Gun control: candidate ideology, polarization, division?

November 4, 11:52 AMLA Gun Rights ExaminerJohn Longenecker

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Who's dividing whom?

If you've come to understand that the left in America is exhibiting one of the most fundamental defense mechanisms – Projection – you're going to the head of the class. One of the biggest mistakes we can make is in imagining that the left is dealing with America in good faith.

Ideology is not divisive, it can be most unifying under our system as our way of life. Like ostracism, it's not to be discouraged necessarily, but invoked from time to time as a survival tool. Under our system, debate is welcome, productive and even guiding, and should never be portrayed as it is as a negative. Naturally, the left in America tries to make it out to be imposing values, but, as usual, they are projecting their own motivations of what they do best: imposing their own values on others. The problem with the left is not ideology or views, but of having police powers and the use of force to enforce those views.

Second amendment liberty writers who post for the public's better understanding of second amendment rights often report that crime soars in areas where your being the first line of defense is blocked by punishment. This abuses due process, and it makes people fear their government more than the thugs they might otherwise resist in due process. (Don't think for a minute that armed self-defense denies an aggressor due process automatically. It does not.)

There's more. The second amendment's permanent purpose is to discourage phoney programs that come into being once people are frustrated from self-defense. Any 2010 candidates running on a smaller government platform will have to see first the connection between violent crime, disarming the citizen, and the predatory programs that follow and hound the taxpayers.

Divisive or not, America needs to get real on the T-word: Tyranny.

Tyranny is not someone sitting on a throne and making rulings with a baton thunked on the floor, it's abuses of process where, again, the people fear their government more than they fear the very crisis the government claims to fight. Tyranny is the immense transfer of wealth and liberty in the name of justice. Dismantling a working social and liberty safeguard only to fill the void with predatory programs is Tyranny in 2009.

How? Because Americans can meet and manage nearly any crisis or injustice in liberty better than any government can in its governance.

Anybody running on the liberty or smaller government platform needs to understand that government is great for meat inspection, safe highways, airline safety, printing and protecting money, and a lot of other things. Government's great as long as it remembers that it's a servant serving at the pleasure of the people. Any quarrel whatsoever with this signals worse times yet to come with some officials operating outside the scope of their authority.

Do we have an ideology and shouldn't we? Absolutely, and one of the goals of tyranny is to squash it. Our ideology is independence from our very own servants.

Americans can meet and manage nearly any crisis or injustice in liberty better than any government can in its governance.

2010 candidates might be very surprised to see such a strong constituency waiting to elect them if only they will show they understand the second amendment - self-rule - smaller government connection.

Officials will not get to a smaller government without first affirming the second amendment and what it is for.

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The second amendment isn't about guns, it's about carrying our own burdens in independence so the state will not substitute itself in our place everywhere. Available both Hardcover and as an e-book.