2A support? - 100%.
Guns? Well, they're OK!
An Opinion By Bart Stinson, Guest Contributor. September 20th, 2017
I’m not a hunter. I haven’t owned bird dogs since I was 14, when we gave Brutus and Queenie away and moved to a big city.
Nor am I fascinated by guns. You pull the trigger and a bullet comes out the other end, and that pretty much satisfies my curiosity. Going out in the country to shoot at cans or paper targets is not my idea of fun.
But politically, I’m usually the most pro-gun person in the room.
I won’t tell you whether I have guns in my house, or how many, because it’s none of your business and — more to the point — it’s none of the government’s business. I believe, as a wise bumper sticker says, that the Second Amendment is my gun permit. I don’t need a clerk’s or police department’s approval to exercise my Constitutional freedoms.
Anybody who gets into arguments with gun control advocates has been asked, scoffingly, why on earth a legitimate hunter would need such a large magazine, or such powerful loads, or dum-dum bullets that maximize trauma to flesh. And I don’t have an answer for that question. I don’t know why a legitimate hunter, or even a poacher, would need any of these.
Unless that hunter is also a patriot.
You can call patriots the militia. (The Constitution did.) The militia, in the Constitutional sense, is comprised of ordinary armed citizens with the best interests of the community at heart. Even now, if your neighborhood is threatened by mob violence or by arsonists, the most likely guarantor of your safety is probably not a bespectacled metrosexual at the American Civil Liberties Union but those guys down your street, the ones who ride their motorcycles too fast and let their wives mow the lawn.
If that night of resistance ever comes, patriots who defend their homes, families, neighbors or republic will want to be equipped to win, not fail. The Second Amendment is no poetic tribute to doomed gestures of valiant resistance. It is utterly pragmatic, intended to empower citizens with the genuine capacity to prevail against tyranny.
Better yet, it should deter tyranny. And I believe that it has done so.
Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership (JPFO) is an organization preoccupied, as you might expect, with the connection between disarmament and genocide. Its manifesto is entitled “Death by Gun Control: The Human Cost of Victim Disarmament.” According to JPFO’s website, every 20th Century episode of genocide except one was preceded by a period of disarming the intended victims.
Besieged Black Americans escaped genocide in the South in the early and mid-20th Century not because they were esteemed, but because they were armed. On the eve of the Civil War, armed Northern Blacks had repelled violent Democrats who attacked their free neighborhoods. Southern Democrats were acutely sensitive after emancipation, therefore, to the threat of free Negroes capable of self-defense. The Ku Klux Klan and its Democratic allies set out to disarm them, but failed. Former Cincinnati mayor Ken Blackwell has written that Black militias later protected Civil Rights workers in three Southern states.
It’s easy to find volunteers to crush defenseless victims. I think of that wire photo of Clinton-era Attorney General Janet Reno’s gun-wielding, flak-vested goon bursting into a Miami bedroom to snatch terrified six-year-old Elian Gonzalez from his peaceful household.
But when intended victims have the firepower and intention to shoot back, the victimizers’ easy bravado cools, and itching-to-be tyrants are soon notified of a contagious new reluctance among their allies and enablers. Let’s cherish and enforce the Second Amendment.