Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
The Bill of Rights shouldn’t really leave a lot of room for debate. People have a right to assemble, to voice their opinions, to be protected from search without reason, and to keep and bear arms, among other things. This is quite plainly spelled out in the first ten amendments. Yet, it’s often a topic of debate regardless.
More of then than not, especially with regard to guns, that debate tends to fall along partisan lines.
Respect for the Second Amendment should not be a partisan issue. The vast majority of Americans understand this fact. After all, the Constitution is not a partisan document.
Before the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms in District of Columbia v. Heller, a February 2008 Gallup poll found that 73 percent of Americans possessed this understanding of the Constitution while a mere 20 percent had the incorrect collective-right interpretation. This wide-ranging respect for the Second Amendment holds. According to a November 2019 Rasmussen poll, a mere 24 percent support repealing the Second Amendment.
With a broad bipartisan majority in favor of preserving the Second Amendment, support for the right to keep and bear arms need not break down along party lines. However, the leaders and donor class of the national Democratic Party are intent on making it that way.
Consider the Draft 2020 Democratic Party Platform. The document contains a gun-control plank that is replete with many of the worst gun controls put forward by the party’s most anti-gun politicians.
The platform declares that the party will criminalize the private transfer of firearms by requiring every firearm transaction to take place pursuant to a government background check. The platform expresses support for the elimination of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System’s three-day safety-valve provision, which permits a firearm transfer to proceed three days after a NICS check has been initiated if the FBI has not determined the transferee to be prohibited from possessing firearms. This vital provision ensures that the federal government cannot delay lawful gun transfers indefinitely and ensures that firearms transfers can take place even if the NICS system is overwhelmed. Further, the platform calls for gun owner licensing.
Taken together, these measures would undo the Second Amendment right by turning it into a privilege bestowed by government—something on which no one attempting to exercise a Constitutional right should be forced to rely.
That’s true, it does.
What’s more, though, are that these very same people despise President Donald Trump and the police. They don’t trust either and outright vilify both. Yet they’d leave control of America’s weapons in these very same hands.
Honestly, it doesn’t make any sense.
They want to severely curtail the private ownership of firearms, and yet they want to make sure the people they despise are the ones with the easiest access to firearms. It’s baffling.
At the end of the day, no one should completely trust any governmental entity ever. Especially when it comes to something so fundamental as our right to keep and bear arms.
For almost 250 years, the Second Amendment has been there as a warning for any potential tyrant. They’ve all known that if they push it too far, there will be armed citizens ready to fight back. Frankly, there are times in the past when that probably should have been triggered, but times were different then. People weren’t that upset about what happened, which is a shame.
But today, I’m not ready to trust any government with my rights. No one should, especially when you think the sitting president is a tyrant and that law enforcement are borderline criminals. If you hold those positions, you should probably also hold on tightly to your guns, just like we do.
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/2020/09/23/2a-support-shouldnt-be-partisan-but-it-is/