No, Mother Jones, We Gun Owners Won't Come To Save You :: 06/12/2020

There’s been a lot going on over the last couple of weeks, to put it mildly. From protests to riots to even a segment of Seattle supposedly not being part of the United States anymore, let’s just say it’s been eventful. In fact, it’s been so eventful that it’s difficult to keep up.

However, one thing that’s been easy to keep up with is how often the line between “peaceful protestors” and “rioters” kept being missed by the news media. As such, it’s not difficult to imagine actual peaceful protestors being treated like potential rioters by law enforcement. I’m not saying it’s right, but it is what it is.

Amongst all of this, though, it seems that the people at Mother Jones who have spent years deriding gun owners and gun rights, are now looking at us wondering if we’re going to come in and save the poor protestors.

In many ways, the past couple of weeks have been exactly what the National Rifle Association has for years warned its members about: A mass mobilization of militarized police and unknown federal agents in cities across the country to shut down largely peaceful mass demonstrations of people exercising their constitutional rights—and doing so with force. In Washington, DC, for example, the President of the United States had law enforcement fire tear gas and rubber bullets at peaceful protesters for a photo op. In Buffalo, police in riot gear shoved an unarmed 75-year-old man to the ground, sending him to the hospital bleeding from the ears. In Minneapolis, where the protests started after a white police officer killed 46-year-old George Floyd on May 25, there have too many instances to count of police violently attacking peaceful protesters—and slashing people’s tires.

Surely these actions by law enforcement officers are what NRA head Wayne LaPierre warned about when he wrote in a 1995 fundraising letter that a recently signed assault weapons ban would give “jack-booted government thugs more power to take away our constitutional rights, break in our doors, destroy our property, and even injure or kill us,” right? After all, that was the NRA’s biggest fear during the Obama administration, when the group turned the former president into a liberal bogeyman, incessantly fundraising on the notion that his administration would ban all firearms. And even before that, the group capitalized off of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, making misleading claims that the New Orleans mayor had declared martial law and that police were disarming law-abiding gun owners to help crack down on looters. So surely the nation’s oldest gun rights organization, which has a sordid history of stoking fear among its base that Big Government is going to come and take away rights, would have a lot to say about these current instances of police crackdowns on peaceful protesters, right?

Actually, no.

You see, those aren’t peaceful protests. Oh, there might have been some overreaction at a couple that were peaceful, but most of those protests were properly categorized as riots. They destroyed millions in property and inventory from small businesses, many of which were minority-owned. Innocent people were injured or killed by these “peaceful protestors.”

As such, we’re not really inclined to see it as tyranny.

You see, while many of us on this side of the aisle were disgusted by what happened to George Floyd, we also recognize that the protests weren’t an issue until Antifa joined in and turned them into looting and pillaging fest that even the Vikings would have been disgusted by. That’s what sparked the police reaction, and while I do believe they went too far in a number of instances, I get why they did it.

So no. We, the gun owners of this great land, aren’t going to swoop in and save you.

You see, we have guns to protect us and ours from tyranny. That doesn’t include anyone else unless I choose to include them. I damn sure won’t include a bunch of rampaging maniacs who burned down the very communities they claimed they were trying to save.

Yes, we have guns to oppose tyranny, but until we see it, we’re not doing anything. Right now, we’re not seeing any such thing.

Instead, we’re going to point and laugh how the very people who derided us and blamed us for every ill in the world and now seem to think that we should swoop in and save the day for them. They forget that they’ve done everything they could to alienate us. They fed into the tribalism that made it so difficult to even view them as fellow Americans.

Let me lay it out very clearly for Mother Jones. If you have a right to arm yourself, you do not live in a tyrannical state. As bad as some of the images of police have been, a number of them are being punished for their actions, which is further proof you don’t live in a tyrannical state.

If and when you’re barred from buying guns, come and talk to us.

Until then, stop looking at the people you’ve tried to vilify to come to your rescue. We’re not interested.

Tom Knighton is a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger and lifetime shooter. He lives with his family in Southwest Georgia. He's also the host of Unloaded TV on YouTube. https://bearingarms.com/author/tomknighton/

https://bearingarms.com/tom-k/2020/06/11/we-gun-owners-wont-come-save-you/