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What Does It Mean to “Vote Guns?”
Decades and decades ago, to be a gun owner meant you were a hunter. You lived in a rural area and you used your rifle or shotgun to put the wonders of God’s creation onto your dinner table. The guns you used in pursuit of this goal were classics like the Savage 99 or an Ithaca double-barreled shotgun. The prevalence and the simplicity of the guns used in hunting meant that when the Roosevelt administration thought it would be a good idea to severely restrict certain kinds of firearms as part of the National Firearms Act of 1934, gun owners didn’t complain that much because the guns that were being restricted weren’t in common use.
The Gun Control Act of 1968 was passed in the wake of the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., and others, and in an attempt to counter the rising tide of violence in the inner cities. Gun ownership was changing: hunting was still popular, but more and more people were living in urban areas, and gun owners now understood that criminals preferred their victims unarmed. In the decade that followed the Gun Control Act, gun owners suffered through more restrictive changes in local and state gun laws, culminating in Bill Clinton’s Assault Weapons Ban of 1994.
Gun owners, and especially a revitalized and reorganized NRA, had had enough. They mobilized get-out-the-vote efforts and turned up the volume of their lobbying efforts to the point where today, the Democratic nominee for President considers the NRA and Republicans to be her biggest enemies.
That’s right — Hillary Clinton considers her fellow Americans to be her biggest enemy. Let that sink in for a minute.
Hillary does not believe that Americans should own semiautomatic rifles (guns she refers to as “assault rifles”) and has stated that the Australian model of gun control is something “worth looking at.” The Australian model of gun control is simple and easy to understand: Register all the semi-automatic and pump-action rifles and shotguns, along with any and all handguns, and then force gun owners to turn their private property over to the government when the government decides it’s in your best interest to do so.
Why? Because she, and many politicians like her, believe that the right to keep and bear arms is something that only belongs to government. She believes that the Supreme Court got DC v. Heller wrong and that people do not have right of armed self-defense. She believes that protecting families is the function of government, not individuals. We, the people, cannot be trusted with the means to protect ourselves, that’s the responsibility of others.
In Hillary’s world, it takes a village to protect us idiots.
Hillary believes, as do many other politicians on both sides of the aisle, that the basic fundamental right of protecting yourself is not your duty, it’s the government’s duty. This quote from New Jersey Assembly Majority Leader Louis Greenwald (D) is particularly revealing: “Issuing concealed carry permits to every pizza delivery boy in the state won’t make us any safer as a community.”
Speaking as a former pizza delivery boy in one of Phoenix’s roughest neighborhoods, I’d have much preferred to knock on a door in south Phoenix with a 9mm in a holster along with the large Meat Lover’s in my hands and $40 in small bills in my change bag. However, because Arizona did not have the “shall issue” concealed carry legislation that Mr. Greenwald derides, I had to go unarmed and defenseless as I carried out my deliveries. Fortunately, I was not robbed during my brief career in pizza delivery, but others have not been so lucky.
Voting guns means you reject the idea that only the people whom the government trusts should be armed. It means you understand that protecting what matters to you most is your job, not the government’s. It means you understand that no matter how efficient a police state is, bad things are going to happen to good people. Moreover, it means understanding that if a politician does not support that basic right of individual self-defense, they do not support the other individual rights either.
The Second Amendment and the right to keep and bear arms is a litmus test about how a candidate feels about the role government should play in your life. It’s not about “allowing” you to hunt or shoot competitions, it’s about not relying on government to define how you and your loved ones will be protected from the evil that is in this world. Voting guns is voting for your life and the lives of your loved ones.
Vote as if your life depended on it, because maybe it does.
Published in Guns
That bearing arms isn’t limited to strapping a hogleg to your thigh and tying it down. It can also include dragging (or driving in modern times) your cannon around with you.
Eric Hines
To repeat what you quoted:
It’s talking about “to carry arms” and specifically says “fire-arms”.
I think that means you’re not limited to merely wearing arms for style or transport, but you can actually carry them loaded and use them if necessary. This seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with arms that are too large to be carried. Is there a common legal definition under which tanks, bombs, and artillery are firearms?
That’s why I bolded the last clause. It plainly isn’t limited to carrying your weapons about your person.
And yes, from Johnson’s Dictionary cited above, for one: Fire-Arms: Arms which owe their efficacy to fire; guns. Bombs aren’t explicitly included, they’re clearly within the spirit of bearing Arms–which include far more than firearms. Johnson’s Dictionary, again: Arms: Weapons of offense, or armour of defense.
Eric Hines