Guns and Ballots

Tomorrow is the 2018 Midterm election and it is important to remember the critical association between firearms and ballots. Our Bill of Rights guarantees our individual right to keep and bear arms. Yet while the last four words of the 27 word Second Amendment are “shall not be infringed”, we are seeing our rights slowly and surely infringed. Backed by extremist justices intent on ignoring the Constitution in the name of social agenda.  But guess what, that’s not the way it has to be.

The proponents of gun control have been playing the very long con game all along. It always starts innocently enough with what they call “common sense”, “gun safety” or “public safety” laws that don’t significantly infringe on Second Amendment rights. Minimal infringements are thought to be acceptable as long as it advances the government interest of keeping people safe.  But of course, it never ends there. One minor infringement leads to the next, and the next and the next, since the previous gun control laws were never quite enough to achieve the public safety goals they set.

Remember, gun control does absolutely nothing to increase public safety and the answer to fix that shortcoming is always to implement more gun control.

If you’re wondering where it ends, the answer is it only ends when there are no civilian owned firearms. Of course, even this level of gun control will never increase public safety as no set of laws is ever going to prevent criminals from breaking the law. Criminals will always be able to get and use firearms since breaking the law is the actual definition of a criminal. With an increasingly disarmed population, there is very little that will ever deter them from continuing to use guns to gain an advantage over their helpless victims.

Recently some gun control zealots have been more open about their goals. They have been publicly speaking about repealing the Second Amendment, even going so far as to have a former US Supreme Court Justice openly write about repealing the Second Amendment following the protests of children in Washington. He wrote that the concerns that brought about the Second Amendment were “…a relic of the 18th century.” Further that “a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option.”

It’s hard to even conceive of how a former Supreme Court Justice, someone whose life has been dedicated to defending the Constitutional could abandon a foundation of our nation and even suggest that.

Yet this is the type of thinking that is now becoming more and more common in places like the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. By ignoring the Constitution, Bill of Rights, previous US Supreme Court rulings and the rule of law, they are finding these new and legally imaginative gun control laws are constitutionally valid. With very little interest from previous US Supreme Courts to revisit the Second Amendment, clearly infringing gun control laws are becoming the law of the land.

Politicians are pushing ever more repressive gun control measures while at the same time trying to block judges who will uphold the Constitution at all levels of our court system. Their goal is simple. Pass unconstitutional laws then have them legitimized by fringe justices.

Simultaneously these very same politicians are passing laws lessoning or eliminating the penalties for those who commit crimes, redefining crimes such as rape, assault with a deadly weapon and drive-by shootings as “non-violent”, eliminating bail requirements, commuting the sentences of murders to allow their release and pardoning an illegal alien convicted of kidnapping, robbery and using a firearm to prevent their deportation. THIS is the type of pubic safety they are pushing.

Firearm ownership and use isn’t the exclusive domain of any one political party or ideology; it crosses all walks of life and ways of thinking. But there is often a disconnect when it comes to defending those rights.  Many who own firearms support candidates who sponsor increasingly draconian gun control laws, even to the point where these laws will make the very firearms they own illegal and them a criminal. Whether they believe they will be (temporarily) grandfathered, they alone will be exempted or they just don’t believe it will impact them, they haven’t decided to fight for the rights they currently enjoy. Sadly, at the point where they do realize this is also their fight, there will be nobody left to stand and fight with them.

In the last few weeks the gun control lobby has essentially gone dark. They have stopped pushing their extremist agenda because they know this is a critical issue for undecided voters. They reason that if undecided voters don’t hear about a candidate’s radical gun control agenda in the run up to the elections, they’ll believe they are a more moderate candidate and their firearm rights are not in jeopardy by voting for them.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

Firearms were the tools that allowed us to have a ballot in the first place. Without them, this nation would still be an English colony instead of the republic it now is.  Now ballots are the tools that will allow us to keep our firearms. If we choose not to use our ballots to ensure the rights this country was founded on, no other right can be guaranteed.

Only your vote can defend your right to keep and bear arms. Please choose wisely.

Bob

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Gun Control’s End Game

One of the more popular anti-gun control posters shows pictures of people who want to take your firearms.  Among them are Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot; all leaders who eventually killed significant numbers of their own unarmed citizens.  This implication is the people in our government who want to take your firearms away are following in the same footsteps as these genocidal maniacs and will exterminate large portions of the United States population. That’s probably a bit on the extreme side, but make no mistake what the goal of gun control is… control.

When our nation first emerged from English rule, the Founding Fathers wanted to ensure the new republic they created would never be able to oppress it’s own citizens like they had been oppressed under King George III. They limited the power of the government, they set up checks and balances with three branches of government, they wrote a Constitution and Bill of Rights enumerating the inalienable human rights all citizens would enjoy, preventing the government from infringing upon them.

Since then, firearms have been an integral part of the American culture. From the expansion West to hunting for sustenance to the protection of one’s life and liberty, firearms are as American as eagles, apple pie and baseball. Despite what the gun control zealots tell you, the firearm culture has been a significant part of our nation’s strength.

Still not everyone has been comfortable with the Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms. The history of gun control in this country has its roots in racism and class structure.  Keeping firearms out of the hands of blacks, Hispanics, Chinese – or any minority – or the poor whites denied them their own safety and the ability to resist those who held power. This was all done in the name of ‘safety’; only it was for the safety of the oppressors not the safety of the people.

Today firearm sales, possession and usage are covered by a patchwork of laws at the federal, state and local level. Decidedly liberal state and local entities are constantly increasing the level of gun control in their jurisdictions as a mechanism to stem the spiraling rate of crime and violence. Yet areas of our country with the tightest gun control laws continue to have the highest levels of crime and violence. The answer to this problem is to implement even more gun control laws.

Think about what firearms provide us with.  They allow law-abiding citizens to protect themselves and their families from those who would inflict harm upon them.  Without them, law-abiding citizens are wholly dependent on the government for their protection.

Gun control laws, laws that are supposed to increase ‘public safety’, only impact the law-abiding, never the criminals. The laws limit the type and number of firearms that can be legally purchased, the number of rounds a magazine can legally carry, the ability of a law-abiding citizen to carry a firearm and where they can legally carry it and how a firearm can be legally stored and transported, among many other restrictions. The penalties for breaking these laws and ordinances are supposed to be a deterrent for any would be criminal. Yet somehow, the criminals still ignore them.

Why is very easy to understand. For a criminal, the gun is the tool of their trade, the ability to subject their will upon another. Whether the motivation is murder, robbery, assault, rape, intimidation or terror, the insignificant additional penalty of carrying a loaded firearm in public pales in comparison to the crime they are going to commit or the protection they desire from victims who choose to fight back.

At the same time gun control laws are being tightened, the penalties for crime are being reduced or eliminated and more and more criminals are being released early from jails and prisons to prey upon increasingly unarmed citizens. Crime goes up, even as the new math to calculate crime rate shows it decreasing.

Gun control promises to keep you safe from the horrors of “gun violence”. The simple truth is “gun violence” isn’t the problem; only violence. Guns are simply tools used in violence, and they aren’t even the most common ones used.  Knives and cutting instruments kill four times as many people annually as so-called “assault weapons”.  Suicides count for two-thirds of the deaths attributed to “gun violence” – in other words, violence directed towards yourself rather than another.

So if the so-called public safety laws do nothing to increase public safety, why have them? The answer is simply control.  An unarmed, frightened populace is far more willing to pay more, submit to more government regulation and control in order to ‘feel safe’, even if their safety is less assured now than it ever was.

Being safe is more important than someone’s false sense of feeling safe. Every year in this country, firearms are used lawfully to defend life at a rate of three to one felonious uses. Yet the ever-increasing gun control laws target the law-abiding citizen’s ability to own and use a firearm to defend themselves and their family.

I’m not dark minded enough to believe the current authors, promoters and supporters of gun control laws in our country intend to exterminate large numbers of the United States population who disagree with their politics. However I do firmly believe they intend to use gun control as a mechanism to eliminate self-reliance, personal safety outside of the control of government and impose increased level of control upon a vulnerable population.

I choose to not be vulnerable.

Bob

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Vote For Me, I Own A Gun!

With the midterm elections just 15 days away, candidates have been ramping up the rhetoric and political posturing like never before.  For those of us in the Second Amendment community, there are some tough choices to be made. When it comes to the Second Amendment, many gun control candidates are tempering their message so as to appeal to their pro-gun constituents. But let’s not forget what their real goal is… to take away your right to purchase, posses and carry firearms.

From my own local city council to the county, state and federal representatives around the country, I’ve seen and heard preposterous claims of support for the Second Amendment from absolutely hard-core gun control candidates. They make statements like ‘I’m a life long gun owner’, ‘I’m a hunter’ or ‘I grew up in a family of gun owners’. By trying to paint themselves as part of the firearm community they attempt to make themselves more attractive to firearm owners who are concerned about more irresponsible, ineffective and unconstitutional gun control laws.

Ever since the absolutely ridiculous picture of the 44thPresident of the United States shooting a shotgun, politicians have put out campaign ads to bolster their firearm credibility. We’ve seen them in hunting orange holding a rifle. You’ve seen them holding a handgun at a shooting range. You’ve seen them holding a shotgun in a picturesque wildlife habitat. Guess what, it’s all staged bullshit.

Off camera and away from their constituents scrutiny, these candidates continue to promise to take up the most stringent of gun control schemes in exchange for the financial support from the billionaire funded gun control organizations.  Hot mic captured comments often portray a very different view from the campaign promises. This is where you hear how the gun control organizations are coaching their candidates to keep their gun control plans to themselves during the elections in order to get elected.

And of course, there are the qualifiers to their support for the Second Amendment. They generally follow-up the “I support the Second Amendment” with statements like “but I also support reasonable, common sense gun safety measures”.  The Democratic candidate for governor in Alabama follows up his claim of being “pro-Second Amendment” with this:

“[L]et me make my position clear. I will never favor taking any existing constitutional right away from any American unless we, as a people, come to the conclusion that restraint of some rights helps ensure the pursuit of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness by all.”

Does this sound like someone who is going to be protecting your Second Amendment rights?

Whenever you hear the words “gun safety”, realize they are not talking about being safe with firearms; they are talking about imposing draconian legal restrictions on the lawful ownership of firearms. To the gun control zealots, there is no such thing as a ‘safe’ firearm in the hands of the civilian population. Their idea of “gun safety” is when legal ownership of firearms is abolished.  The end goal has always been to slowly and systematically eliminate the right of private citizens to purchase, posses and carry firearm and ammunition.

Remember, gun control does absolutely nothing to increase public safety and the answer to fix that shortcoming is always to implement more gun control.

So, who are the real Second Amendment candidates? These are the men and women who have been involved in Second Amendment rights BEFORE they became a candidate for public office. They are the ones who’ve had a hunting license EVERY year, not just election years. They are the ones you’ve been seeing at the local range or gun shop for years, not just since they declared their candidacy. They are the ones who already knew the issues and challenges surrounding the Second Amendment community BEFORE they decided to run for public office.  They are the ones who can proudly say “I support the Second Amendment” with no qualifying statements after it.

At times I’ve been accused of being a one-issue voter, the issue being the Second Amendment. Quite honestly, I’m okay with that because without the basic rights and freedoms protected by our Constitution and Bill of Rights, nothing else is going to stand.

Every elected seat in every city, county, state and federal race is important for the protection of your Second Amendment rights. It doesn’t matter if you live in a constitutionally challenged area or free America, your vote matters.

The midterm elections are Tuesday, November 6, 2018. Choose wisely.

Bob

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