Guns and America

I will begin by saying that this is a political blog. I will follow up by saying that I fully and completely support the Second Amendment. I say that unequivocally because many of my friends and relatives who support gun rights will now think I don't believe in them. And all because I think that individual rights in America do not revolve around gun ownership.

Do you think our guns won the Revolution? They did not. French guns and Dutch money won the Revolution. Without that our guns meant little: it's that simple. We would be more British than American today without outside help which, I must add, didn't really care about our gun ownership anyway.

But to the point: our rights do not revolve around gun ownership. Our rights are about the ideas which support them, namely life, liberty, and property (I wish Jefferson had said property and not pursuit of happiness, but that's an idea for another time). Quite bluntly then, there are more, and I will argue more important, issues than gun rights. What's more important is encouraging the belief that rights are based on our overall obligation to do our part to create and manage a just society.

We need to convince people that our rights, all of them, come from God. We need to emphasize that if our rights, all of them, are not protected as a whole then each individual one means less. If we don't believe in free speech or freedom of religion, our insistence on gun rights is superfluous, and even shallow and unworthy of us, because guns can protect even evil, as history clearly shows. Gun ownership and gun use by themselves are moral neutrals.

So then, as a practical matter it is not our guns which keep us free. It is our attitude towards freedom, our patriotism and more importantly our belief in a just God which keep us free. Lose that attitude, or worse, allow the nation as a whole to lose that attitude, and your right to have a gun means zilch. That right will be squashed alongside every other right.