Zach Dasher, the nephew of “Duck Dynasty” star and infamous bigot Phil Robertson, is running for Congress and he’s pledging to stand up for your Second Amendment rights because you never know when we might have to overthrow the government.
“You take away a person’s right to defend themselves, then guess what, you can do whatever you want to them.”
“It’s important to recognize that the Second Amendment is not just the right to bear arms so we can go duck hunting or deer hunting or shoot skeet. This is a right to defend yourself, and not just against criminals but against a tyrannical government as well,” he added.
It’s confusing to me why someone who believes in the fantasy of armed rebellion is running for office, but I suppose it’s no more confusing that running for office on a platform that says government is the problem. But I digress.
The idea of overthrowing the government with arms hasn’t been a plausible reality since at least the 1860s and it never will be again. And it’s not clear what Dasher and others like him are referring to when claim they government can do ‘whatever it wants to’ if they aren’t able to defend themselves. What exactly do they believe the government will do?
It’s also not clear what the threshold is. At what point does armed rebellion become necessary?
When same-sex marriage arrives in Louisiana, will that be the last straw? When a Democratic woman is elected president, will that be the final insult? I ask because those are the only scenarios I can imagine happening in the near future that Republicans such as Dasher would view negatively. What else do they envision?
Talk of armed rebellion is masturbatory confederate fan-fiction and Civil War reenactment is the closest any of those who speak of it will ever come to the real thing.