“Live free or die. Death is not the greatest of evils.” ~ Gen. John Stark, July 31, 1809
Live Free or Die. Some of us mean those words when we say them.
Americans may mouth the words, but when push comes to shove, too many either really don’t care or they are cowards deep down, who will allow the status quo to carry on, no matter how sorry a state of affairs has grown around it; or, their own ignorance is so deep that the God Given nature of our individual rights is beyond their grasp and understanding, and those words in the mouths of the timid, the weak and unsure become mere noises like the squeaking of a mouse eking out an advertising catch-phrase. Their words are empty and void of any sense of duty and obligation to themselves, their families and their country and what one must do to actually maintain a free society.
Today, in astounding fashion, we see a majority of the Democrats and even quite a large number of Republicans bowing to their feelings and the communists and statists within the House and the Senate, as the whine over the scourge of “gun violence” reaches a fever pitch. These gun-grabbers personify firearms, as if these inanimate firearms are chaotically running about America slaughtering innocent citizens. And we now hear many Democrats and television network hosts and pundits asserting “assault weapons ownership is not synonymous with gun ownership.”
A brick or a hammer is an “assault weapon”, and if anything, the AR-15 is simply a tool for the defense of home and person. It is no different than the 1905 Remington .308 semi-automatic, from the days when mass shootings were unheard of and an unthinkable and evil act, and the good morals of society prevented such things, through the people’s own self-restraint and will to only act for each other’s well-being. Firearms are harmless left at rest, and the damage they do, the good or evil, lies with the intent of the man holding it.
It makes no difference to the weak of America that the Second Amendment was enacted after America had just come off the bloody battlefields from a terrible war against the tyranny imposed by the British. Memories of what happens when citizens are disarmed have long faded, and the Founding principles have seemingly been very nearly eradicated by the flood of revisionism history and the constant asinine assertions that the “right to keep and bear arms” is somehow only for hunting, as they completely ignore the part that says “shall not be infringed”. This plain language has not been enough to secure our freedom, even today, because those fine words in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution cannot help us, if the ideas they express are not engraved deep within the hearts of all Americans.
Despite the clear negative right telling government that it cannot “infringe” on our right to carry firearms for the lawful purpose of self-defense, it has long been more than obvious that Democrats want to take our firearms. The Democrat communists and statists continue to politicize mass shootings, as they rally and advocate for the further infringement and the outright abrogation of the Second Amendment.
During the Democratic Party presidential candidates’ debate, on September 12th 2019, the Far Left radical Beto O’Rourke gave the firearm debate a hard electric jolt, when he flatly stated: “Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15, your AK-47. We’re not going to allow them to be used against fellow Americans anymore.”
Shortly after Beto’s revelation, Cheryl Chumley, journalist at the Washington Times wrote: “All the Democrats who’ve tried for years to deny the gun confiscation motives behind their gun control pushes went — nooooooo. There’s the golden ticket the NRA, the Republican Party, the patriotic Second Amendment supporters of this country needed to prove their argument. … Democrats want to confiscate guns, pure and simple.”
Recently on the Jimmy Fallon Show [Sept. 16th], Kamala Harris, Democrat candidate for president, advocated for mandatory buyback programs the “right” way, by giving “people their value, the financial value of what they have and not just taking things from people that have value without compensating them”.
A recent poll from the Washington Post suggests, however accurate or inaccurate, that thirty-one percent of Republicans and fifty-five percent of independents would support mandatory buybacks. If true, this should be more than troubling to America’s freedom loving patriots, as it suggests a certain willingness by many to subvert the nation’s founding and erode liberty.
But I did not buy my firearms from the government, and so, the government cannot legitimately enact a mandatory buyback program that is flagrantly unconstitutional and strips U.S. citizens of their rights, while the criminals are still largely untouched by any laws it may pass. I don’t want to sell my firearms “back” to the government. What now?
Some poor law enforcement agent will be placed between a rock and a hard spot, if he truly understands the Constitution, whenever he is serving under some Democratic majority government and has orders to confiscate the firearms of the people in his area — those who have not relinquished them and sold them “back” to the government. Those men who go against their oaths to uphold the Constitution, in favor of illegitimate and illegal orders from the new rising despots and tyrants will create a collision juncture between the forces of tyranny and the immovable forces of freedom and liberty. And for those law enforcement who do understand the full import of their oaths, they will stand with liberty and freedom first.
Our right to keep and bear arms shouldn’t even be up for debate, that time having long passed. However, no deluge of facts and statistics will change the minds of the Democratic communists and their radical brown shirts, since their true desire is to render the law abiding Americans defenseless and unable to defend our families, our property, our communities and ourselves and stand in the breach in defiance of their numerous depradations and treason, while they reduce everything and everyone to the common denominator of poverty and misery and nothing more than serfs, who are forced to surrender to their socialist super-state, the Leviathan. These radicals absolutely will try to take our weapons.
Thirty-two years after the Battle of Bennington [August 16th 1777], in a letter to Veterans of the War for Independence, General Stark wrote: “They were men who had not learned the art of submission, nor had they been trained to the art of war. But our astonishing success taught the enemies of liberty that undisciplined freemen are superior to veteran slaves”.
For any knowledgeable patriot, it is an easy choice. Any move to disarm America must be met with swift action and massive force, since no mystery is found in the progression of what follows the disarming of any people, revealed time and again in the annals of history and a trail of death, genocides and tyranny. Standing firm in the face of rapidly advancing tyranny is not a hard choice.
Free men understand that slavery begins with the end of the government’s acknowledgement of our right to keep and bear arms and its role as a supposed defender of the Bill of Rights, and as such, anyone supporting the suppression of our right to bear arms, through their mistaken belief that only the State should possess the tools of violence, is fit only for the cattle cars; whether malicious in their intent or just plain ignorant, it is of little importance at this point, since they hold a statist vision that seeks to shame and browbeat good and decent Americans into submitting to totalitarianism. There isn’t any prescription or solution to any problem that can start by signing away a God given right that will always exist despite such a foolish act, a right that preexists government. And Free Men with liberty engraved and blazing upon their hearts, who are forced to meet the forces of tyranny, repression and subjugation with steely grips on their weapons, can only answer with a blistering inferno of bullets and intensely wielded hot, blurring blades, that are, in fact, the final arbiter of freedom.
September 18, 2019
~ The Author ~
Justin O. Smith has lived in Tennessee off and on most of his adult life, and graduated from Middle Tennessee State University in 1980, with a B.S. and a double major in International Relations and Cultural Geography – minors in Military Science and English, for what its worth. His real education started from that point on. Smith is a frequent contributor to the family of Kettle Moraine Publications.