The Road to Hell is a Compromise

I once had a young man, who obviously had not been through the war on guns, and who had heard only one side of the story, ask me why we couldn't just compromise on a few "reasonable" restrictions on guns. My first thought was to simply laugh in his face, but I thought better of it. I then went through the long effort to restrict our rights, and showed how it was we, not those who wished to control guns, who had compromised all along. Now, we were standing our ground. Not one inch more.  As Jesse Helms said, "Compromise, hell!  If freedom is right, and tyranny is wrong, why should those who believe in freedom treat it as a roll of roll of bologna to be bartered a slice at a time?"

But it is not only on gun control that we have compromised. Most of us in the gun rights movement are not the single issue voters we are made out to be. We don't just want our Second Amendment rights, we want them all. Most of us also have jobs and responsibilities such that it is impossible to keep up with the thousands of ways every day that governments at the local, State and Federal levels violate not only the Constitution, but their own statues. Guns, thus, are a convenient short hand, for how a politician thinks about guns will almost always indicate how he will think about the rest of the Constitution. Make no mistake, every politician, and every judge knows the real purposes of the Second Amendment. Hint: it ain't about hunting.

So, it was good to read in the American Thinker the other day a piece by Jay Huag entitled Why Liberals Love Compromise. It explains how the Left has used the claim that we on the right do not compromise, to slowly frame the debate ever more leftward.  They offer a proposal that is somewhat left of the status quo, and then invite us to "compromise."  We lose every time.  Today, we have Republican candidates for President talking about saving Social Security, an Unconstitutional law, and a Leftist ponzi scheme that threatens to drive us all bankrupt.  Most times, the Left poses some change to the status quo. Suddenly, the debate is framed in such a way that those who are defending the status quo are...well...defensive.  I understand why this is, even if I don't understand how so many can be taken in so consistently. It has been said that a lie will go around the world while the truth is pulling its boots on. It is, first of all, often an emotional issue, or it is made to seem so.  In the case of gun control, innocent victims are sometimes gunned down in horrific crimes.  The Virginia Tech massacre is a prime example.  We feel empathy for these people, and wish we could do something.  The Left often plays on these emotions while offering up its favored solution.  Meanwhile it takes time, effort, and money to marshal the facts to counter the lie. Even so, the lie will often have become such common wisdom that a sizable number of the public will believe it. Thus, gun control is thought by many to control crime, when the opposite is true. In John Lotts formulation more guns, less crime.

So, what do we do to pull the culture back towards a Constitutional understanding of the proper role of government?  Mr. Huag's view:

Part of the reason liberalism has appeared so inevitable is that "compromise" has replaced "reform" as the game that is played. What I say is this: stop playing their game and start playing ours. Conservative reform is what America needs. Their game has bankrupted the country, ruined our schools, hamstrung our economy, and confused our foreign policy. Their game failed in the '70s and is failing again now. We conservatives cannot win until we change it at every level of government, local, state and federal.

Part of reforming is to stand our ground. No compromise. Never. Why should people "treat freedom as a roll of bologna to be bartered one slice at a time?" Yes the Leftists will wail and scream. They will protest, and perhaps get violent. But we have the guns, remember. Let them. It is no different than when your child throws a tantrum, and it is for their good as well as our own. We must take back the school boards, take back the churches, take back the city councils, take back the State houses. In short, we must march through the institutions. It will be a generational fight, but freedom and liberty are at stake. We must win.

If the recent debt ceiling deal did not teach anything else, it should have taught everyone on our side that there is no compromising with the Left.