign positions it is difficult to find anything for which he is categorically in favor or against every time. When he last ran for election, for example, he had an A+ rating from the National Rifle Association.
Indeed, it is difficult to know who Todd Young is going to be next.
His campaign literature reminds us that he is above all a U.S. Marine, conjuring up the image of, say, Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima or the Chosin Reservoir. He says he will “fight” for us if reelected.
That may be true, as he defines it. But unlike our Rep. Jim banks or Gov. Ron DesSantis of Florida he did not exactly head toward the sound of gunfire during his decade of military service. And that is despite his being in a position to choose his own duty station. He took a recruiting billet.
The rest of his resume reads like that — appointed to this, chosen for that. We can wind this up by saying that the man looks good on paper. You wouldn’t want him managing your constitutional rights, though. — tcl
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