Sovereignty 101, Part II: No Alternatives to the State?

I’ll be on the air with Lou Dobbs tomorrow at 1:30 p.m. Pacific Time. The show will air on Lou Dobbs’ affiliated stations and should appear in Lou’s Website Archives and podcast shortly thereafter. Go to www.LouDobbs.com today and tomorrow for more information.

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Sovereignty is a scary concept for some, and as George Bernard Shaw put it, Liberty means responsibility, which is why most men dread it. Well said.

That’s fine, but what, then, is responsibility? From the point of view of a sovereign, I like to put it this way: The right to carry a concealed weapon began with the right to carry our own personal burdens. I think we can all remember people who do not wish to carry burdens, and it is this paternalism they fight for even more than the would fight for freedom. Freedom’s responsibilities begin with carrying our own burdens, but more to the point, insisting on carrying them and kindly refusing the offers of others to lift them from us.

This is the culture war we fight. It’s not really about social justice, but cowardice in facing life. It is to prefer Dependency over Independence.

Independence is frightening for some, while others embrace it as their reason for living as much as their loved ones are. Independence of others even frightens some, and these people often work for and even look forward to the further ascendancy of the State. These people are right called Statists, then. Independence is anathema to their aims.

As it relates to gun control, or I should say Independence from our servants, our personal burdens are manifold, ranging from putting food on the table to planning the next generation to a good measure of social responsibility to work ethic to personal integrity and more. One of the earliest is protecting self and loved ones, on the understanding that no one else will. This what separates the dependent from the independent: the truth that no matter what is promised in paternalism, you are still on your own inescapably, only with fewer choices and all exists blocked from doing better if you’d changed your mind. This is the sentence that is dependency.

Officials who promise to lift burdens wind up too often lifting liberty and in the final analysis the State has lifted no burdens at all. It merely discourages and punishes all alternatives. Pretty soon, it becomes a recognizable pattern and practice, this idea of discouraging thoughts of Liberty.

The reason some Americans are for gun control at all is because being armed brings not only the power of the gun in self-defense of the moment, but of true independence, independence from our servants on so many levels. Furthermore, and perhaps the best evidence of all, is the power of realization, the realization that one does not need as much from a government as the government would like to ‘give’. This kind of critical thinking is a threat to any government who wishes to rule over people more than serve the people, so they are ‘rounded up’ and exterminated around the globe --- even after the weapons are confiscated.

The enemy within every armed citizen is not only the gun in the hand of the armed sovereign in this country, it is the critical thinking that generally impels one to conclude why he has a gun. The independence of thought is an enemy of the State, and the means of arresting that thought is to disarm the citizen of both weapons and knowledge.

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Lou Dobbs tomorrow afternoon. See www.LouDobbsradio.com