The right of the people to keep and bear arms isn't about hunting. It's never been about hunting. It's about defending this nation, both from foreign invaders and tyrannical governments, and it seems some people are starting to wake up to that fact.
Most gun rights supporters have obviously known this and have said so many times.
The problem is that many others on both sides of the fence like to roll their eyes at it. They'll tell us that we can't take on the government and win, even if that's not entirely true.
Well, at least, they did.
Now, it seems there's a shift happening, and the Christian Science Monitor, of all places, is talking about it.
“I’ve covered so many angles on the Second Amendment,” Patrik [Jonsson] told me. “I’ve done stories about liberal gun owners, I did a story about women gun owners, I did a story about the complications of being a Black gun owner.” But Patrik started noticing something new after the killing of Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse fatally shot by federal agents in Minnesota earlier this year.
During the COVID-19 pandemic and a wave of Black Lives Matter protests, Patrik explains, a growing number and diversity of Americans started turning to firearms in hopes of defending themselves from criminals. This, according to scholars, was an expansion of what is sometimes called “Gun Culture 2.0” – a perception of guns as being primarily for self-protection rather than for hunting or military use.
(Previously, those on the left were more likely to identify with gun control advocates, who point to research showing that firearms in the home increase the risk of violence there.)
After Minnesota, though, Patrik found a growing, cross-partisan belief that guns are necessary not just to protect oneself from criminals, but also from the government.
My response to that last bit?
We've known this for quite some time. We've said it and were either ignored or mocked, but now that the man in power is someone they don't like, and something happened that fit way too neatly into their narrative about that man, suddenly it's a viable reason to own a gun.
No, the Trump administration's initial response didn't help. Far too many people who know better jumped on the train to put the blame completely on Pretti, not for getting involved in an altercation with federal agents when he really shouldn't have, but for having a gun at a protest. Neither are, in and of themselves, sufficient grounds for someone being shot, but laying hands on a fed is a crime, at least. Having a gun isn't. His having left his permit at home is a misdemeanor, granted, but again, not something that warranted him being shot.
Who did they think he was, Eric Swalwell?
Suddenly, they were seeing the very thing we actually told them could happen if they were right about Trump. Of course, if they were right about Trump, we'd have seen it during his first term, and a lot more during his second one, but it was still something we told them was a possibility if Trump was as bad as they claimed, and they still wanted gun control.
Then Pretti was shot, the rhetoric got stupid, and suddenly some of them are waking up to the fact that governments can, in fact, be tyrannical.
I have no doubts that our definitions of what that looks like differ greatly, and while I might have an issue with theirs, the Second Amendment does not discriminate. It's not about one ideology or another. It's not about left or right. It's about protecting this nation from all enemies, foreign and domestic, and while we might disagree on who qualifies as either, the Second Amendment itself doesn't care.
So yeah, I'm glad to see them waking up to this fact.
Now, they need to start voting for lawmakers who agree with that instead of being willing to sell them down the river by banning the guns most useful in resisting a tyrannical government, doing away with red flag laws that would allow the authorities to disarm people who might resist, and a whole host of other infringements that will be used to keep us docile in the face of tyranny.
I'm not holding my breathe on that one, though.
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, at least without the leftists waking up and forcing them to stop from within.
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