“The advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation … forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.” —James Madison (1788)

I just returned from a long weekend away — a fitting break from my Liberty book project last week — to revisit the intellectual repositories of the three most influential men in the history of Liberty v. tyranny — the American triumvirate, Washington, Madison and Jefferson.

Traveling with my wife, Ann, our first stop was Charlottesville, Virginia, where protesters are still endeavoring to tear down historic war monuments. Last year, privileged students at the University of Virginia displayed their monumental ignorance by desecrating and shrouding a statue of UVA’s founder, Thomas Jefferson, at the university’s famous Rotunda.

That notwithstanding, our return to Jefferson’s Monticello was, as always, inspiring.

Next, we traveled north to James Madison’s Montpelier, an equally inspiring historical visit.

From there it was, of course, on to the Mount Vernon home and library of George Washington. In addition to a docent tour with an outstanding historian, we were also given access to Washington’s archive collection, and the curator showed us the surveying compass my ancestor produced in 1795 for Washington as a gift for his nephew. (Some of you may recall that Washington was a surveyor prior to becoming The Indispensable Man.)

Our Saturday destination was Marine Corps Base Quantico, where our son and 63 other young Marines graduated from the Infantry Officer School — the first graduation I have attended anywhere, which occurred before dawn!

After celebrating these young men, we met with other friends and headed for the swamp — Washington, DC.

I know you will be SHOCKED to learn that we were annually not going there to join the hordes of adolescents (of all ages) gathered on the Mall, pleading for the incremental revocation of the “palladium of the Liberties of the republic,” our nation’s Second Amendment.

It’s no small irony that our destination was actually the NRA’s National Firearms Museum, where we spent the afternoon with its senior curator and historian, for a review of an amazing collection of the weapons that have aided in the defense of Liberty, foreign and domestic. I figured it was the most antithetical thing we could do in DC in contrast to the anti-2A protests. We were amused at the greeting we received from a few aging hippies holding “shame” placards across the street from NRA headquarters.

So, from Jefferson, Madison and Washington to the tyranny of the marching mall masses in DC.

Allow me to offer a few observations about the so-called “March for Our Lives” and all the “little Barack” brown shirts in attendance there, and in a few other urban centers.

First, as for those leftists who pretend that repeal of the Second Amendment is not their objective — that they’re only advocating for “commonsense gun safety legislation,” that pretense was dealt a blow this week. The New York Times published this blunt argument for repeal from former Supreme Court Associate Justice John Paul Stevens, a Gerald Ford appointee who finally retired from the bench in 2010. (Memo to Ginsburg…)

According to Stevens’ badly flawed logic, “Demonstrators should seek more effective and more lasting reform. They should demand a repeal of the Second Amendment. … [It] is a relic of the 18th century. … A constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple. … [It] would move Saturday’s marchers closer to their objective than any other possible reform.”

Is that clear enough? Stevens effectively betrayed the Left’s hand by revealing the gun confiscators real legislative goals. In doing so, he also tipped the Leftmedia’s hand regarding their aligned objectives.

The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake lamented, “Rarely do we see such an unhelpful, untimely and fanciful idea as the one put forward by retired Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens. … The move might as well be considered an in-kind contribution to the National Rifle Association, to Republicans’ efforts to keep the House and Senate in 2018, and to President Trump’s 2020 reelection bid. In one fell swoop, Stevens has lent credence to the talking point that the left really just wants to get rid of gun ownership and reasserted the need for gun-rights supporters to prevent his ilk from ever being appointed again (with the most obvious answer being: Vote Republican).”

In other words, the Left’s “boiled frog” approach to repealing the Second Amendment is undermined when a despotic judicial supremacist leapfrogs over that ruse and reveals the ultimate objective — an especially terrible thing to do in a midterm election year.

Second, let’s consider who are the actual “survivors” of the tragic Parkland school attack versus those who have now become enthusiastic political pawns for the Left.

When I think of “survivors,” what comes to mind would be the people who exited the twin 110-story World Trade Center towers on 9/11 before they collapse, or the 23 individuals who survived after the collapse.

In the Parkland context, as with other rare mass acts of violence, a survivor would be someone who was wounded and did not die. Perhaps that word could be extended to those who were in the immediate line of fire but escaped injury, as was the case with many people in Las Vegas last year.

But the threat at Parkland was terminated, and the hundreds of students who were on the Parkland campus that day are not “survivors” by virtue of being on campus, as the Demo-gogue Left and their sympathetic Leftmedia propagandists insist. That moniker is purely for emotive optics and political theater.

In keeping with that fake narrative, The Washington Post claims there are now 187,000 survivors of sociopathic attacks on schools — the three most referenced of those being Columbine in Colorado (1999), Sandy Hook in Connecticut (2012) and Stoneman Douglas in Florida this year.

That phony assessment degrades the struggle of those who are actual survivors of such tragedies.

Of course, most of the students at these schools experienced differing degrees of trauma during those terrible moments, but their distress has been amplified by classifying them as “survivors.” As intended, that has generated a lot of consternation among parents and kids nationwide, but in reality, there is not an epidemic of school shootings across our nation.

Yes, the parents of young people on the few school campuses where attacks have occurred were rightfully worried about their children, as I would have been. But being on or near a campus during an assault on other students doesn’t make one a “survivor” — except for political expedience.

Third, regarding the number of Mall marchers, while initial media reports on attendance were based on event-organizer estimates of 800,000, in fact, according to CBS and other networks, there were, at most, only 25% of that number. That turnout is astoundingly low given that 91% of DC’s voters cast ballots for Hillary Clinton and that the surrounding Virginia and Maryland suburbs are infested with statist bureaucrats.

As for those who were in attendance, our friends at The Daily Signal offered a few takeaways from ground zero, as did The Washington Free Beacon — if you are interested.

Suffice it to say that many of the marchers, however well-intentioned, exuded a sense of moral panic wrapped in their abject ignorance of the Second Amendment that, ironically, is our Republic’s foundational assurance of their First Amendment rights to march and protest. But they won’t recognize that until those liberties are lost — should those of us who steadfastly defend our liberties, and their own, fail to do so.

Fourth, the leftists at the helm of the Democrat Party have based their future political fortunes and statist objectives on the propagation of such ignorance, which they have institutionalized in government schools — the pool from whence came many of Saturday’s march attendees.

Thomas Jefferson wrote, “Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day.”

But as socialist protagonist Vladimir Lenin declared, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” For decades, the Left has been infusing America’s young minds with statist indoctrination, preparing them to sow those seeds.

The unifying characteristic of these uninformed leftist lemmings is that they have a pathological dependence for statism and its false promise of nanny-state security.

Essentially, they fear Liberty and loathe those who defend it. And rich suburban liberals really fear grassroots gun-owning Americans. The notion that the Second Amendment provides a check on the usurpations of individual rights is anathema to them, as is the thought that the government on which they depend might devolve into tyranny.

And finally, let’s review the most pertinent facts about violence in America:

1. If you don’t have a violent criminal record, and/or are not associated with the violent thug, drug or gang subcultures, who commit the vast majority of crimes in America, your chances of being shot or killed by an assailant with a gun are almost as low as murder rates in Western Europe where gun ownership is outlawed. Oh, and in Switzerland, which has a higher concentration of “assault weapons” per capita than any nation in the world, the murder rate is one of the lowest in the world.

2. If you’re not involved in criminal activity, your statistical probability of being killed by a drunk driver is much higher than being murdered. (Oddly, no one is organizing marches to ban alcohol or automobiles.)

3. Despite all the “assault weapon” hysterics, according to the FBI’s latest annual crime statistics, rifles were used in 374 homicides, while knives were used in 1,604 homicides. But the rare high-profile attack at a school by a sociopath with a gun is a much more politically attractive anti-2A rallying point than gang-bangers murdering other gang-bangers in our inner cities.

4. In their zeal for deconstruction and repeal of the Second Amendment, Democrat Party leftists don’t want to discuss is that the deadliest ground in America are inner cities – those urban poverty centers which are Democrat-controlled strongholds, and have been for generations. The vast majority of those murders are black-on-black or black-on-hispanic. According to the latest FBI statistics, there are 46 people murdered in the U.S. every day – though it is notable that since Trump’s election, the murder rate is declining.

5. Violence is a cultural problem. “Gun control” is not the solution for ending systemic violence, but it most assuredly advances the Left’s insatiable quest for power and control. In fact, many urban Democrats have become gun owners, and an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey found that Americans have an increasingly favorable view toward legal firearms for self-defense.

Until Democrats join Republicans in a unified effort to reverse the policies that have devastated our families and communities, violence will continue to rule the day. Violence in America is the direct result of failed statist policies, the effluent of their so-called centralized social programs, which have enslaved generations of poor Americans on urban poverty plantations in every major city nationwide.

Fact is, Democrats don’t care about children unless they can use their caskets as political props. If they did care about children, they wouldn’t promote the culture of death that each day kills 2,446 of the most vulnerable among us before birth.

It’s tragically evident that our nation has reached the pinnacle of privilege and complacent ignorance when some of its citizens demand that the Constitutional right which assures all others, be revoked.

When debating the Second Amendment, there are three points that are often neglected.

First, possession of firearms is a deterrent against countless millions of crimes, as made clear in studies of convicted felons, who tell researchers that they choose victims who are least likely to be able to defend themselves. Second, there are more than a million crimes thwarted every year by those who defend themselves with a firearm.

And finally, the Second Amendment is, first and foremost, about protection of our Constitution and the Liberty it enshrines. As I have oft noted, handguns are for personal and home defense. But semi-automatic rifles, mislabeled by Democrats and their Leftmedia propagandists as “assault rifles,” are for protection of those who would infringe on the “right of the people to keep and bear arms.” If you find that notion unsettling, then you need to learn more about the history the constant assault of statist tyranny on Liberty.

And for the record, despite claims to the contrary, banning the sale of those guns has had dubious results in terms of reducing the rare but sensational use of such firearms by mass murderers.

“The ultimate authority … resides in the people alone. [T]he advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation … forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any…” –James Madison (1788)

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NOTES:

The First Civil Right is To Keep and Bear Arms. It is, as James Madison’s Supreme Court Justice, Joseph Story, rightly defined it, “the palladium of the liberties of the republic,” the ultimate assurance of all other rights.

What follows are a few key notes that all defenders of American Liberty and its foundational guarantor, the Second Amendment, should be prepared to articulate, in order to refute the rhetorical gun control agenda disinformation propagated by Democrats and their Leftmedia publicists.

While some of this data is based on annual findings, most of that data does not vary significantly year over year.

FOOTNOTE 1: Regarding so-called “gun violence,” there were approximately 19,600 homicides involving firearms in the U.S. in the latest year of record, which you can view state by state. Fortunately, there are indications that homicides may be declining after the significant surge of violence unleashed by Biden and his Democrat agitators in 2020. The 2022 homicide rate was 30% higher than in 2019.

The Demos ubiquitously and falsely label the generational murderous contagion they have seeded as “gun violence,” and they focus exclusively on the infrequent high-profile “mass shootings,” which account for only a tiny fraction of all homicides. More than 99% of murders in the U.S. are not the result of mass attacks. (Notably, guns don’t commit violence, thugs and sociopaths commit violence.) The oft-cited Gun Violence Archive defines a “mass shooting” as any incident that involves a “minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed.” The vast majority of those violent attacks are the result of drug and gang violence committed in Democrat-controlled urban centers.

In a country and culture that ignores the rising generation of sociopathic murderers — mostly thugs in violent urban centers who are saturated with cultural violence and indoctrinated with mass-media glorification of violence — it is fortunate that the incidence of mass murder is not 10 times higher. Arguably, the only thing keeping that number from being higher is that 125 million Americans are legal and responsible gun owners.

Democrats don’t focus on the vast majority of murders, particularly the epidemic of black-on-black murders on their decaying urban poverty plantations, because they want to avoid the “inconvenient truth” about race and violence, which is the direct result of failed Democrat social programs. In fact, black people (13% of the population), are 12 times more likely to be murdered, per capita, than white people (62% of the population).

That gross racial disparity in murder rates isn’t useful for the gun control narrative Democrats invoke to evoke emotional reaction from mostly wealthy white suburban women, who form the Demos’ largest voter constituency.

FOOTNOTE 2: Regarding so-called “mass shootings,” for the record, murders of multiple people by one assailant are very rare in our nation of 335 million people. Less than 1% of all murders nationwide are classified as “mass shootings” and high-profile attacks, such as the 2017 mass murder in Las Vegas, are extremely rare.

The FBI defines “active shooter incidents” as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” In 2022, the FBI reported 50 incidents resulting in 313 casualties (100 killed and 213 wounded). That number was up significantly from 2020 when the FBI reported 40 incidents resulting in 164 casualties (38 killed and 126 wounded).

A broader record of “mass shooting” data is maintained by the Associated Press and Northeastern University, which uses the Department of Justice definition of mass public shooting: “A multiple homicide incident in which four or more victims are murdered with firearms.” These numbers fluctuate significantly year over year, and they range between 20 and 40 incidents. But notably, over the last 30 years, the number of black mass assailants is almost as high as the number of white assailants.

Democrats focus on these rare instances of multiple murders because these high-profile tragedies are political fodder to foment fear — most notably when they can toss out their oft-repeated but erroneous claim that “gun violence is the leading cause of death for children.” If by “children” they mean gang and drug-associated murders of those primarily between the ages of 16 and 21, then yes. Democrats are experts at fomenting fear and division.

The fear and angst Demos intentionally propagate are taking a toll on Americans’ mental health. Psychological researcher Dr. Riana Elyse Anderson observes: “Watching it time and time again on your phone or on the headlines can really impact you in ways that I don’t think we knew before to be as impactful. It’s so ‘in our face’ all the time and we have access to so much footage, so many pictures, so many videos, so many accounts that we’re ingesting it in ways that’s really unhealthy for us.” The result for many mothers, in particular, is an irrational fear that their children will be shot. That is precisely the fabricated fear Democrats want to perpetuate, especially among their female constituents, in order to advance their gun control agenda.

But here is a fact Democrats and their mainstream media platforms will not tell you about those rare high-profile shootings on school campuses: Young people between the ages of 6 and 22 are far safer on a campus than they are off campus.

(Notably, the deadliest school assault in American history did not involve a firearm. A sociopathic school board member in Bath, Michigan detonated a bomb outside an elementary school, murdering 38 children and six adults.)

FOOTNOTE 3: Regarding what Democrats and their Leftmedia publicists ubiquitously and falsely label “assault weapons,” an actual assault weapon, commonly known as a “machine gun,” is select-fire and can rapidly cycle rounds in fully automatic sequence. Very few select-fire weapons are in civilian hands, and only then subject to stringent licensing requirements.

In fact, civilian firearms in common use, like the AR-15 and other semiautomatic sporting and hunting rifles, are not “assault rifles.”

For much the same reason the Demo/Media talkingheads focus only on rare high-profile “mass shootings” to generate fear and angst, they also call semi-automatic rifles sometimes used in those attacks, “assault weapons.” Predictably, Demos then call for what Hillary Clinton framed decades ago as “common sense gun laws,” inevitably followed by calls for an “assault weapons ban.”

In 1994, Bill Clinton banned the sale of “military-style assault weapons,” but that ban was not renewed 10 years later because it was determined the ban had no effect on crime reduction. According to Rand Research, “We found no qualifying studies showing that bans on the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines decreased any of the eight outcomes we investigated.”

The fact is, rifles and shotguns combined are used in less than 3% of all homicides, but Democrats never let facts get in the way of their “assault weapon ban” political agenda.

Both the Clintons were prolific prevaricators, masterful obfuscators of the truth. And Joe Biden has followed their template, establishing himself as the standard bearer of the “lying dog-faced pony soldier” cavalry.

FOOTNOTE 4: Regarding firearms and violent crime, researcher John Lott reports, “Over 92% of violent crimes in America do not involve firearms.” Again, the only thing keeping that number from being much higher is that 125 million Americans are legal and responsible gun owners.

FOOTNOTE 5: Regarding firearms and suicide, almost 60% of all deaths involving firearms are suicide, most also involving drug or alcohol abuse. But the big numbers promoted in “gun violence” reports do not distinguish between murder and suicide, thus implying that homicide rates are much higher. And does this mean that Demo support for assisted suicide is in conflict with their support for gun control?

FOOTNOTE 6: Regarding alcohol versus firearm deaths, if Democrats are serious about protecting Americans, they should outlaw alcohol. Alcohol abuse is far more deadly than firearm abuse. More than 178,000 people died from alcohol abuse last year — that’s NINE times the number of homicides associated with firearms. Drunk drivers are responsible for 37 deaths per day. And notably, it is estimated that alcohol is a key factor in at least 30% of homicides where the assailant uses a firearm. (Include drug dealing or use as a factor and that number jumps to about 60%.)

Of course, the vast majority of alcohol users possess and use it legally and responsibly. Likewise, the vast majority of firearm owners possess and use them legally and responsibly. Enacting a prohibition on firearms is tantamount to enacting a prohibition on alcohol. In both cases, only law-abiding users obey the laws.

BOTTOM LINE: Let me restate this point — only law-abiding citizens abide by the law. Only outlaws perpetrate acts of violence. Making good people helpless won’t make bad people harmless.

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis
Pro Deo et Libertate — 1776

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