I prefer dangerous freedom over peaceful slavery. Thomas Jefferson
The right to keep and bear arms is anathema to an ever-growing anti-gun lobby, united in their belief that guns are the root cause of the senseless violence that has become so common in contemporary American society.
There are members of this anti-gun lobby who sincerely, if naively, believe that eliminating guns will eliminate violence, cementing their belief on the basis of emotion. They are not likely to be swayed by facts which positively prove that gun violence actually decreases when citizens are allowed to own and carry firearms. An armed person is less likely to become the victim of a criminal or mass murderer.
Then there are those anti-gunners who form their opinions based on desperation. This group, a subset of the emotion driven anti-gun group, often pop up in the aftermath of the senseless, brutal mass murders that have become an unfortunate aspect of life in America.
There is no disagreement that something must be done to stop the violence. What we disagree on is the method. The left’s goal is to totally disarm American citizens or at the very least, to make gun ownership so restrictive through new laws that it will be next to impossible to own a firearm. But adding extra layers of regulations to ownership will not stop any violence because criminals, by their very nature, do not obey laws.
Let’s be honest. Anything can become a weapon in the hands of a crazed killer. Box cutters, baseball bats, homemade bombs, knives, ropes, rocks, bricks, metal pipes, hammers, chain saws, shovels, automobiles and trucks, to name but a few.
The Second Amendment was created for a purpose. In Federalist Paper 28, Alexander Hamilton expressed that when “government betrays the people by amassing too much power and becoming tyrannical, the people have no choice but to exercise their original right of self-defense, to fight the government.” In Paper 29 he wrote that “an armed citizenry was the best and only real defense against a standing army becoming large and oppressive.”
In Federalist Paper 46, Madison contended that “ultimate authority resides in the people,” and that if the “federal government got too powerful and overstepped its authority,” then the people would “develop plans of resistance and resort to arms.”
In The Papers of George Madison, 1725-1792, Madison wrote that history demonstrated the most effective way to enslave a people was to disarm them and suggested that divine providence had given every individual the right of self-defense, clearly including the right to defend one’s political liberty within that term.
Abuse of responsibility by armed citizens is rare. Fewer than 1% of all legally purchased firearms will ever be involved in a violent crime verses 100% of those firearms obtained by criminals which no number of new laws or regulations will ever prevent.
“Don’t think of it as `gun control’, think of it as `victim disarmament’. If we make enough laws, we can all be criminals. The possession of arms by the people is the ultimate warrant that government governs only with the consent of the governed. As the Founding Fathers knew well, a government that does not trust its honest, law-abiding, taxpaying citizens with the means of self-defense is not itself worthy of trust. Laws disarming honest citizens proclaim that the government is the master, not the servant, of the people.” Jeff Snyder
