AWR Hawkins Right About Freedom 'Substitues'

The world is give or take. If you make one decision, you didn't make another. We all do this, and we all deal with the ramifications of that decision. Sometimes, we can realize we made a mistake and still head the other direction, but even then, we've lost time on that path, which may have an impact later on.

This is just how life is. I'm not breaking new ground here. Anyone who managed to reach adulthood has already figured this out to some degree or another, even if they've never really articulated it.

The reason I'm talking about it is that AWR Hawkins over at Breitbart wrote a piece about how gun control isn't a suitable substitute for freedom, and I completely agree.

Gun control laws are not instituted in a vacuum, but in a sphere initially occupied by freedom. And with each gun control passed and instituted, more and more freedom is displaced and done away with.

In other words, we trade one thing (freedom) for another thing (gun control).

Consider this: We used to be free to have guns in our cars and trucks at high schools and other places of learning. In turn, we were free to defend our greatest possession, namely, our very lives. Now, thanks to hysterical gun controllers, we are largely barred from even having guns in our vehicles at many middle schools, high schools, and other places of learning. Instead we have “gun-free” zones.

What did we give up by adopting this control? We gave up the freedom inherent in a full-bodied exercise of the right to self-defense. In other words, we became sitting ducks who live day-to-day hoping that criminals do not act like criminals, terrorists do not act like terrorists, and assaulters do not act like assaulters.

Now, some will likely see this and roll their eyes. Of course we don't allow guns at schools. What kind of screwed-up world would we have if we did?

Well, I remember those days. I remember my classmates going hunting before school, walking into class wearing their camo, their rifles or shotguns hanging in a gun rack in their trucks. It was a small private school, so we might not have been typical, but since our headmaster was doing the same thing, he wasn't inclined to change anything.

The school, Riverview Academy, shut down about a year after I graduated. In its nearly 30-year existence, though, guns were always there, and guess how many incidents we had? Zero. No one ever pulled out a gun and did anything with it besides maybe show it to a friend. We knew how to handle firearms. We respected them.

Of course, this was also at a time when school shootings in our inner cities were a thing, which is where the gun-free zones thing started, but let's also take a look at what we see today. We still have gang bangers taking guns to school. We still have school-aged kids being shot and killed over gang beefs.

What we also have are mass shootings in our schools. We have arguments about whether the teachers, who we're supposed to trust absolutely in every other way when it comes to our children, should be trusted to exercise their own Second Amendment rights to protect themselves and, by extension, our children.

Hawkins brings up the Old Dominion University ROTC class we've all talked so much about. He mentions Sandy Hook and how the killer there had nine minutes to murder children, all because there was no one there to stop him.

A lot of people talk about gun control as being necessary because they should have the "freedom" to not be afraid. Fear is not the determiner of someone's rights, which is probably a good thing for these people because my freedom to not be afraid requires a gun in my holster and my holster on me.

But gun control has never made anyone safer. It hasn't even given them the illusion of safety. It's given them the delusion of it.

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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