David McElroy

Do you support First Amendment Rights? What about Second Amendment rights? Some people have favorites. They like free speech, so they support the First Amendment, but they don’t like guns, so they don’t support the Second. Someone else might support guns, so they like the Second Amendment, but they don’t think criminal suspects should have any rights, so they think the Fourth and Fifth Amendments are worthless. And so on.

If you do that, you’re confused about what rights are. It’s hard to blame you, though, because you were taught misleading information in school and you’ve grown up in a country where people don’t seem to believe you can talk about rights without finding an amendment to point to and say, “See? That’s where this right comes from.”

Contrary to what you were probably taught, the Bill of Rights doesn’t give anybody a single right. This document was simply a list of a few of the basic rights that some early U.S. politicians thought should be written down and enshrined in the Constitution to make certain that these “obvious” things were protected. But it wasn’t meant to be a complete list. The Ninth Amendment was inserted to make sure that nobody could think that this was all the rights that exist. It reads:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

In other words, “We recognize that you have all the natural rights that are yours just because you’re a human being. We’re listing a few of them here, but that doesn’t make them more special than the ones we’re not listing.”

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There’s a building not far from my house that takes me back to December of 2004 each time I drive past. It’s not a good memory, but rather one that still gives me shivers eight and a half years later.

It’s the memory of a night I suddenly couldn’t remember what I was doing and freaked out as I tried to do my job.

We were close to finishing the first day of shooting for my short film, “We’re the Government — and You’re Not.” Even though I didn’t really know what I was doing, I was the writer and director, and I was sharing the producer duties. I honestly didn’t know until that day just how little I knew.

Even though the day had been a blur, things had generally gone well except for my car having a flat tire at the next-to-last shooting location of the day. (I rode around on the little “doughnut spare” all weekend because I didn’t have time to fix the tire.) I was waiting for one last prop to come in the mail. It was days late, but we thought it would be there. I ran to my house and it wasn’t there — and it was time to shoot the scene. I didn’t have a back-up plan.

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If you’re going to Washington, D.C., for the Fourth of July, I strongly suggest that you don’t take a gun. And I suggest even more strongly that you don’t follow Adam Kokesh on a “peaceful” armed march on the city.

We can agree about the outcomes we want, but still strongly disagree about how to get there. We can even disagree about whether there’s anything reasonable to be done which would bring about the desired outcome at the moment.

Kokesh calls himself a libertarian, but I’m not familiar with what all he believes. I just know of him as a flamboyant and loud activist. If that’s your thing, it’s your business. It’s just not my way, so I’m not especially interested in that sort of activism. And I definitely don’t have a death wish — or a desire to lead a bunch of people into being arrested in order to play the role of martyr or victim.

Kokesh had already been promoting the Fourth of July armed march, but he upped the stakes last week. After a recent arrest in Philadelphia — which appeared unjustified based on my cursory viewing of the video — Kokesh called for an “American Revolutionary Army to March on 50 State Capitols.” Here’s his full announcement, if you’d like to make sure I’m not taking him out of context.

If you’re following someone who suddenly calls on an “army” to march on every state capitol in the country and forcibly demand the immediate dissolution of the national government, you should seriously wonder about the person you’re following. Even if we agree on desired ends — and I suspect that I would generally agree with what Kokesh wants for society — you have to wonder about the judgement and mental stability of someone making that sort of plea and hoping for people to obey.

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