Guns Equal Freedom; What the Left Just Doesn’t Get.

The Second Amendment to our Constitution, short and to the point reads as follows, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” The first part is the justification and the second part is the right. The Founders didn’t differentiate about what kind of arms and since many colonials had guns as good or better than that of the British army it can reasonably be inferred that they were talking about military grade arms. And yet that right is being constantly challenged by the left. Limits on what kind of guns people can own, how many bullets a magazine can have, who qualifies for concealed carry permits are all infringements of our rights.

Liberals just don’t understand why our Founders wrote the Second Amendment in the first place. It wasn’t so we could put food on the table from hunting, nor was it just to allow for personal defense against criminals. It was to protect the freedom they had just wrested from the English government, because when you get down to the basics you can’ have freedom without power and you don’t have power unless you can defend yourself against a government that ignores your rights. As Mao Tse-tung observed, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

Way back when civilization was developing different classes one basic division was that of workers and warriors. A prime example of this was ancient Sparta. Spartan men were trained from childhood to be warriors. Even though the working class in Sparta, the Helots, outnumbered the Spartan warriors by over 10 to 1, they were kept in subjugation. Another example would be the nobles of the middle ages. Although the serfs outnumbered the knights significantly the trained and equipped warrior class held all the power. It takes years of training to learn to wield weapons like spears and swords effectively, plus having enough wealth to afford them and the armor that went with them. Commoners in Sparta or Europe didn’t have that luxury.

Then along came gunpowder. Where a well-trained knight would have been reasonably certain of defeating any peasant that challenged him with a pitchfork or scythe, all it took for a serf armed with a gun to succeed was to pull the trigger first. Certainly, trained soldiers using guns have an advantage over untrained civilians, but that advantage is much less than the advantage that a trained warrior class would have over the same civilian.

In the American Revolution the Minute Men were not trained soldiers, but as the battles of Lexington and Concord showed, they were still a factor the English crown had to take into consideration. This was why the right to bear arms was the second most important Amendment the Founders included in the Bill of Rights.

Recently there was a confrontation between a Nevada rancher, Cliven Bundy, and the Bureau of Land Management. Bundy might be than a little unreasonable and his dumb comments about slavery lost him most public support, but his position was that the BLM was being unfair and arbitrary was correct. They were restricting his right to graze cattle on government land his family had used for decades because it might possibly endanger desert tortoises even though tortoises and cattle had coexisted for years and years. The BLM behaved badly, sending in armed agents to round up Bundy cattle and run rough shod over the rancher and his property. Armed citizens, in the best example of something our Founders would have supported showed up and the BLM backed down rather than face a possible lethal confrontation.

Again, this is why the Second Amendment is part of our constitution. An armed population can keep that government from encroaching on the rights of its citizens. The BLM in the Bundy case acted badly, as did our government at Ruby Ridge and Waco. The left, of course takes the position that the government is always right. Since the government is made up of people this is unlikely to say the least. Historically it was no accident that Hitler, Stalin, and Mao among others had strict gun control laws. Guns don’t just allow people the right of self-defense, they ultimately allow our freedom.