A license to buy firearms is a sure sign of government mistrust
Charley Reese

Published in The Orlando Sentinel on February 06, 2000
Columnist

If you have to obtain a government license to exercise a right , it is not a
right.

That’s all that really needs to be said about President Clinton’s desire to
require that people obtain a license before purchasing a firearm. Unlike
driving a car, the right of the people to keep and bear arms is part of the
Bill of Rights. That Second Amendment states that Congress shall not
infringe the people’s right to keep and bear arms.

Don’t buy that malarkey that the Second Amendment applies to states or to
militias but does not guarantee an individual right. A huge majority of
legal scholars today agree that it does apply to individuals.

If the government is going to license purchasers of arms, then it should
also license the right to speech, to assembly, to religious freedom, to
trial by jury. There is no debate that unlicensed journalists through the
years have caused far more damage to the republic than firearms.

Of course if people are ignorant of their rights, ignorant of their
Constitution and the history of its writing and ratification, then it’s easy
for demagogues to take their rights away from them. Even in the time of
Franklin Roosevelt, if any politician had suggested Americans had to obtain
a license to buy an ordinary firearm, there would have been a national
uproar. Decades of poor education, however, took its toll.

It should be clear to any thinker what these mugs are up to. Crime and the
homicide rate have been going down steadily as prisons were filled up. Keep
criminals off the streets and you get less crime. The availability of
firearms has nothing to do with it.

The belief that an inanimate object, in this case a firearm, will cause an
otherwise honest and normal person to commit murder is the intellectual
equivalent of believing that black cats and broken mirrors cause bad luck.
It ill becomes a nation that purports to be a leader in technology and
science.

So if it’s not crime, what is the game? Well, it’s as old as the republic.
Long ago Thomas Jefferson said that no matter what they call themselves and
no matter what age they live in, people always divide themselves into two
groups — those who love and trust the people and those who fear and hate
them. Elitists fear the American people. They want them disarmed.

But there is definitely a cause-and-effect relationship between armed
citizens and freedoms. For the life of me, I cannot understand why so many
Jewish organizations oppose private ownership of firearms. I can only
conclude that they learned nothing from the Holocaust. Do they think that
the Warsaw Ghetto uprising was carried out by licensed firearms? The 1968
Gun Control Act is virtually word for word a copy of the Nazi gun-control
act that Adolf Hitler hailed as a great triumph.

Yes, I know, Americans believe that nothing bad can ever happen in the good
old U.S.A. I don’t know where they get that idea. We exterminated Indians.
We enslaved Africans. We killed 600,000 of each other. We periodically have
riots, during which the police make themselves scarce and people have to
defend their lives and property with private arms.

The truth is nobody can predict the future. It may be hunky-dory,
peachy-creamy. It may be hell. We could have a military coup. We might elect
ourselves a dictator. We may become involved in a war in which foreign
troops are fighting on our soil. The future is unknowable.

What is knowable is that a free people must have the right to arms and must
recognize the difference between rights and privileges. What is knowable is
that a government that does not trust the people cannot be trusted by the
people.

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When women are disarmed, a rapist will never hear – Stop or I’ll shoot!
Armed Citizens SAVE Lives! http://www.wagc.com

Gun Control: The theory that a woman found dead in an alley, raped and
strangled with her panty hose, is somehow morally superior to a
woman explaining to police how her attacker got that fatal bullet wound.

“Quemadmoeum gladis nemeinum occidit, occidentis telum est” (“A sword is
never a killer, it’s a tool in the killer’s hands”) Lucius Annaes Seneca
“the younger” ca. (4 BC – 65 AD)