A Well Armed Rabble

 J. B. Shurk has an article at the American Thinker entitled Guns, Germs, and Feelz in which he discusses the fact that too many of us have allowed ourselves to be frightened into not owning and bearing arms for our own self defense.

At the end of July, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives sent a letter to Rare Breed Trigger notifying the Florida company that the ATF had classified its FRT-15 trigger, a drop-in trigger for an AR-15 rifle that speeds up the rate of fire, as a machine gun under the National Firearms Act and demanding that the company cease all sales. Rare Breed is fighting the ATF's action, but that hasn't reduced the federal agency's power to turn law-abiding gun-makers and gun-owners into criminals overnight through bureaucratic decree.

When certain words are not useful to the political left's agenda, the meanings of those words are simply changed to fit the agenda. In the left's war against personal ownership of firearms, the ATF empowered itself with the barely checked authority to redefine what a "machine gun" is. By fiat, unelected cubicle kings have deemed a trigger a "machine gun." A pistol is a machine and a gun, too. How long before the ATF decides that new wordplay epiphanies empower it to criminalize the Second Amendment more broadly?

Of all the mass delusions that have been perpetrated upon the American people, the government's decades-long mission to terrify the public from owning firearms is the most dangerous. Because control ultimately depends upon the threat of force, no person can be free when government alone is armed. This used to be common knowledge in the United States. It was understood broadly across the political spectrum that private gun ownership is instrumental in preserving liberty. Progressive Teddy Roosevelt bemoaned the decline of citizen-shooters and actively encouraged schoolboys to practice with their rifles and men of all classes to be good shots. "The first step" in preserving peace, he argued, "is to teach men to shoot!"

The emphasis is mine. You must understand that you are always your own first responder to any situation. The job of the police is not to be your personal body guard, but rather to draw chalk outlines around the bodies and investigate the crime. But, you say, I am afraid of guns, and don't want them around me. But it is not really guns of which you are afraid. No, it is yourself! You are afraid that you can not control yourself, and might shoot someone mistakenly. If that is you, you need to grow up, and realize that unless you have a problem, and there are such people, you can, and should practice self control. I will tell you that there are few situations that come up in the average person's life for which a gun is the solution.  But when you need one, nothing else will do.  And when you realize these facts,  you discover that you can indeed carry a weapon. You should.

In a truly free society, everyone would be armed and capable of defending himself and his loved ones should the moment arise. Guns are tools, nothing more. They have no more innate will than a pair of scissors lying on the table, and just as that pair of scissors is harmless until someone decides to use it to stab another, a gun is a paperweight until it's not. Teaching people to be afraid of firearms has taught Americans both to be afraid of defending themselves and to depend solely upon bureaucrats from agencies like the ATF to preserve their lives. Both lessons are deadly.

If Americans needed further proof that the natural right to self-preservation is toothless without the right to own weapons for one's defense, the Taliban gave another tutorial by promptly scooping up guns from the civilian population the day after seizing power in Kabul while insisting that "people no longer need them for personal protection." A Taliban official promised that "weapons for personal safety" are unnecessary since "innocent civilians" have nothing to fear. The Taliban are just putting into practice a common principle held by leftists holding power throughout the world — that law-abiding "innocents" should be prevented from owning weapons to protect themselves from the not-so-innocent who wish them harm. It's remarkable that at the same time the federal government has redefined lawful Americans who question the legitimacy of the 2020 election or government vaccine mandates as potential "domestic violent extremists" on par with the Taliban, it is Democrats' gun control policies the Taliban imitate. When the meanings of words are subordinated to the quest for power, though, it gets awfully confusing to remember who the "innocents" and "terrorists" are.

How fast do things go south when ordinary citizens have no effective means of defending themselves from government psychosis? Just look at New Zealand and Australia, "free" nations with strict gun control that are currently using their militaries to enforce lockdown orders that have essentially placed everyone under house arrest "for his own good." If people can be stripped of their liberties to live and work as they see fit for a virus that is almost entirely harmless for most people in good health, exactly what potential threat can a well-armed government not use to justify enslavement? There's no shortage of invisible pathogens in the world for those in power to declare as "public enemy number one" requiring their citizens' absolute obedience, but why stop there? People die from snakebites, car accidents, and elevated heart rates from unsanctioned free will all the time. If anything that increases the risk of death sufficiently justifies loss of freedom then totalitarian government is the only threat allowed to exist.

The Second Amendment was written as a sort of doomsday provision, wherein after distributing power between the three branches of the Federal government, between the Federal government and state governments. and finally between the government and the people. But the Left has weaponized fear as a tool of government to scare you into doing things you wouldn't do on your own.

As always, only the well-armed rabble are left to hold the line.