Opinion
New York – -(AmmoLand.com)-
“It is time for us to think outside the box and form two countries. Instead of civil war I propose civil separation. We are two countries, so ideologically opposed that each feels victimized and dominated by the other. Political leaders need to step up and brainstorm next steps. Clearly lay out the two ideologies and give each state a vote as to where they belong.” ~“Opinion Letter” from reader of The New York Times posted on June 5, 2022, responding to May 27, 2022 “America May Be Broken Beyond Repair,” by the Political Progressive Columnist for the Times, Michelle Goldberg. The letter writer, Dawn Menken, a Psychologist, from Portland, Oregon, is the author of “Facilitating a More Perfect Union: A Guide for Politicians and Leaders,” published in 2021*
If the American public didn’t know the truth before, it knows it now: the battle for the very Soul of the Country is on the line, and Ground Zero of that battle isn’t Uvalde, Texas. It’s New York City, New York, with the Bruen case shortly coming down the pike.
The Nation is indeed “two Countries,”—no less so now than at the time of the American Civil War: friend against friend, brother against brother, uncle against cousin, father against son. But what is different today is that ideologies cut across and into the very notion of what it means to be an American. There are those who hold to the meaning and purport of our Nation as set forth in our Constitution and especially in the Nation’s Bill of Rights. And there are those who wish to jettison all of it in the erroneous belief that our Nation is at its core, immoral, even evil. They wish to destroy the very fabric of a free Constitutional Republic.
But the salient difference between these two Countries rests on this:
Those Americans who embrace and cherish their fundamental right to keep and bear arms, and others who do not.
Those who embrace and cherish their fundamental right to keep and bear arms also recognize and embrace their sovereignty over Government. They understand that government exists to serve the interests of the people. They recognize that Government is the servant and the American people are the sole master.
Unfortunately, many Americans are of a different mindset. Such Americans have bought into the psychological conditioning programmed into them that guns are awful and gun owners are to be despised. Such Americans care not that Government is their servant, not their master. They recognize not and care not that by ceding their God-Given right to keep and bear arms, they have laid the foundation for their own demise: loss of Selfhood, loss of Dignity, loss of Self-Reliance, loss of mastery over their own destiny.
But what does the Government Tyrant do about the population of gun owners? That places the Tyrant in a quandary. The Tyrant cannot gain control over those who have the will and means to effectively resist the insinuation of tyranny over them. And, while two-thirds of the population has apparently capitulated, that still leaves a goodly third of Americans who have not and will not capitulate. One hundred million people is a lot of people by any reckoning.
What, then, does a Tyrannical Government do?
How does the Tyrant go about separating an estimated 400 million firearms (according to American Gun Facts) in the hands of roughly one-third of the population?
According to a November 2020 Gallop Poll, thirty-two percent of Americans possess firearms. See also a report of the Rand Corporation, a 2017 report of the Pew Research Center, titled, “the Demographics of gun ownership,” and an SSRN 2021 “National Firearms Survey.”
The American public is routinely bombarded with viral memes. Injected with and subjected to verbal and visual memes on a daily basis, many Americans develop a phobic reaction toward guns and toward those who possess them: word phrases such as “Gun Violence,” “Gun Culture,” “Mass Shootings,” “Assault Weapons,” “AR-15 Rifles,” “Weapons of War,” “Large Capacity Magazines,” and other such nomenclature, when coupled with images of violence, operate as visual and auditory cues, that induce a neurotic reaction in the target population. This is to be expected; in fact, this is intended. The goal is to create in the mind of the target audience a feeling of physical revulsion and repulsion toward guns.
But is it really a concern over the safety of innocent people that motivates a vigorous response against firearms and firearms ownership, misguided though that be, or is there something more sinister at play? If it were the former, one would expect a harsh response toward the massive wave of everyday criminal violence infecting and infesting our Country, especially in the major urban areas. But we see no such response.
Those State and municipal Government officials and legislators, who rabidly attack guns in the hands of average, rational, responsible, individuals, handle rampant violent and vicious crime infecting their locales with diffidence and an air of casual indifference.
So, it cannot be violent crime generally or violent gun crime committed by drug-crazed lunatics, psychopathic and psychotic gangbangers, and garden-variety criminals, particularly, that motivate these officials.
What might it be, then? Why would Globalist Government officials, along with their compatriots in the Press, go off half-cocked whenever a rare occurrence, invariably avoidable, of “mass violence” arises, occasioned by the actions of a solitary lunatic?
Why would Government officials and legislators shriek for more nonsensical gun laws, targeting tens of millions of average Americans, predicating the need for all of it on the lowest common denominator among us: the lone wolf psychotic.
The answer is plain. The actions of that lone wolf psychotic merely provide a convenient pretext. It isn’t the criminal actions of the lone wolf killer that Government is concerned about. For he doesn’t pose a viable threat to Government. Rather, it is the armed citizenry that poses a threat to a Tyrannical Government and poses a threat by virtue of the mere fact of being armed.
But why should Government fear its own armed citizenry? It shouldn’t and wouldn’t unless Government seeks to usurp the sovereignty of the citizenry, as it clearly aims to do here.
A perspicacious Tyrant would know it is a Tyrant. But this Federal Government doesn’t know it.
The Federal Government has amassed power and authority that doesn’t belong to it; power and authority that never did belong to it, believing, wrongly, that the power it has usurped from the people is rightfully its own. And the Government has become jealous in guarding this power, hoarding it.
The Federal Government has come to perceive the armed citizenry as a potential rival that must be crushed, and not as a master to whom it must serve. And we, gun owners, for our part, would do well to view this present Government as a rival to our rightful claim of sovereignty over the Federal Government.
Our claim of sole sovereignty over Government is grounded on the Constitution, and on fundamental, unalienable, immutable, eternal God-given natural law Rights. And, what, then, does the Federal Government presume to claim its sovereignty over us on? What can it presume to claim sovereignty over the American people on? Nothing but a set of limited, contingent, demarcated powers and authority handed through us to it, conditioned on the fact that Government exists to serve our interests, not its own.
Whose claim of sovereignty is superior? And, if one falls back on the aphorism, “might makes right,” well, then, the Government is not alone as the bearer of arms.
*Menken’s book purports to be a guide for political leaders on how to bring the Country together to resolve the Nation’s differences. Yet, one year after the publication of her book, it is clear from her NYTimes letter Times, that Menken has had a change of heart; surrendered to the truth that reconciliation is impossible. That should have been obvious to her all along. It wasn’t.
There are two antithetical ideologies at play. One ideology is grounded on the principles, precepts, and tenets laid down in our Nation’s sacred documents. The other intends to cast it out. One ideology was forged in the Nation’s struggle for independence from tyranny. The proponents of that ideology seek to preserve the Natural Law Rights and Liberties of the people. They intend to maintain and preserve the success of the American Revolution.
The other ideology, grounded on the principles, tenets, and precepts of Collectivism, much in evidence today, seeks to upend the hard-fought battle for Independence from tyranny. For Collectivism is predicated on Tyranny. It is inextricably tied to it. On our website, we discussed all of this in several articles some time ago. See, e.g., our article posted four years ago, in 2018, titled: “The Modern American Civil War: A Clash of Ideologies.”
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