“Those who would give up essential liberty to
purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Benjamin Franklin 1759
Over the years we have
all heard the above quote or a disambiguation of it, usually from the anti-war
crowd, twisting it to mean if we submit to any measure for security, we are not
deserving of liberty.
What they and many others did not do, though, was
to research the quote and its context. Had any done just a little research they
would have discovered Ben Franklin was addressing those who would not accept one
of the guns he purchased to help protect what was then the frontier from
marauders and murderers.
“Those
Who Would Give Up A Little Liberty To Gain A Little
Security”
Sadly we are once again facing the claim of if we just
give up a little bit of our liberty, that being our rights under the second
amendment to bear arms freely, we can be safer and our children less likely to
be slaughtered in schools or even on the streets in drive-by gang
shootings.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Using the
recent, tragic Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings, Barack Obama today
announced he was signing
23
Executive Orders and memorandums he says will make us safer, with a back
drop of children around him.
While I cannot say every proposal a bad one,
ultimately we are expected to allow infringement upon our second amendment
rights in order for Obama to make us safer. Or so he wants us to
think.
For all of his talk over the years of “we cannot return to the
failed policies of the past,” that is exactly what he is doing now, returning to
failed gun control policies that did nothing to make anybody safer.
We
had a so called “assault weapons ban” in effect from September 1994 to September
2004. We also saw some
32
School Shootings, including the deadliest High School shooting in our
history, Columbian during that period. The ban did nothing to prevent a single
one of them.
This time around we are seeing more red herrings thrown in
designed to convince the general public how we must accept more infringement on
our right to bear arms. Obama and others advocating more laws like using phrases
such as “weapons designed for the battle field have no place on our
streets.”
That statement is 100% true, but it is also very misleading as
such fully automatic Military weapons are already banned for the general public,
only those with special licenses willing to pay higher fees and keep them
registered being able to purchase one. They are already highly regulated and few
have the ability to even get near one.
But due to the
appearance of several weapons we can legally have, semi-automatic firing, some
even using the term “self-loading” lately, the effort is to discourage or ban
those merely because they look scary.
Another red herring being used is
the capacity of the magazine, most wanting them to be restricted to 10 or less
cartridges. That a magazine can be changed out in just a couple of seconds slips
by them as does a criminal or maniac arming themselves with several weapons.
Empty the magazine, throw it down and pull out another.
Once again we see
the call of “background checks” as if none are being done already. Even at gun
shows, a licensed dealer must submit a background check before delivering a
buyer a weapon, unless of course they possess a concealed carry license that
would show they have already passed a background check.
There is a call
to require such checks on private sales, but how will they enforce such a
requirement? Criminals dealing in stolen or illegal weapons will not be rushing
to have the latest forms required when selling such weapons from the trunk of
their cars nor will there be much a background check of those smuggling illegal
weapons in over our porous borders that both Obama and past presidents have
refused to seal.
The futility of these ongoing attempts to disarm
innocent citizens and infringe upon our second amendment rights was pointed out
in a study published in the
Harvard
Journal of Law & Public Policy that stated, “Nations with stringent
anti-gun laws generally have substantially higher murder rates than those that
do not.”
We can see the same outcome right here in some of our larger
American cities like Chicago, Illinois and Washington D.C., both of whom have
stringent anti-laws and restrictions along with some of the highest murder rates
in the nation.
We are supposed to believe these new measure are
“reasonable” and “common sense.” They are not.
We are supposed to
believe nobody is intending to take our guns away from us and disarm us. I don’t
buy it. If that is not the ultimate goal, why then does the left always jump to
such knee jerk reactions after a tragic shooting, almost always where guns are
not permitted, of infringing upon the rights of law-abiding citizens instead of
looking closer at potential root causes, such as the affects of
Psycho-therapeutic
drugs?
Since the intent of the second amendment is to give
citizens the ability to ward off any despotic, overbearing government control
over us, not hunting, we should we very wary of any effort to infringe on that
right, regardless of promises to make us safer.
As Harvard discovered, it
actually places us more in danger.
It’s time we stood our ground and
stand up for our rights.
Ruger Firearms has a
page up on their website providing us with links to our elected officials along
with a link to a letter to be sent to your elected representative telling them
we want our rights preserved, not infringed upon.
We are seeing some
states and County Sheriff’s standing their ground, informing the administration
they refuse to enforce any new restrictions that violate the second
amendment.
We need to stand with them and support them. We need to let
Obama and others in government know our rights are sacrosanct and not open to
negotiation.
We need to remind them they are public servants, not lords
over us.
These are our rights and nobody should be allowed to fool us
into believing if we just give them up a little, we will be better off.
