Banning The Tool Despite The User – It should come at no surprise that we are very 2A friendly with most of us here at JM4 not being in support of any restrictions to the lawful ownership of anything you can afford. I personally go so far as if you want a tank, and can afford one, have at it brother. However, despite what is likely to be a favorable Supreme Court case coming up, the overall political atmosphere is not friendly to gun owners, with talks of banning modern sporting rifles such as the AR-15, magazine limits, and banning body armor for civilian use. I am going to ask you to put on your tin foil hat for a minute and ask yourself….why?
The founders of the Nation were a group of very smart individuals and knew that a tyrannical government could exist only in a country where the citizenry was unable to overthrow the government should they no longer serve the people. Many Constitutional scholars have stated that the reason the right to bear arms was right after freedom of speech and assembly was to force the government to listen to the grievances of the people, and back it up with musket balls. It is also important to remember that those muskets were state of the art weaponry at the time, and some American rifles were better than what the Constitutional Army had available to them at the time. So it continued up until the 1930s when a rash of gang violence (caused by the governments unpopular prohibition on alcohol, which created a violent underground market….not like that might happen again), when the banning of fully automatic weapons without excessive taxations.
What is sad is organizations designed to defend our rights, such as the National Rifle Association, helped draft and pass the 1934 National Firearms Act and 1938 Gun Control Acts. Notice now, that these became weapons of criminals and the military only, leaving the average citizen unable to match the capabilities as the government. This has continued into 1968 further restricting the ownership of firearms, mostly in response to the Black Panthers carrying weapons. It wasn’t until one of their own was raided that the NRA became the “not from my cold dead hands organization”.
So why is that history important? Well, if you look at history enough you will see parallels if not exact replicas of what are happening now to what has happened to other nations in the past. In 1935, there is a questionable quote from Hitler about how his streets were safer due to gun regulations (I don’t quote it because authenticity is hard to confirm), but he did three years later make laws banning all Jews from owning firearms, as well as other minorities. Joseph Stalin killed in upwards of 50 million of his own people, none of them could resist because firearms ownership was forbidden.
Similar things happened in Korea, China, Cambodia and other countries where if you had arms to defend yourself and organize, you could have kept a government in check, however when the rights were lost, they never came back.
So, what can we infer from the current governmental calls for banning these items? What could possibly be the rational to ban AR-15s, one of the most popular rifles in the US and used in the least amount of crime, other than its too militaristic for those with weak constitutions or ill intent? Why target body armor for civilian use, when we know that behind the military the US citizen owns the next largest amount of body armor in the world if there was not concern that it would make it harder for those attacking the citizen to kill them? I am not suggesting that is the plan, but it does make one question the rational to why would you want to simultaneously ban the tool and the protection against it, unless it is to leave the citizen unable to fight or protect themselves? Looking to the past just makes me wonder more.
Author: Ian Bolser