Springfield, Missouri – -(Ammoland.com)- Courtland Sykes is running for U.S. Senate to represent the state of Missouri in 2018. We belive he is someone the readership at Ammoland News should get to know and support. If you are in Missouri volunteer and vote for Courtland. If you not from Missouri consider making a donation.
Where do you stand on gun control?
Courtland Sykes : I oppose gun control absolutely.
The right of Americans to keep and bear arms is constitutionally inviolate. No compromises on this. I am an NRA life-member. I hunt, conceal carry, collect guns, do competitive shooting, and attend gun shows. I totally oppose gun control.
I grew up in the mountains of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas and began gun collecting and hunting in my youth, and I had my first gun at age eight. I favor youth hunting and gun training programs by the NRA and others. I believe in Missouri’s constitutional “no permit needed” concealed or open carry regime and in the promotion of hunting nationwide.
I will be, in the U.S. Senate, the most pro-gun and anti-regulation Senator in U.S. history.
Why do you so adamantly oppose gun control?
Courtland Sykes : I oppose gun control because gun regulations of any kind in the hands of the liberal state—including its administrative agencies—starts us down a long slippery slope. The first regulatory step leads to a regulatory tumble into the slime-pit of liberal laws; there the sum of the little legal add-on’s to bills, the little riders, the little administrative nicks and hits and bumps here and there begin adding up until they disable our guns and rights by such innocuous sounding indirections as regulating ammunition or overtaxing guns or by such innocent sounding moves as making lists of gun owners mandatory. From such lists regulators can then later target the addresses and spotlight the names of America’s gun owners for the purposes of later seizure, taxation, licensing, submission and regulation. I’m having none of this whatsoever—and I’m out to protect Missourians and all Americans from it.
The NRA has done a brilliant job, year after year, of keeping track of every little attempt to regulate guns—and they have waged an amazing fight, because that’s exactly what it has taken to preserve our second amendment rights.
Without the NRA we wouldn’t have a second amendment today.
Everyone should join and make the NRA even stronger. Liberals prove their slippery slope operation all the time—it’s their major tactic for their power grab and they are tricky and persistent about it.
Why do so many Democrats in Congress favor gun control?
Courtland Sykes : America’s founders believed that it took an armed citizenry to keep a tyrannical government in its place and believed that guns served as an ancillary and ad hoc defense bulwark not only against tyranny but against foreign invaders, domestic rioters and looters, and against any out of control bureau or agency of government.
That’s exactly why we have a second amendment and exactly why Democrats hate guns and favor gun control. Democrats are the party of big government and the control state and the party of tyranny—the party that believes government should control everything you and I do. They are everything against which an uprising—if one ever needs to occur—will be specifically and instantly directed. They fear our guns—and I don’t blame them.
Our household guns are America’s guarantee that we as Americans, can remain free. The Democrat’s liberal obsession with seizing our guns springs from their fear that we as gun owners will, if necessary, rise up well-armed, and defend our freedoms from their statist obsessions to seize our rights and liberties, from their attempts to bully us and suppress us with tyrannical laws by using the state’s own guns to coerce us—and in fairness to their pathetic liberal obsessions—they do understand us perfectly—they understand that we believe guns played a deciding role in the first American revolution and will play a deciding role in any revolution that may follow. America is a land of over 300 million guns—a gain of 150 million guns since 1968—and liberals don’t own many.
I will never, for any reason, support any gun control regulation. Mark me as 100% against gun control.
Did your military experience abroad affect your view of guns and killing?
Courtland Sykes : As a military veteran and military intelligence operator with four combat zone tours of duty in Iraq and the Middle East and one in Central America, I am trained and fully prepared to shoot and kill any enemy instinctively, without hesitation and without remorse.
War is its own morality; war is a real world field operation—not an abstract academic study for some ivory tower philosophers to discuss over crumpets and tea. No one thinks war or the killing that war requires is pretty and few want to do it. For those of us who served—we acted for our country—we did our duty, America goes on and no one in the world deserves our slightest apology and we will never make one.
I am glad that there are millions of well-armed American veterans with guns, well-trained and that many are war-hardened and we should all thank God that this is so. The world is full of America’s enemies—many of whom Obama imported to our shores disguised as refugees or immigrants—and they lie in wait among us in America now—like invaders on the night before.
It is not our weakness, but our strength, that ensure our peace; not our absence of guns but our guns that ensure our survival. Guns, which are the military’s personal weapon of strength for preserving the peace, become our personal weapons of strength for preserving the peace in our homes and our businesses, right here in our own land.
What about self defense?
Courtland Sykes : Self-defense is an inherent human right and one of the gun’s foremost purposes. A home invader is a cunning and premeditated criminal who makes his hideous and violent final choices and chooses his own risks and targets in advance.
Self-defense means a homeowner should plan his gun’s work in advance so as to inflict maximum necessary damage upon any home intruder, to never risk his own life or his families’ lives with wound shots or by hesitating to fire fatal shots which means a home invading criminal should be never likely to leave your house alive.
A home invader can be brought to as much justice as he will ever deserve by bleeding out on the living room floor—the same fate he originally planned for you and your entire family—until your gun brought him to justice.
But doesn’t the criminal have a right to fair trial?
Courtland Sykes : Survivors have a right to trials—the deceased have no rights. A home invader doesn’t waive his right to trial exactly—he just has his trial on your living room floor and serves his sentence in a body bag.
Given the dead-criminal mindset that home invasion targets should be encouraged to develop, not one penny of further public money need be wasted in the future coddling any criminal home invader’s medical survival and trial rights—there will be neither.
This country can save millions by encouraging a homeowner’s self-defense mindset that results in killing many more home invaders—the savings can be immense—no trial, no appeal, no public defender’s fee, no court costs, no prosecutorial expense, no jury pay, no incarceration costs, no re-trials, no parole, no rehab, no re-arrest, no re-incarceration, no second parole and no future deaths for some other innocent family he kills while he is a paroled criminal—these are the ancillary benefits of the homeowner’s kill-shot mindset; for in the dark, in the home, the kill-shot is “necessary force” against a home invader.
I believe that every year, public service commendations should be offered to the ten gun owners who have best defended themselves in their homes—providing that they, with their guns, have successfully killed the home invading criminal outright.
What about guns in Las Vegas?
Courtland Sykes : The Las Vegas parable is a tragedy about madmen and their devices—a parable not about guns or at most, only incidentally so. Take away America’s guns and America’s madmen will soon prove themselves just as mad without guns. Anyone plotting a mass homicide will not be deterred, even slightly, by laws forbidding him from stealing whatever he needs to commit the forbidden mass homicide he plans to commit.
Take away guns and the cunning madman will commit his mass mayhem with alternative devices—with knives, gasoline, fireworks, cars, trucks, motor scooters, airplanes, drones, razor blades, poison balloons, bulldozers, toxic substances and hundreds more—none of these will be outlawable either.
We have seen this year, throughout the world, that Islamic killers are being trained to drive trucks into crowds—and have done so repeatedly. The Islamics actually have an Islamic training manual teaching them how to commit mass killings with trucks.
When do we think we should begin to outlaw trucks?
So if it isn’t guns who do you think is most responsible for mass killings?
Courtland Sykes : Guns don’t inspire madmen to act—Hollywood does—and nobody does it better or more often. It is reported that an average America youth will witness about 200,000 acts of violence on television by his eighteenth birthday and over 70% of adolescents play violent video games like “Grand Theft Auto” and “Call of Duty.” Hollywood inspires and motivates madmen hourly—and does it for money and profit while promoting nihilism, immorality, and drug use. Where is the outcry? Do these gun control advocates also want to outlaw Hollywood? Of course not.
Hollywood takes those profits from gun violence it sells on screen and spends those profits to finance anti-gun crusades and anti-gun candidates like Obama and Clinton. Hollywood’s loony left use “gun control” to mask and deflect the cries to control Hollywood’s depictions of gun violence and Hollywood’s profits from it.
Hollywood distracts us because it doesn’t want to be mentioned as the real culprit in the mass killing epidemic. To Hollywood, inspiring mass killing is mere collateral damage in their grub for profits. So long as they can keep you fixated on gun control they can keep you looking away from the truth—that Hollywood inspires and motivates and instructs and glamorizes violence of every kind all the time, night and day, on every channel, and it isn’t guns that kill but killers who are motivated and inspired to kill by some means. Hollywood—in its films, television, video games, and song lyric—has promoted youth aggression, violence, and callousness—as thousands of studies show. Hollywood’s hoards of warped and sleazy dramatists are the true instigators of madness in mass killers because Hollywood glamorizes violence throughout our society and throughout the world.
Would gun licensing have helped in Las Vegas?
Courtland Sykes : The Las Vegas madman had a non-violent record, passed every firearm registration criterion and bought firearms from dealers, legally. He hauled his arsenal upstairs as he repeatedly entered a full surveillance camera controlled casino with dozens of in house security personnel in a casino which will soon regret that it had thriftily installed—no metal detectors at all. Then, when trouble broke out, the casino responded sluggishly. First rate security might have made all the difference—guns are easily detectable and the threat to Las Vegas by gunman has been constant for years.
Let’s look then at some of the artifacts and actions that it took for this madman to commit this terrible crime that night, John, and I’ll let you tell me which of these artifacts and actions that you think congress should or could license, register or outlaw because it took all of these artifacts and actions for the gunman to have been in place that night: guns, meals, room service, cars, gasoline, automobile tires, shoes, credit cards, cash, room keys, eyeglasses, shirt, pants, belt, socks, electricity, water, a mother, a father, the English language—he needed ALL of these things and many more that night to commit his mass killings.
Do you want me to go on, with the necessary implements list, or would that make me sound as brain dead as the simple-minded Elizabeth Warren is—she hates guns and thinks that taking them away from ordinary Americans can solve the mass shootings problem.
Or can we just agree how ridiculous the notion is that gun control can control a madmen or stop his mass killings?
What can stop the mass killing epidemic?
Courtland Sykes : Paradoxically, the one thing that might stop mass killings—is more guns.
Most of the time a well-armed citizenry can well respond and destroy or distract a killer and save lives. What if—in that crowd of 22,000—only one person in 22 had had a gun. That number—less than 5%—would have put 1,000 guns in that arena.
In this case—the rare case of a madman firing from height in Las Vegas, we see the outlier instance of where personal defense guns could not have helped—even the police couldn’t get to him until many minutes had passed. But in most other mass killing cases an armed population could have and would have stopped such a killer.
Madmen need no guns to commit mass killings and gun control only disarms the very public that if armed, in most cases, will disrupt or stop the carnage.
A better armed populace and more guns are needed to stop gun violence—not a defenseless, unarmed populace.
I totally oppose gun control—and always will.
Sykes is America’s boldest, most outspoken candidate on issues you care most about:
- God and Family First
- Pro-Strong Military
- Pro-Wall
- Pro-Gun
- Pro-Law Enforcement
- Pro-Lower Taxes
- Pro-Energy
- Pro-School Choice
- Oppose-Radical Feminist Agenda
- Oppose-Globalism
- Oppose-Green Lunacy
- #1 Constitutional Conservative
- America Number One
- MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
