Lets Talk about Guns

By Bob Livingston

The progressive gun-grabber crowd says they want to "have a conversation about guns." Even supposed conservatives, big government liberal Republicans like Condoleezza Riceand some in Congress, have called for "conversation" about guns following the February shooting at a Florida high school. Donald Trump, who campaigned on how important it is "that we maintain the Second Amendment and that we maintain it strongly," has backtracked and indicated support for several gun control measures. Let's have that conversation... but one that involves facts rather than emotion. Make no mistake, the anti-gun crowd is coming for your guns. What they've been doing by stealth and through gradualism for years has recently become overt and hostile. The truth is, almost all politicians favor gun control. Deep down, most all of them want all uncontrolled arms of the people confiscated. Why do all governments want to confiscate arms of their people? It is quite simple. The government political system fears an armed citizenry. Organized crime, no matter how legitimate it may appear, wants no risk of being overthrown and no personal risk to the politicians and bureaucrats. It wants no threat to the state that it cannot calculate and control. Guns have been part of the American culture since the beginning. Early settlers coming to the new world would not have successfully carved a country out of the wilderness without weapons. Nor would they have been able to throw off British tyranny. The Founders understood this. They also understood that men, by nature, were corrupt, and corrupt men would use the government to strip people of their rights. Natural rights are inherent — inalienable in Thomas Jefferson's language. That means they exist whether the State (that is government) recognizes them or not. The Founders understood this as well. So they — at the insistence of the anti-Federalist (classical liberal) wing of the Constitution's drafters — amended the Constitution with a Bill of Rights. The Constitution, as written, puts a limit on what government can do. The Bill of Rights puts a rubber stamp on it to ensure that the rights of the people are preserved. The Founders placed checks in the Constitution to reduce the threat of government growing out of control and usurping powers it did not have. Among those were the appointment of senators by the states and the 9th and 10th Amendments to the Constitution. These gave the states the power to resist federal overreach and tyranny. But they are no longer in play — senators are now elected (17th Amendment) and are therefore slaves to the money interests, and the 9th and 10th Amendments were rescinded by the War of Northern Aggression and the 14th and 16th Amendments. The propaganda media and the anti-gun crowd tell you that you don't "need" a gun... that you don't "need" an "assault weapon" (so-called) and you don't "need" a high-capacity magazine for hunting or self-defense. This sophistry and semantic argle-bargle is designed to confuse and deflect. According to FBI statistics, firearms are used to murder about 10,000 people per year on average. Of those, rifles of all types are used to kill about 300 people. Sporting rifles like the AR-15 (which is the anti-gun crowd's favorite boogie man) is a subset of rifles, and not even the biggest subset, despite propaganda to the contrary. Estimates are that there are more than 80 million sporting rifles in circulation, yet they are used in only a handful of crimes. That means that more than 80 million sporting rifles have not been and never will be used in a crime. The idea that banning them will "reduce crime" is pie-in-the-sky foolishness. The AR-15 — and other so-called "assault rifles" (which is a specious and amorphous term that means nothing) — are not Frankensteins wandering about school campuses and public venues seeking large groups to slaughter. Nor are attacks on schools increasing. There are fewer homicides of school children each year now than there were in the 1990s, according to a recent report by the government's own Bureau of Justice Statistics. The anti-gun crowd loves to cite statistics of the number of people killed each year by people using guns. What they fail to tell you is that there are as many lives saved through the defensive use of guns as lives lost from the offensive use of guns. A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention commissioned by President Obama found: Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed ( Cook and Ludwig, 1996; Kleck, 2001a ). Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of… But beyond self-defense, the ownership of guns in the hands in the people was noted by the Founding Fathers as "the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them." (Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story). The mainstream media and gun-grabbers will tell you that you can't resist government with your guns even as they call those same guns "military-style" weapons. They can't even keep up with their own propaganda. They also ignore how the Taliban has fought the U.S. military to a standstill for almost 17 years using some of these same "weapons." The truth is, if you are for gun control, you are not against guns. You are just for government guns and want the people disarmed and defenseless. Gun confiscation is not child's play. It has to do with the basic survival of human liberty. Americans should protect their private guns and keep their guns private. This is the first law of survival against the organized crime of the state.