Gun grabbers again seek to enslave Americans

There are many mysteries in this universe such as who was Jack the Ripper, who was D.B. Cooper, where is Jimmy Hoffa.

Nothing is more boggling, however, than the leftist mindset. There are many well-educated leftists; yet, they remain willfully ignorant when it comes to the responsibility of living in a free society. Either that or they despise the idea of a free society. Neither option is palatable.

This is never more apparent than when a deranged individual uses a gun to kill some people.

Before the bodies are even cold, leftists begin politicizing the tragedy and using it as an attempt to disarm the people. This happens time and again and last week’s tragedy in Las Vegas was no different.

Like all good petty tyrants, they cloak their attack on your liberties in terms of it being for your own good. They use false statistics, false analogies and false hope.

The fact is there is no “commonsense gun laws” that will prevent gun violence. Even a complete ban would do little to curb the total amount of violence as was learned in Great Britain, which has an extremely high violent-crime rate despite largely banning guns. One is much safer on American streets than British streets.

That point is moot, however. There would be no way to institute a gun ban in the United States.

Some 100 million Americans own about 300 million guns and a large percentage of them would never give them up voluntarily.

The military has about 2.25 million members and there are about 1 million law enforcement officers. Clearly, gun owners have the advantage and any kind of gun ban would be a violation of not only the U.S. Constitution but the natural, God-given rights of the people.

More importantly, however, there is no need for such laws.

The fact is, the United States is one of the safest nations on the planet when it comes to murder.

There were 14,000 murders in the United States in 2014, with only 8,000 of them committed with a gun. That is in a nation of more than 300 million people and 100 million gun owners. Clearly, the United States has an extremely low murder rate compared to the rest of the world.

What the left disingenuously does, however, is compare gun murder rates with other nations, but conveniently or ignorantly forgets the overall murder rate as though somehow other types of murder are irrelevant. Another deception they attempt is talking about total gun deaths but ignoring that most of those are suicides and about 1,000 of them each year are death by cop.

Each year, the United States is usually ranked somewhere around the middle in the world (usually not even in the top 100 most years) when it comes to per-capita murder rates — despite being the largest country in the world in terms of per-capita gun ownership. Indeed, given that as many as 2 million crimes are stopped each year by someone brandishing a gun, some would argue the large gun ownership is the reason we have such a low murder rate.

What this shows is that the United States is one of the safest places in the world, unless you are an unborn baby: in 2014, some 8,000 people were murdered by guns (a number that is decreasing), but 1 million babies are butchered by men and women in white coats. But that is an argument for another day.

The fact that the United States is one of the safest places on the globe is largely irrelevant in the gun control debate, though. The exact opposite could be true and the analysis and conclusion would be the same.

The Constitution is clear. Gun ownership is a fundamental human right.

Even if the United States led the world in gun violence, the government has no power to ban guns or to otherwise infringe on the right of the people to own them.

That is because the Founders knew and understood that an armed population is an essential element of a free society. The structure of the United States is a brilliant combination of checks and balances, which makes it difficult for tyranny to grow and flourish.

The right to keep and bear arms is another one of those checks. The Framers knew and understood that government should fear the people and not the other way around. Gun ownership is the final defense against tyrannical government or even armed invaders (ask the Japanese about that).

They understood that the fastest way to enslave a people is to disarm them. They saw it in 18th century Europe.

To the Founders, bearing arms was a duty of every citizen. The militia, that the left ignorantly parade as the only ones allowed to bear arms, was, to the Founders, the entirety of the people and that belief is largely carried forward today in federal law.

There are three pillars to a free society, the ballot box, the jury box and the ammo box.

It is a poor intellect that can’t understand the importance of an armed populace in maintaining our liberties.

Thomas J. Lucente Jr. is an attorney and night editor of The Lima News. Reach him by telephone at 567-242-0398, by email at [email protected], or on Twitter @ThomasLucente. This article originally appeared at LimaOhio.com. Republished with permission.