Friedman’s “pencil story”eloquently outlines the amazing concept of freedom. In the pencil story you have a right to engage in (or refuse) a monetary transaction with another party. The concept of freedom can be applied to many real life situations. As with other freedoms, you do have the right to defend yourself, and you do have the right to defend others.

Guns are nothing new. The gun pre-dates the Television, Cars, Airplanes, Telephones, Computers, the Internet, Electric Power, Space Travel, the Lightbulb, the Cotton Gin, the Steam Engine, the Printing Press, and probably countless other inventions. It is a story that dates back to China, the birthplace of gunpowder. The invention made its way into the Middle East, Europe, and Africa via the ancient Silk Road.

An Austrian plastics expert named Gaston Glock had the most influence on the modern gun in recent memory. His concepts in light firearm design led a trend that made personal defense easy and more convenient for people of different physical strength and ability levels to defend themselves.

But there are those who will always attempt to limit as many types of freedoms as possible. Whether it be the size of your soda, car, or your gun, these limitations all suffer the same flawed logic. Either not understanding, or refusing to accept self-defense and self-determination as a right, they’ve made proposals to deal with their own flawed world view. Gun control in the U.S. is has an ugly history, one that’s deeply seeded in racism, xenophobia, and class warfare. A fact anti-gun politicians and lobbyists purposefully avoid mentioning.

Gun ‘buy backs’ appear to be a growing ‘gun control’ trend administrated and lauded by big city technocratic mayors like New York’s Michael Bloomberg, and Seattle’s Mike McGinn. A modern gun ‘buy back’ usually implies that guns are not fit for the likes of free individuals. The concept of the modern gun buyback is indeed quite presumptuous on its face. How can a government ‘buy back’ something it never even owned to begin with?

The concept of gun ‘buy backs’ are actually nothing new. Haile Selassie, (AKA  Ras Tafari) ran perhaps one of the most clever gun buybacks on record. Upon returning from a banquet in his honor with Selassie, the war lord Dejazmach Balcha found his army deserted after selling off all their guns and weaponry to Sellasie’s rival army. After a successful ‘buy back,’ Selassie enjoyed a long reign as the Emperor of Ethiopia.

Second Amendment freedoms are just as relevant now, as they were at the time our republic was formed. Make no mistake; the America we all love and even sometimes take for granted is free because we’re armed. For those that still seek refuge from freedom, countries that enjoy the most gun control often also enjoy the highest violent crime, murder, and suicide rates—let alone other serious side effects of gun control—government crimes against humanity, and civil unrest.

Multiple studies have shown that hundreds of thousands of people per-year defend themselves with a gun in the U.S. alone. As a free people, we do have the right to defend ourselves and each other as individuals. Crime has consistently dropped with the introduction of concealed carry laws. Youth homicides are actually at a 30 year low. The areas with the highest amount of gun control now have the dubious distinction as victim disarmament zones, and subsequently often suffer under a high violent crime rate. Mass public killings almost always take place in so called ‘gun free zones,’ an inconvenient fact anti-freedomists and hoplophobes have no answer for.

Like Friedman’s pencil, a gun may have a price in the market just as it has in times long ago on the Silk Road; however, freedom and the right of self-defense are priceless. As Colion Noir put it, “Take away the ability to protect ourselves in a world where evil does everything it can to deprive us of life, and you take away our right to life.”