Before anyone protests and hurls, a dangerous projectile in my direction let me add, it is about rights.  That is the bottom line in the wording of the second amendment.  It reads: “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.”  (Emphasis mine).  The right of the people to keep and bear Arms is the guarantee of the second amendment.  It makes no attempt to identify what kind of arms we can keep and bear, but that we have the right to do so. 

When did gun control become politically palatable?  I would, as do many, argue that it got its greatest impetus under Lyndon Banes Johnson in 1968.  The Gun Control Act of 1968 was designed primarily to regulate interstate commerce in firearms transfers.  It was designed to make it illegal to make those transfers except among licensed manufacturers, dealers, and importers.  That has been vastly expanded by today’s gun control advocates.  They are pressing for outright bans on certain firearms and mislabeled them in the process.

The term ‘assault rifle’ is grossly misused and inaccurate in discussing the AR-15.  The AR in that rifle does not mean “Assault Rifle” as one liberal recently insisted in our debates.  It stands for ArmaLite Rifle, manufactured by the Colt Manufacturing Company.  The gun grabbers prefer to call it a military-style assault weapon.  It is not!  One military expert amusingly said: “Soldiers would be laughed off the battlefield if the carried an AR-15 into combat.” 

For all who have the same mentality as Joe Biden or Michael Bloomberg, the AR-15 is a semi-automatic rifle.  It requires a trigger pull for each round fired.  I know that is shocking to Mr. Bloomberg who thinks the AR is a fully automatic firearm, unlike the semi-automatic pistols he refers to in his rants about the virtues and need of gun control and bans of the AR-15 and AK-47 as well as other firearms. 

The more one researches the factual data compiled by the FBI, ATF, and other law enforcement agencies the more we discover the fallacy of the Left’s arguments.  The idea that some of the leading Democrats have advanced that if we ban certain firearms the criminals will also turn in their weapons is beyond laughable it is frightening.  What part of ‘criminal’ do they not understand?  In some of the more recent statistics regarding firearm induced homicides, the FBI and other agencies’ own data debunks the gun control argument.

Regarding murder victims by firearms, the data from 2014 to 2018 indicates that only 297 of the 14,123 homicides were committed by criminals using a rifle.  That would be roughly 2%.  That is lower than the 1,515 lives taken by someone using a knife or about 11% of the murders.  Why is there no clamor to ban knives but howls by the Left to bank those evil-looking firearms they call military assault weapons?  How about the juicy tidbit in the data that there were 463 people killed by someone using a hammer, club or some other bludgeoning instrument?  Add to that list the 672 killed by someone using their hand, foot or fist and the fact that handguns accounted for 6,603 murders.  Why is the rifle the target?

The fallacious argument that guns are too readily accessible and available denies the historical and empirical evidence that guns were more readily available in earlier years. In my lifetime, you could order a gun from a Sears catalog or walk into any hardware store or pawn shop and buy one with no background check.  When you consider those days and compare the numbers of gun violence and mass murders to the more recent highly regulated gun availability times you find that there were fewer incidents then than now.  What changed?  Not the guns but the hearts and minds of people.  Much of that change has been produced via our educational system, Hollywood, and politicians.

Those who were alive during my teen years would be alarmed at the behavior of today.  They would find it almost impossible to believe that some of our largest cities now must hire police officers and security guards to police their schools.  In my teen years, you frequently saw a gun rack in a pick-up truck with a rifle hanging on it visibly.  We did not fear mass shootings unlike those of today when guns are far more highly regulated and more difficult to obtain.

The motives of the nefarious gun control advocates, not the rank in file citizen who has been inebriated by the Kool-Aid rhetoric and diatribe they have been fed, is not public safety.  It is about disarming American citizens.  Why would they want to achieve that goal?  They know that their actions would do little to nothing to reduce the homicide rates in America.  Why would they push for something they know will not make people safer?  That, I can only speculate about, but I believe it is far more sinister and diabolical than most are willing to consider.

If we look no farther than our Southern neighbors in Venezuela, we find some alarming facts.  The Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro banned private gun ownership in 2012.  That action stripped the citizens of that nation of the ability to protect themselves from both criminals and government troops who preyed upon them.  In Cuba, Fidel Castro said: “Armas Para Que?” or “Guns, for what?”  The Cubans quickly found out what and it was not pretty.  

History reveals that in 1938, Hitler signed a new Gun Control Act and Jews were banned from working in firearms plants.  The .22 caliber hollow-point ammunition was banned. We know the result of Hitler’s Gun Ban and the tyrannical despotism of his regime as well as the Holocaust.  The German Weimar Republic decreed gun registration in 1931 but warned that those records must not fall into the hands of radical elements.  The National Socialist Party led by Adolf Hitler ascended to power in 1933 and used those records to disarm his political opponents and rendered them powerless to resist.

Gun Control turns law-abiding citizens into disarmed subjects and relegates us powerless to defend ourselves against criminals or a rogue tyrannical government.  That is precisely what the Founding Fathers insisted must not be allowed to happen.  Thus, we have the second amendment and must never relinquish our right to “keep and bear arms”.  They understood that if the citizenry was armed and capable of defending itself it would be a permanent deterrent to both crime and governmental tyranny. 

I am pro the Second Amendment and will never willingly relinquish my God-given Inalienable Right to “keep and bear arms.”  I believe that certain inalienable rights come from God not the government and we all have the right to “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”  We have the right to protect our property and person, which is part of the right to life and liberty and required if we are to be allowed to pursue happiness.

God bless you and God bless America!