Two patriotic non-profits close.

June 8, 8:37 AMLA Gun Rights ExaminerJohn Longenecker

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I’m going to echo and add to the observations of my friend and colleague David Codrea who wrote Apathy enables gun control. David mentions Citizens Of America and Utah Gun Owners Alliance.

He’s right. As an activist myself, I can say with personal experience that many Americans who complain about our present social conditions, whatever that complaint may be – banking scandal, voter fraud --- are not even registered to vote. As I mentioned in my last piece, the Left in America will raise the dead to get out the vote: what do Americans do? Nothing, if anything.

How soon we forget. I could mention Dubai Ports as a success story for voters, and it could be just recent enough in human memory to recall how all that hard work paid off. Let me be blunt: it takes hard work to remain free, and it seems nobody wants to work that hard anymore. Just as the left discovers and re-discovers how far it can push us into dependency, so the dependent discover how much coercion they can really tolerate.

The left in America is working that hard, and it is killing the country. Our side is one big no-show.

Forgive my bluntness, but for the longest time, neutral, apolitical, or middle-of-the-road Americans have said that the talk radio pundits of the liberty message are nothing but whiners, but they are not: liberty purists have been putting out the solution for decades now, only it hasn’t been taken up because it feels as if it is calling you to a duty, something unseemly, or even belligerent. Some believe it simply won’t work, and all too often it is mistakenly associated with an armed populace in show-downs with our own troops. People simply want to be left alone, and the left in America is capitalizing on this indifference of having it so good, they feel they can afford a little tyranny if they’re just left alone. Is this what it is: comfort zone? .

Liberty now is a marketing problem. Much of the focus has been on the Second Amendment, and that, to tens of millions, means Guns. You can see it in the names of the organizations. Guns, Guns, Guns.

But it isn’t about guns. I’ve written for years that what it is about guns isn’t even about guns, but about how we carry our own burdens. It isn’t that the everyday armed citizen is the type to carry his own burdens, it is that the one who carries his own burdens is likely to be an armed citizen. The connection is all about understanding that no one will do it for you, that no one else can ever do for you better than you can do yourself, and even more: that when it comes to crime and violence, tens of billions are spent on anti-crime programs which entirely miss the point, because they try to take your place and then spend billions in an area that is not where crime is fought.

As more citizens are disarmed, discouraged and dispirited when it comes to meeting violence, more money is taken, more abuses leveled. This is dependency on agencies that never had the powers granted them by the people. The end result is that some believe that Guns are wrong and that crime is an everyday cost of doing business. Yogi Berra said it, "Include me out!"

It’s not about Guns, it’s all about Independence from our own public servants. This is the freedom / armed citizen connection. The armed citizen makes the idea of official programs to take your place look rather silly, but disarm the public and those programs seem to have a new look to them. By this time, the populace has not made the recently disarmed / increasing violence connection. This is because they are not thinking in terms of independence, but of being left alone as the higher priority.

This paradigm spreads into other corners of governance, including environment, business management and other patterns and practices of taking the better, more workable solutions off the table. When it comes to health care in the U.S., they’ll go to single payer and similarly block all exits to alternatives of self-reliance and private insurance. It’s not about health care or its costs, it’s about dependency. Gun control is not about violence, it’s about dependency.

You can understand, then, that the second amendment non-profits are not so much about guns as they have been about Liberty all along. All Liberty In America is freest when the populace is armed wherever they have right to be. Violent crime is not fought by absentee policy, but by the resolve not to be a victim and backing that resolve with citizen authority and superior force.

It is not a good indicator of national will that two patriotic non-profits throw in the towel. Tens of millions of Americans suddenly woke up in 2008 and 2009 to realize that they have been had big time, facing a governance against their wishes, takings, takeovers, and other practices they never authorized. This is directly related to how officials understand a protest without teeth as a paper tiger.

Our best bet for regaining our independence from our servants will be in a national connection of the armed citizen to the protection of the public not only from crime, but from officials who broker costly demagogic programs in the name of fighting crime. Understand that officials became this bold in all things because America became this intimidated in all things.

Our best bet for regaining our Independence is to be independent, and to put the self back in self-rule. That means understanding that you are in fact being summoned to a duty, and if you don’t rise to meet it, you’ll be making a choice for your kids just as certainly as our parents handed us the country we inherited.

You and I will probably die in freedom, but we will be the last, and what our kids will face will be a new definition of what liberty are independence are. They will also feel what Dependency is.

Understand that officials became this bold in all things because America became this intimidated in all things.

Our job is to see to it that what they know as Independence is how we understand it, and how we understand it is how our parents understood it. That’s going to take involvement.

Liberty.

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John Longenecker is author of Safe Streets In The Nationwide Concealed Carry Of Handguns. E-mail me at John at GoodForTheCountry.com See the other Gun Rights Examiners listed in the sidebar on the right for their latest editions. >