Brady Campaign Accidentally Makes Case For Guns in Private Hands

Today, at Bearing Arms Tom Knighton has a post entitled Brady tweet actually runs counter to their cause. The Brady "cause" is of course to ban guns. Oh, I realize they don't say that, but Josh Sugarmann let the cat out of the bag years ago. So what did the Brady Campiagn do? Using the Kent State riots as an example of state sanctioned gun violence, which they claim to abhor, they undercut their desire to leave the state with a monopoly on gun violence. For if state sanctioned gun violence is so bad, wouldn't you naturally want a counter balancing force to protect the citizen from state tyranny?

Now, understand that I’m not interested in talking about what happened at Kent State. I know the official story about it, but I’ve become so distrustful of official stories that I don’t actually care to recount something that may not be remotely true.

However, what is true is that Brady is talking about “state-sanctioned gun violence” while simultaneously doing everything they can to make it so the state is the only one with guns in the first place.

Let’s remember, for example, that they tend to push to include law enforcement exceptions to just about every gun control bill they support. State-sanctioned gun violence, as they call it, is so awful they want to make sure only the state can have certain guns deemed too dangerous for you or me.

We also should remember that Kent State wasn’t the police. It was the National Guard. That’s military. There’s absolutely no push by Brady to disarm or restrict the military from having certain weapons, now is there?

Yet if state-sanctioned homicide is a problem that we should be prepared to address, how in the hell are we to do that if ordinary citizens are disarmed?

Without an armed populace, Kent State would cease being a historical anomaly and become simply the first of numerous other atrocities.

I was still in high school that day. Graduation wouldn't be for another month. Kent was the next town over from Stow, where I lived. Our local Students for a Democratic Society representative was ecstatic over the fallout. They had provoked the state to violence by their own use of violence. They had set the ROTC building on fire, then prevented the fire department from putting out the fire by slashing their hoses with machetes. Of course, at the time, the student riots were seen as "mostly peaceful." And it truth, probably the majority of the mob were there to protest the war in Vietnam. But the "peaceful" mob was used by the communist infiltrators as cover to create chaos and violence. Remember that the National Guardsmen were about the same age, and no doubt felt threatened by the hostility mob.

The point of pointing that out is that the situation, as usual, is complex, yet the press presents a simple story of state bad, students, good. I think there was enough blame to go around, which is why I, like the author, don't believe anything I read without a lot of evidence. So, in such a situation, do you want the govermnent to be the only one with guns?  To want that is to be naive.  Remember that in any situation, you may be the first responder.  Do you really want to stand there with nothing in your hands?