 With a socialist and would-be totalitarian in the White House and a Democrat majority in Congress, the forces of popular culture are marshaling, eager to accomplish several long-term socio-political goals that now appear to be within their reach. Among these goals are the restriction and elimination of technology that makes it easier for those Americans who dissent to do so. This includes the silencing of "right-wing talk radio" by infringing on free speech through the establishment of the euphemistically named "fairness doctrine," not to mention various schemes to restrict, monitor, or otherwise control the Internet (up to and including shutting it down completely at times).
It is not the technology of free speech, however, that concerns American leftists most. No, liberals reserve for their staunchest contempt the ownership of firearms by American citizens. They pour their derision and their outrage on the right to self-defense guaranteed you by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. They howl in disbelief when the Supreme Court holds that this right, like the other rights in the Bill of Rights, is an individual one.
Most importantly, leftists fight their insidious battle to erode your constitutionally protected rights by poisoning popular culture against you, shifting the culture incrementally so that support for civil rights gradually dies. In the case of firearms technology, the liberals seek to redefine this technology as unknowable, unmanageable and inherently unsafe. They wish to create in the minds of our citizens the attitude and the presumption that firearms technology is simply too darkly magical, too deadly, for the average citizen, for mere mortals, to possess or to wield. In this way, they create ever-greater support for their extra-constitutional attempts to apply "reasonable gun control" – leftist code for gradual firearms registration and confiscation.
Legendary firearms instructor and pundit Jeff Cooper put it best. "In my opinion," he said, "neither money nor greed ... is the root of all evil. The root of all evil is envy. The non-coper hates the coper, and thus the non-shooter hates the shooter. I see no other explanation for the pointless and irrational activism of the gun grabbers on the political scene. They know that their machinations can have no effect upon crime. Guns have no effect upon crime, but they do make all men equal, as the saying goes. This puts the coper on top, and infuriates the non-coper." This is the root of all liberal hatred for firearms. Liberals despise the idea that this technology enables the individual to stand up for and defend himself and his family. They loathe the notion that with a gun, a man is far stronger than a man without – and thus a much larger threat, a much louder dissenting voice, where their invasive, big-government, totalitarian, nanny-state power grabs are concerned.
Also significantly, the average gun-hating liberal lives his life in ignorance. Leftist gun-grabbers possess almost no knowledge concerning the realities of the technology they so hate and fear. Their ideas about guns are informed almost completely by myth, misinformation and oft-repeated but falsified or flawed "studies" that purport to "prove" their worldview. They repeat, breathlessly and with wide-eyed credulity, the propaganda fed them by alarmist activist groups like the Violence Policy Center and Sarah Brady's renamed Center to Prevent Gun Violence (previously much more aptly named for Brady's desire to ban handguns). When not lying outright, gun-grabbers are furthering the myths their ilk have created and spread about the greatly terrible and unknowable technology of firearms. The goal is to convince you – or, more accurately and importantly, your children – that a private citizen simply shouldn't own a firearm because it is too dangerous and of no real benefit. The war for your children's hearts and minds is actively being waged in our media.
ABC, for example, produced the "20/20" piece "If I Only Had a Gun," the purpose of which is to establish, quite falsely, that firearms are next to useless for self-defense and that having a gun, well, simply won't help you if someone else has a gun. Not to be outdone, apoplectic reporters across the country have been covering the boom in gun sales, beside themselves that there exist in this country Americans who actually believe they have a right to self-defense. Why, guns kill people, the "journalists" tell us. If you leave firearms lying around in a pile on the coffee table, passing 6-year-old children will see the guns and want to play with them ... and nothing will stop them! The horror!
A working knowledge of firearms technology and its application quickly dispels, utterly and with finality, all of this myth and misinformation. I've had the privilege of extensive force-on-force firearms training. It's hard work, but not impossibly so. Civilian shooters, in fact, are actually much more extensively trained than are members of law enforcement, on average, even though cops often are held up by liberals as the only people with the training and discipline required to wield a gun. The typical police officer is not a "gun person" and tends to treat that weapon like a cell phone – a tool carried on the job, for which he or she has no special affection. Guns in the hands of citizens, meanwhile, benefit everyone. There isn't a single liberal anti-gun talking point that hasn't been refuted.
Guns are an old, relatively simple technology. One of the most popular handguns on the market was designed almost a hundred years ago. What has not changed in the last century – or the last two – is that we need these "liberty teeth" now more than ever. We need the technology of firearms because it secures freedom and defends your family. No matter how much Obama and his cronies try to convince you otherwise, firearms technology is not unknowable, it is not unsafe, and it is not unmanageable by private citizens. Firearms technology and the Second Amendment are the linchpin holding our Constitution together. If we remove either out of fear or ignorance, everything falls apart.
President Barack Obama states on the www.whitehouse.org website that he wants to reinstitute the Assault Weapons Ban, which does not ban true assault weapons:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/agenda/urban_policy/
From the White House Urban Policy:
Obama and Biden also favor common sense measures that respect the Second Amendment rights of gun owners, while keeping guns away from children and from criminals. They support closing the gun show loophole and making guns in this country childproof. They also support making the expired federal Assault Weapons Ban permanent.
Note: by definition, an Assault Weapon must be fully automatic. Those are already very illegal.
Phil Elmore is a freelance author, technical writer and publisher of the self-defense e-zine The Martialist (themartialist.com).
Assault Weapon, Defined: The term assault weapon might be derived from confusion with the term assault rifle, itself a translation of the German word Sturmgewehr, literally "storm-rifle". There is no technical military definition of an assault weapon, but in a general sense, the term assault weapon can refer to a military weapon used to aid in military assault operations, that is, attacking a fortified position (as referenced in multiple uses in military terminology below). Legislators and political lobbyists have adopted the term to refer to specific semi-automatic firearms and other firearms listed by specific characteristics for statutory purposes. The legislative usage follows usage by political groups seeking to limit the individual's right to keep and bear arms, who have sought to extend the meaning to include a semi-automatic firearm that is similar in name or appearance to a fully automatic firearm or military weapon. Note that this term is not synonymous with assault rifle, which has an established technical definition.
Assault Rifle: An assault rifle is a rifle designed for combat, with selective fire (capable of shooting in both fully automatic and semi automatic modes). Assault rifles are the standard infantry weapons in most modern armies, having largely superseded or supplemented larger and more powerful battle rifles such as the M14, FN FAL and the Heckler & Koch G3. Examples of assault rifles include the AK-47, the M16 and the Steyr AUG.
A current Swiss Rifle issued to every able-bodied man:
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