no, i will not vote for colonel tigh.

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RobertaX has a fine treatise up on why voting for the Lesser of Two Evils still gets you evil in the end.

One thing that has been a source of great frustration to me over the years is the tendency of many so-called conservatives to vote on the gun issue alone. In truth, there is no “most important” of the Amendments in the Bill of Rights–they’re all equally important. I keep hearing that “at least you can fight for your other rights if you have your guns”, but the actions of conservative gun owners after 9/11 have made me come to the conclusion that this is a load of hogwash.

I’ve read countless arguments from conservative gun owners who profess to be “Bill of Rights literalists”, but who don’t care one bit about the rape the Bill of Rights has received, simply because a.) the raping was done by the right folks (the ones with “R” after their names, although all the spineless Democrats who signed off on the Patriot Act nonsense share a large chunk of responsibility–they basically held the victim down while the rape took place), b.) in their minds, they weren’t directly affected by the curtailing of liberties (”hey, I have nothing to hide, and I don’t mind being inspected like cattle and have my phone calls tapped because I’m not one of them terrorists”), and c.) nobody tried to take their precious guns away.

Well, if you only defend the right to keep and bear arms for its own sake, pretty soon you’ll have nothing to defend with those guns but your right to own them. Also, the Second Amendment is the only one in the Bill of Rights that refers to a tangible object. I can bury my guns; I can’t bury my freedom of speech or my right to a jury trial.

What these folks don’t realize that voting for someone like McCain is not only bad for civil liberties (because McCain has a bad track record of respecting the Bill of Rights), but also bad for the right to keep and bear arms. He’s bad because his election would reinforce the current Republican trend of taking gun owners for granted, because “where the hell else are they going to go?” It means that the Republicans only have to give lip service to the RKBA, do the “reasonable restrictions” and “compromise” shuffle in Congress to appease the other side, and that they only have to be a little less bad than the Democrat in order to get the gun owner vote.

An election win for McCain would mean four or eight more years of complacent conservatism, where the Republicans bicker about non-issues like gay marriage or flag-burning or some other superficial shit that gives them an easy way of waving the flag or pandering to the religious vote. It’ll mean four or eight more years of rubber-stamping every bit of anti-freedom nonsense as long as it carries with it the promise of safety from the evil towelheads, who will surely nuke our cities if we don’t hand over our rights to our benevolent protectors so their jobs may be easier.

Here’s a question for all those who think that freedom needs to be abridged to save lives:

We lose three times more people per year to traffic accidents than we have lost to terrorists in the over six years since 9/11, and that includes the 9/11 body count and the Iraq/Afghanistan combat toll.

Why is it that nobody seriously proposes banning private automobiles and mandatory use of public transportation, even though we could save tens of thousands of lives every year with such a measure, and even though driving a car is not a constitutionally guaranteed right like the freedom of speech, or freedom from unreasonable search and seizure?

What’s that? It would curb our freedoms drastically and tank the economy?

So 30,000 people per year is the undisputed price of freedom, yet we need to toss the Bill of Rights out of the window to avoid the occasional terrorist attack?

Haven’t we been telling the Brady crowd for decades that “if it only saves one life” is not a good enough reason for putting an end to a constitutionally guaranteed right? Has the pro-gun crowd been talking out of their southbound orifices all along, and did it only take a sufficiently scary boogeyman to get them to hold the Zippo to the Bill of Rights?

I think I’d rather take my chances with the Jihadis in freedom, thank you very much, and I certainly don’t feel that the Manchurian Candidate is somehow entitled to my vote just because he holds that Zippo to a different end of the parchment, and because he’s a borrow-and-spend Statist instead of a tax-and-spend one.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but exhorting people to vote for McCain with the “he’s less bad than Hillbama” argument is like urging them to pick rapist #1 over rapist #2 on the grounds that #1 is a little less well endowed, and that he promised to let you pick the position.

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