The New York Times dedicated nearly a third of its front page to an editorial promoting gun control following the San Bernardino shooting. The editorial board, ignoring many other historical moments over the last century, decided increased gun control was an important enough issue to warrant its first front page editorial since choosing to criticize the Republican Party for nominating Warren G. Harding for President in 1920.
Arguing that it is a “moral outrage and a national disgrace” that Americans are able to purchase weapons “designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency”, the editorial board makes a direct call to American citizens to turn in their guns “for the good of their fellow citizens.”
That statement demonstrates a view held by many liberals: it is the sole responsibility of the state to protect us and private gun ownership is a hindrance to that goal.
Referring to firearms as “tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection”, gun owners are portrayed as men trying to reassert their masculinity or violently overthrow the government.
It is clear that the true intentions of the Founding Fathers when drafting the Second Amendment have fallen by the wayside, something intentionally done by liberal academics, political pundits and others who believe private gun ownership is a threat to government power or a vestige of white culture that deserves to be eliminated from society.
The Founding Fathers lived under an oppressive power who denied the colonists all of the rights now guaranteed under the Bill of Rights. After achieving independence from Great Britain, the framers of the Constitution wisely enshrined all of the rights they were denied to all future generations of Americans.
The Second Amendment was drafted to give future generations of Americans the ability to protect themselves from a tyrannical government. Many Americans believe the prospect of a tyrannical government coming to power today is an impossible concept promoted only by conspiracy theorists, yet they are blind to the growing police and surveillance state coming to shape around them based on the constant threat of terrorism (a threat manufactured by the forces that have hijacked our government to achieve that very end).
Private gun ownership is the only major obstacle preventing the complete destruction of America as we know it, and the elimination of the rights many take for granted every day; the same rights our Founding Fathers risked their lives to leave to us.
As Noah Webster said in 1787, “Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of regular troops that can be, on any pretense, raised in the United States.”
In Federalist 28, Alexander Hamilton said, “If the representatives of the people betray their constituents, there is then no resource left but in the exertion of that original right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms of government, and which against the usurpations of the national rulers, may be exerted with infinitely better prospect of success than against those of the rulers of an individual state. In a single state, if the persons intrusted with supreme power become usurpers, the different parcels, subdivisions, or districts of which it consists, having no distinct government in each, can take no regular measures for defense. The citizens must rush tumultuously to arms, without concert, without system, without resource; except in their courage and despair.”
