The Necessity of Being Active in Our Defense of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

We have two articles today, the common theme of which is the absolute necessity of being active in our defense of the right to keep and bear arms.  For if we do not defend our rights now, while the cost is small, what will we do when the cost is our lives and our fortunes?

First, though, I wanted to write a bit about this week's Raleigh Gun Show.  Ever since Trump was elected, gun owners have seemingly breathed a sigh of relief.  And why not?   Many of them voted for President Trump, and he has been, generally, conservative and at least has usually given lip service to the Second Amendment.  However, we need to pay attention.  The people attending the Raleigh Gun Show this weekend seemed altogether less concerned about the loss of their gun rights.  This complacency could be our downfall however.  The Left clearly smells blood in the water, and is taking full advantage of it.  We all need to pound our Representatives and Senators with the message "No more gun control. Period."

First up is a piece by Scot Morefield over at Townhall.com entitled Think They'll Never Come and Take Your Guns Without an Armed Revolt? Think Again. I have contended that the Parkland murders provided an excuse to put up a bunch of gun control rhetoric in an effort to block National Concealed Carry Reciprocity, which stood a real chance this Congress. And I think this was largely true. However, Morefield points to an even deeper, and more sinister motive in getting a gun ban in place, by hook or by crook:

Don’t get me wrong, I think most true Leftists would LOVE to harness the power of the State to crush liberty-minded gun owners by every means necessary, and if a few of the right eggs are broken in the process, so much the better. But realists on both sides know such a scenario is highly unlikely to happen, at least to a result the Left would want. In all likelihood, open displays of tyrannical force such as openly rounding up certain people groups or door-to-door weapons confiscations are highly likely to result in open displays of resistance, and a civil war that is likely to be fought, and won, by the good guys.

...snip...

Here’s the answer, and it should scare every gun owner in the country:

They want to make de facto criminals out of the majority of the gun owning population.

That way, they can essentially pick us off, one by one.

Without necessarily meaning to, Mehta hits on this critical point in his piece: “A national gun buyback law would turn a significant portion of the American people into criminals,” he wrote. “Residents of New York and Connecticut snubbed their new laws … Compliance with the registration requirement has been modest at best, as hundreds of thousands of gun owners in both states refused to register their weapons. So far, then, the laws have been most successful in creating hundreds of thousands of lawbreakers who feel obligated to break the law.”

If liberals are able to pass any sort of “assault weapons” ban, buyback or no buyback, they know they will make criminals out of several million currently law-abiding gun owners. And even if the majority of those gun owners don’t follow the law now, that won’t make them any less a criminal. They just haven’t been caught yet.

But when the ‘right people’ control the levers of power and the ‘right laws’ are all in place, make no mistake - they will be caught.

Morefield is right, of course. The Left will never come door to door confiscating our guns, because they would face down too many trained gun owners, who would use guerilla tactics to take out the Leftist forces, and force them to spend more time, effort, and money protecting themselves rather than taking anyone's guns away. But most of the people actively resisting have families, wives and kids, and know the consequences for them if they are rotting in prison. So make a few examples, and the rest will fall in line.

Go read the whole thing, though, because Morefield provides more evidence than I have outlined here.  It is a well thought out piece, and fits in with the Leftists playbook, which is to make so many laws, rules and regulations, that everybody can be put in jail for anything they might do, if it suits the current powers.

Next up is a piece at the American Thinker by Jeffrey T. Brown entitled Gun Owners Are Being Blamed for the Failures of Liberalism. My only nit pick here is that the author politely calls Leftists, meaning some flavor of Communist, Socialist, Fascist, National Socialist, Progressive, or down right totalitarian scumbag, "liberals." The in truth are not liberals. This is just the sheep's clothing they wrapped themselves in for a while until we caught on and turned "liberal" into a dirty word.

...Take a breath...

Brown is correct that millions of gun owners, concealed carriers, NRA members, and gun rights activists who didn't kill anyone are being smeared in the press for somehow enabling the scumbag murder who shot up Marjory Douglas Stoneman High School.  Meanwhile, the scumbag murder, the Broward County Sheriff, and the FBI, who are responsible, are somehow left off the hook.

Liberalism is largely a process of adopting illogical and factually invalid positions and then artificially placing blame on its opponents when policies based on those positions inevitably fail. For the blame to bear fruit, it is necessary for people of good conscience to be fooled into believing that their actions and beliefs are bad for society and have brought about shameful consequences. At the same time, it is necessary for people whose consciences have already been deformed and co-opted by the faux morality of liberalism to be conditioned to think fellow citizens, who have caused no actual harm but hold contrary views, are evil.

...snip...

In order for leftists to succeed, lawful gun-owners must be tricked into going along with this illusion. Unfortunately for the left, people who are serious enough to decide to accept the responsibility of careful stewardship of firearms are not stupid enough to ignore that we are living in a cesspool entirely of the left's making. Not surprisingly, mature, responsible gun-owners have declined the left's invitation to be caricatured and smeared as the scapegoats for where liberalism has taken us as a culture. As serious people, they don't have much capacity for irrational, emotionally unhinged accusers pointing their fingers at those who not only did not cultivate the environment that has bred mass shooters, but also do not provide such people from their own ranks. The phenomena of unhinged "mass shooters" and the predictably vulnerable environments where they carry out their evil are unique byproducts of liberalism and its failures.

Generally speaking, law-abiding gun-owners are of a different time and culture. They are anachronistic. To lawfully own a firearm is a commitment to timeless principles of maturity, personal responsibility, individual freedom, and civic awareness. It is a trust, a right possessed by free people who exercise their freedom carefully and mindfully. It is not a masculine exercise, as men and women exemplify these qualities equally in their lawful ownership of firearms. It is rather a uniquely American exercise, which is why the left fully loathes it. When liberal commentators spontaneously declare themselves gun-owners for effect, it is unlikely that they are telling the truth, because the philosophical underpinnings of American gun ownership are anathema to them. In everything else they do, they shun and disclaim the America of individualism, honor and integrity. They show no other willingness in their words or actions to reject their liberal brethren so totally as to own what their paganism declares an object possessed of evil powers.

Indeed.

As gun owners, we need to fight this battle on two fronts.  The first is cultural.  We need to provide those coming after us with the same sense of maturity, responsibility, and civic awareness that we have acquired.  These qualities do not come by osmosis, but by a combination of teaching, and demonstrating these qualities.  Children need to see us carrying out these principles in our daily lives.  We have to show ourselves doing these things, as well as explaining why we do them.  In a fallen world, we may need a gun to defend ourselves, and protect those we love.

But we must be ever vigilant to stop attempts to infringe our right to arms whenever  and wherever they pop up.  The Parkland murders were just the opportunity the Leftists were looking for, and the number of bills before Congress and State legislatures, and the lengths these bills would go to, is incredible.  These need to be fought, and the best way to fight them is through an organization such as Gun Owners of America (GOA).  GOA in particular has a very sophisticated alert system combined with a way for you to send emails and call your Representatives and Senators.  Your State organization may have the same thing.  In our State it is the Grass Roots North Carolina. At the gun show, many say they don't want to become members because they "don't want to be on a list."  I can understand, but frankly, if you are a gun owner, somewhere along the way someone has put you on a list.  That ship has sailed.  You are protecting yourself and your family more by becoming a gun rights activist than by trying to keep your head down.

St. George Tucker, in his Blackstone's Commentaries states:

This may be considered as the true palladium of liberty. . . . The right of self defence is the first law of nature: in most governments it has been the study of rulers to confine this right within the narrowest limits possible. Wherever standing armies are kept up, and the right of the people to keep and bear arms is, under any colour or pretext whatsoever, prohibited, liberty, if not already annihilated, is on the brink of destruction. In England, the people have been disarmed, generally, under the specious pretext of preserving the game: a never failing lure to bring over the landed aristocracy to support any measure, under that mask, though calculated for very different purposes. True it is, their bill of rights seems at first view to counteract this policy: but the right of bearing arms is confined to protestants, and the words suitable to their condition and degree, have been interpreted to authorise the prohibition of keeping a gun or other engine for the destruction of game, to any farmer, or inferior tradesman, or other person not qualified to kill game. So that not one man in five hundred can keep a gun in his house without being subject to a penalty.

The Second Amendment is the only way we can hope to remain free, to be citizens rather than subjects.