Defending One's Rights

People who value freedom need to be working to defeat any attempts to impose more gun control on American citizens. The right to self defense is a fundamental one that we have to defend uncompromisingly. The leftists have made it plain that their real goal is total disarmament of the populace and that any victory they can get now will be used as a step toward that final objective.

The millions of honest gun owners need to ask the leftists a simple question. “We don’t commit aggression against other people. We are armed only for self defense. We are no threat to you. You know that we are no threat to you. So why and to what purpose do you yearn so intensely to disarm us and make  us helpless and defenseless?”

Since they cannot give a good answer, we are justified in at least considering the possibility that they want us made helpless because they intend to do us harm. (Of course even those among them who do not have harmful intentions themselves still want Americans  left helpless against the common criminals who surely do wish to do them harm. That is bad enough, and that is the generous interpretation.)

More moderate leftists sometime argue that, even if they grant (usually grudgingly) that people have a right to self defense, there is no need for weapons such as AR-15s, because they are not particularly useful for self defense against criminals.  There is some truth to this, particularly in cities and suburbs. Rifles can be fine self defense tools in rural areas. However, focusing only on the question of utility against criminals  misses a crucial point. While it is important to be able to defend oneself against  criminals, that is not the only reason to be armed for self defense. There is another very important one.  We do not have to believe we will see, for example,  an uber-Santorum  carrying his convictions to their logical result of a theocratic state or an uber-Obama carrying  his convictions to their logical result  of camps and slave labor gaining  power in this country to realize that most governments throughout most of history have been despotisms and that vigilance is the price of liberty. (People finding this hypothetical example too rude to Rick or Barack  might look at some of Santorum’s speeches or remember that for a while after Obama’s election in 2008, one of his web sites called for mandatory forced labor by young people.) The Founding Fathers knew the history and the danger, and saw an armed citizenry as a bulwark against tyranny. It still is, and the citizens need to be well armed, now and in the future.