“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
–Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution
I believe in our right as American citizens to own guns, to an extent. What I don’t believe in is invalid arguments and hypocrisy. Throughout my discussions with others on the highly debated topic of gun control, the most common argument against gun control that I encounter is, “It’s our constitutional right, and the government cannot take away our rights.” Frankly, this argument upsets me. It is a display of willful ignorance in regard to our civil liberties and the political climate we live in.
You either support the constitution or you don’t. There is no common ground in between. If you are to defend the constitution, then you should defend it to its fullest. Since 2001, our country has gone under quite a transformation in terms of our civil liberties and rights as an American citizen, a transformation that has accelerated the increasing deprivation of our rights and freedoms as Americans.
Today, Donald Trump is the frontrunner among Republicans, and one of his core issues pertains to our Second Amendment right to own guns. Donald Trump has also been in favor of monitoring and even closing down Mosques in the name of national security. It’s worth mentioning that you have a better chance of being struck by lightning on your birthday than being killed in a terrorist attack.
Anyways, it’s the same people that wish to protect our Second Amendment rights while also simultaneously supporting the deprivation of the rights of other American citizens. Many of these supporters champion gun rights while hypocritically advocating for the suspending of other rights. It is a hypocritical argument that is perceived to be concrete to gun activists nationwide.
Those that wish to claim this point of view fail to see the new world we live in and choose to live in ignorance purely for the sake of preserving their own ideologies. A truly educated and informed citizenry would realize that our rights are under attack and have been under attack for over a century, resulting in the pseudo-democracy we live in today.
The Patriot Act has deprived us of our right to privacy. The Sedition Act passed in 1917 has limited our rights to free speech and expression. Peaceful protest and assembly has been restricted. People are facing religious persecution. Law enforcement regularly conducts unreasonable searches and seizures that lack probable cause, and our right to a representative democracy is lost. The list goes on and on, it even extends to basic inalienable human rights which are granted to every person. At the infamous Guantanamo Bay, people are being held who have done nothing wrong, and as if that wasn’t already enough, these same people are being tortured. Apparently that’s acceptable because they’re terrorists. If you didn’t already know, this is a worn out argument due to the fact that over half of the detainees presiding in Guantanamo have been cleared or haven’t even been charged. It’s a disgrace.
This is the reality of the “free” democracy we live in. Where is the uproar over the rights we have already lost? To those who choose to defend our second amendment rights, I challenge you to defend the rights we have already lost.
Happy Holidays!
Austin Brooks says
You might like Buckley and some of his earlier defenses in the early Cold War era. For him, political freedom cannot come without the safety of the national people first. As for the Sedition Act, United States v. Eichman and Texas v. Johnson iterated that an idea like that was unconstitutional.