Gun rights are a primary gateway drug for liberty. For some people religion fills that role. Or something else. Everyone has their hot button.
For me, it was a combination of gun rights, property rights, and love for the environment.
But, back to gun rights. What I see happen frequently is that (intelligent) people who are passionate about gun rights come to see that it depends on all the other rights. Liberty can't be dissected.
The biggest dangers to gun rights have been the War on Politically Incorrect Drugs and The War on a Scary Emotion... I mean "Terror".
What people see is that supporting these nonsensical violations of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness only whittles away on the liberty to own and to carry weapons, including ANY weapon owned (or deployed) by any employee of The State. (Yes, I mean "nukes" as well. If you shouldn't have one in your garage, then the US Government shouldn't have any either. And, if everyone had to pay for their own nukes out of their own pockets, I doubt you'd see anyone having them anyway. End tangent.)
Concern for the fundamental human right to own and to carry weapons- and particularly the collectivist drive to demonize that right- serves to wake up a lot of people. "If government extremists are wrong on this, what else might they be wrong about?" And thinking people will then look into that question and discover that the government extremists are wrong about everything. They'll be addicted to liberty from that moment on.
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Everyone I see on TV defending the 2nd Amendment misses the main point of why the Founding Fathers put the 2nd Amendment in the U.S. Constitution: So the government would be afraid of the people. They knew that the biggest threat to liberty was government, period. And the people needed to be armed so the government would be cautious about taking away the liberties of the people. Well it can't happen here many people say. I'm sure they said the same thing in Cuba before Castro took over and disarmed the people.
ReplyDeleteAs to DM Mitchell's comment:
ReplyDeleteYes indeed the 2nd Amendment was ratified so as the citizens, armed and (potentially) dangerous, would provide a bulwark against the political class.
Unfortunately they are no longer afraid of us. Long ago Americans allowed the govt to be armed in a way its citizens are not. We don't have drones, missiles, tanks or even automatic rifles. We don't have jets that both fire on and bomb targets. All we (for the most part) have are rifles, shotguns and handguns.
And there's no fear in DC of the people. They know they can mow us down without a moment's notice.
There's a reason many back in 18th century only wanted citizen soldiers and did not want a standing army except in time of war. It's really too bad that we (or our grandparents or their grandparents) allowed DC and its military to get so out of hand.
If I can't be trusted with a machine gun, a tank, or a nuclear missile, the government's military sure shouldn't have such weaponry.
ReplyDeleteThe government started beefing up its tools at the same time it started cutting back on what "we" are allowed to have, so the disparity got wildly backwards. If anything, government should be limited to matchlocks, while "The People" should have the more effective tools. America wouldn't be having a(n imaginary) problem with "terrorism" or rampant government corruption if that were fixed.