Liberals: Leave our guns alone, for your own sake
Open letter to all my Liberal friends,
Leave the gun issue alone.
I tell you this for your own sake and there are many reasons why but not the standard ones you always argue about. Also, for my gun owners, calm down. You've won this, and it's an ugly beating. Like Pee Wee Herman would fare against George Foreman.
Basically, for both sides' sake, leave this alone and bump heads over other issues.
You can argue welfare and illegal immigration and taxes and such all day long and nobody gets hurt. This is the one issue that half the country is ready to literally die or kill for. They are emotionally dug in and no amount of discussion is going to change that. They believe that without the Second Amendment, the rest of the Constitution is meaningless. And though I agree with my Liberal friends on many issues, this is one I support without question, just as I support the rest of our Constitution.
But, you scream, officers of the law will show up to disarm these NRA nuts, well, they better be prepared because there will be shootouts. People will die and get wounded, even if the cops prevail. The Martyrdom will fester and embolden even more legal gun owners. About 90 percent of Americans between the Mississippi and the California border will go down in a puddle of blood, even if it's their own.
There is also the practicality of disarming law-abiding citizens in that, there are simply too many weapons, legally registered and otherwise, to take away.
According to a recent global firearm ownership, as reported by the Washington Post, "Americans made up 4 percent of the world's population but owned about 46 percent of the entire global stock of 857 million civilian firearms. U.S. civilians own 393 million guns. That is 3 times as many guns as the armed forces of the largest 25 countries in the world, including the United States.
Further, "American civilians own nearly 100 times as many firearms as the U.S. military and nearly 400 times as many as law enforcement. Americans bought more than 2 million guns in May 2018, alone. In 2017, Americans bought 25.2 million guns, which is 2.5 million more guns than possessed by every law enforcement agency in the world put together. Between 2012 and 2017, U.S. civilians bought 135 million guns, 2 million more guns than the combined stockpile of all the world's armed forces.
Got it? So send the cops. They will probably be outgunned.
Another minor point is that hundreds of elected sheriffs across the country have made it clear that they and their deputies are sworn to defend the Constitution and will not make any attempt to disarm law-abiding citizens. They have made it clear that they do not take orders from governors, county officials or any other government agencies. They are elected by their constituents and enforce the Second Amendment.
If that's not enough, the basic fact is, unlike their counterparts in NAZI Germany and many other fascist regimes, lawfully armed Americans will not simply give their arms to the government no matter what local ordinance is passed.
I know these things because I've talked to these good people most of my life and, frankly, they are not kidding or exaggerating. I know I'm not.
I've been a crusader all my adult life. I've used my role as a journalist to fight the good fight at great financial and emotional damage to my life. But I never fought a battle I was literally willing to die for. There is no law, epithet or transgression I would die for.
Except this one.
I do not even own a gun right now and even when I did, it stayed in a cabinet just in case the boogeyman showed up. But I will say, the one thing that makes (or made) America great was putting its citizens above the government. The biggest part of that guarantee is the right to defend ourselves against our own government.
As with any technology, some bad comes with the good. Cars, gas, electricity, trains, plains, medicine, frying pans...the list goes on forever.
And, the bottom line for me, is that we do not have gun problem in America. We have a social problem. We should really be more concerned about a society in which some people feel so angry, confused, ignored, disenfranchised, belittled, broke, rudderless...with no control of their destinies...that they can shoot down innocent people.
We make our own monsters. Maybe we should concentrate on that instead of blaming law-abiding citizens and inanimate pieces of metal.
