Lifted from an email sent to me. 100% concur.
Dear Beto,
Can I call you Beto? Great.
Anyway, I wanted to take a few moments to write an open letter to you regarding some of your recent thoughts on gun control. In particular, your comments regarding mandatory buybacks.
On The View earlier this week, Meghan McCain commented that such an act would trigger violence. Her comment sparked outrage all over the internet. You, yourself, argued that McCain’s comments amounted to “It becomes self-fulfilling; you have people on TV who are almost giving you permission to be violent and saying, ‘You know this is this is going to happen.’”
Allow me to clue you in on something, Beto. There’s not a single gun owner in this country who is looking to Meghan McCain for permission to oppose the tyranny of a mandatory buyback.
McCain’s comments weren’t permission, they were a warning. It wasn’t something new, something she just pulled out of the ether in order to spark some controversy. She’s merely echoing the statements people have made for decades regarding their willingness to die for their Second Amendment rights.
By claiming its a self-fulfilling prophecy and that people like McCain are giving people permission, you’re telling on yourself. You’re telling each and every one of us that you have never bothered to listen to a damn thing any of us have said.
I didn’t even know who Meghan McCain was when I first heard someone issue the dire warning that if some form of gun confiscation were to happen, the first thing the jackboots trying to take them would get was the ammunition delivered at high velocity. The gun-rights community has warned that efforts to take away or guns would lead to civil war for years now.
You just didn’t want to listen.
We often talk about lawmakers being out of touch, and you’ve just become the poster boy for that, Beto. You are so wrapped up in your liberal bubble that you simply can’t understand that this is a thing, this is something we’ve gone on about for ages. You can’t understand it because you don’t want to understand it. In your mind, we’re all just good little drones who will do whatever Big Daddy Government wants us to do.
We’re not.
We’re the heirs of Lexington and Concord. We’re the children of Valley Forge and Bunker Hill. We’re a defiant, freedom-loving bunch that isn’t rolling over because some spoiled rich kid thinks we should.
Let me make it clear for you. If you come for our guns, we are going to fight back. We don’t look to Meghan McCain for permission to do that. She could tell us not to, and we’d still fight back.
Beto, you need to understand. You need to learn. You need to come to grasp the simple fact that we’re not like you. We don’t look at government as an unmitigated good whose lead we should always follow. We have reasons for that. It’s called the history of the 20th Century filled with countless atrocities, atrocities carried out under the umbrella of government.
Those atrocities could only be carried out because the populations were unarmed.
We’re not sheep. We will not be herded into genocide all because some well-meaning but sheltered rich boy who has never lived in a high-crime neighborhood in his life could tell us what we need and don’t need.
Meghan McCain gave no one permission for anything. Further, gun owners don’t need such a permission. Our permission was penned in 1776 and signed on July 4th.
- Tom Knighton
It was never the Framers’ intent that the Second Amendment authorize private citizens to ‘take up arms’ against a government subjectively perceived to be ‘tyrannical’ – including Madison:
‘Proponents of insurrectionism often cite
Federalist No. 46 in which Madison said that should the federal government become tyrannical, its army would be opposed by more powerful state militia composed of "citizens with arms in their hands ... fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence." 20 When one reads that statement in context, however, one sees that Madison does not suggest that such an eventuality could come to pass. Quite the reverse: he says this fear is an Anti-Federalist pipe dream. Madison writes:
That the people and the States should, for a sufficient period of time, elect an uninterrupted succession of men ready to betray both [the state and federal governments]; that the traitors should throughout this period, uniformly and systematically pursue some fixed plan for the extension of the military establishment; that the governments and the people of the States should silently and patiently behold the gathering storm, and continue to supply the materials, until it should be prepared to burst on their own heads, must appear to every one more like the incoherent dreams of a delirious jealousy, or the misjudged exaggerations of a counterfeit zeal, than like the sober apprehensions of genuine patriotism.
"Extravagant as the supposition is, let it however be made," Madison writes, and he proceeds to respond to what he considers an absurd argument on its own terms. All of this precedes the line about the "citizens with arms in their hands" going to war with an invading federal government.
Madison's point is not that guns are the ultimate check on tyranny but that the constitutional structure is the full protection of liberty.
But even if we attach undeserved significance to Madison's line about war between the federal army and the state militia, it should be noted that Madison was not talking about armed citizens-mobs-taking matters into their own hands, but about action by the state militia. And whatever legitimacy that latter idea had was extinguished by the Civil War.
The fundamental problem with legitimizing insurrectionism as an acceptable last resort is that there are always people who believe that governmental tyranny is not merely a future prospect, but a present reality. Insurrectionism has been present throughout American history, but until relatively recently it primarily has been popular with vigilantes and paramilitary groups; it was the philosophy of Jefferson Davis, John Wilkes Booth, and Timothy McVeigh. But it is a view that some conservatives perhaps unthinkingly-have started to endorse. In so doing, they are abandoning faith in ordered liberty embraced by traditional conservatives, such as Burke, in favor of a new conservatism that has more in common with Robespierre and Mao Tse-tung.’
https://docs.rwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&httpsredir=1&article=1115&context=law_fac_fs