Have We Forgotten?

Gun control is always the historical precedent to confiscation, disarmament and the victimization of people who can no longer defend themselves. We are not immune to the violence of drug wars, organized crime and gangland home invasions. We are not free of entanglements in international conflicts. We are not even immune to the corruption of our corporations and our government. 

In the twentieth century, millions of Christians, Jews, and political dissidents, educated, indigenous, women and children or those otherwise deemed as undesirable persons were silenced then murdered after their governments disarmed the people. Have we forgotten the rapes and atrocities that swept Africa in the wake of dictatorial oppression? Have we forgotten the ethnic cleansing in Europe? How many children were sold as sex slaves or forced to be soldiers?

Have we forgotten the American genocide, committed against the indigenous tribes of this continent as our nation was being formed? Though the indigenous were armed, the army was better armed and our government was willing to view the indigenous people as an inferior and disposable people. Indigenous lands became government lands by force and corruption. 

Have we forgotten how swiftly the Japanese American community was rounded up and imprisoned in camps during World War II, their property stolen or sold for pennies on the dollar?  'And how many of us have fearfully accepted the post 9/11 heresy of surrendering our rights in exchange for compliance in an intrusive surveillance society? 

The British now blame their own apathy for believing the politicians' promises and allowing gun control. Their freedoms have been surrendered. Their gun crime rate has risen by forty percent. British citizens are now trying to reclaim their rights to self protection. Alternatively, the Swiss government trains and issues guns to Swiss citizens to keep in their homes. Having trained gun users in every home has resulted in such a low rate of gun related crime that it is virtually non-existent. 

The right and responsibility to have guns in the home and know how to use them is well reasoned and designed to assure the personal defense and protection of each individual, the protection of families, our communities and our country. Constitutional checks and balances includes the power of the people to stand against dictatorial governments that would refuse to recognize the natural rights, the God given rights of people, to protect themselves and their families. 

We have a President who repeatedly sanctios drones to kill children in other countries and has now brought those invasive and potentially murderous drones home to fly over our own kids. We have a President who has reversed his promises to defend our rights, time and time again. We have a President who, instead of uniting the country by finding a middle path on which we can find convergence of ideas, has wrongly declared that "most Americans" are in consensus with a path that has been predetermined to eliminate our civil rights and form what amounts to the total compliance society. 

The massacres likely reflect the replacement of personal authority and self control with a mind-numbing consensus definition of conformity which demands compliance and surrenders the definition of the self to the group. When we see photos of the alleged killers, their eyes look vacant, drugged, as if their minds are not their own. Maybe these horrible murders are a reflection of the cognitive dissonance that tries to make sense of World of Warcraft in a fantasy world on one hand, drones that murder real world children on the other and the devaluation of our own personal boundaries. 

As we mourned the deaths of the children at Sandy Hook, parents in China were equally horrified by the killing of children there. In China where gun control is unquestioned, their children died just the same, at the blade of a knife. The instrument of destruction was the intention to kill. The desperation that led to that intention is the only trigger we should question. 

Our intention is to protect ourselves and our freedom. Increasingly militarized police forces do not represent the freedom of the people, and their guns are not a substitute for the trust which the Second Amendment places on each individual to stand in defense of ourselves and our country. Our police and military are forced to be an extension of an executive branch that has declared itself above the system of checks and balances. The founding fathers lived through oppression and tyranny. They would recognize President Obama's opportunistic attempt to disarm free people as an attack on every individual and the nation. 

President Obama does not speak for the "majority of Americans" on the issue of our self-protection and Second Amendment rights. He speaks for the deception of disarmament, the promise that the government will protect us from ourselves. He represents the seeming sophistication of progressive, consensus-driven top down authority that micromanages the implementation of liberty, which is granted to people and to groups. Freedom is not granted nor is it earned. It is simply the wise recognition that we are the only ones who have the right to determine our own thoughts and actions.

President Obama does not honor the wisdom of individual freedoms or rights of the children whose deaths he has sanctioned with drone strikes and he certainly does not honor the memories of the slain children at Sandy Hook by using them as the blood sacrifice to usher in the confiscation of our guns and the further end of our freedom.