For all of those who are angry about the
Parkland attack and those before it, and who insist that the experiences of the
newly minted child-activists for rescinding the Second Amendment require us to
do what they demand, ask yourselves: do I want a society where my rights are determined by the raw and
manipulated emotions of my accusers? Do I want my rights decided by what
children feel? It is self-evident to rational people that anger,
especially misinformed anger, is not a basis for good policy. However, it
is all that progressives can offer. At least it helps them to deflect
that armed teachers would have ended that attack before more of those children
died, making their refusal to allow that defense for years an act of complicity
in its outcome.
Being a victim and being young
do not make one nobler or smarter than he was before he was attacked. The experience of being attacked
certainly makes one vulnerable to exploitation by those who would manipulate
the victim, but it does nothing to enlarge the victim's limited understanding
of complex issues that are often polluted by corruption and
disinformation. Victimhood does not create virtue or wisdom, but it
does cause rage and emotion among those cultivated to default to feelings.
Inflamed emotion is the left's engine of change, and the left
prizes coercive change above all things. Everything that stands in the
way of their crusade to remake America must go. Nothing prevents
oppressive change more than an armed citizenry, so nothing needs changing as
much or as quickly as that relic of individual liberty. You can't make
people servants of an all-powerful government when they can still prevent being
bound to the yoke chosen for them by their "betters."
We who still believe in the Bill of Rights are presently being
treated to a hefty serving of hate, not because we have done something wrong,
but because we have refused to surrender. We have declined the demand that we sacrifice our rights to
make happy those who would overwhelm and control us. We have resisted the
demands that we permit "commonsense" acts that are anything but
sensible, which will erode or erase our rights to defend ourselves against
those making the demands. We are told we must continually agree to
incremental rescission of the Second Amendment, but progressives can create
rights out of whole cloth to which we can neither object nor suggest
limits. We are to pretend that we don't see this, or understand where it
is intended to lead, and we certainly are not permitted to discuss it without
being attacked.
As a country, we should ask
ourselves a few things: is it
virtuous or wise that the rights of all citizens should be determined by public
protests arising from the experiences, identities, politics, or emotions of
those few whose positions are shaped by their involvement in an event or a
group? Is it virtuous or wise to listen to those demanding, on the basis
of a subjective experience, that rights be taken from millions of citizens who
played no part in their event and committed no crime? How about this:
should the rights of Americans be determined by the most emotional among
us? Should our human right of self-defense be decided by the very people
who have ensured that mass shootings continue to occur in "gun-free
zones" because their agenda isn't advanced by actually protecting people
in those zones? Should our rights be decided by angry children?
Should we condone seeing children who have been willfully exposed to this
danger manipulated to demand "change" by those who consciously make
their schools fertile ground for shooters? Are the children who were
forced into shooting galleries by their sudden political friends wise enough,
or mature enough, to process and understand these facts?
Progressive change is never about what is best, or wise, or
virtuous. This explains
why their solution is never tailored to cure the alleged problem. It is
about what is necessary to their seizure of power and control over all
things. Emotion is the enemy of wisdom. Rage and reason are
mutually exclusive. Those who knowingly force children into gun-free
zones have an unlimited capacity for cynicism, knowing that it will go badly
for anyone who points out that the emotions of those children should not bring
about the wholesale revocation of rights that children do not understand, with
effects they cannot fathom in their limited experience. The adults
understand, even if the children do not, that the larger goal is the
disarmament of free people whose insistence upon individual liberty has no
place in the new progressive political order. The children have no idea
that the behemoth they are helping grow will one day consume them, too.
Many children and adults know nothing about the people who lawfully
own guns, yet they are taught to hate them instinctively. They know
nothing about the social and cultural observations of lawful gun-owners over
the last few decades and how the country is being transformed by the irrational
hatred with which the vulnerable are indoctrinated within progressivism.
They have no concept of what it is like to watch a country succumb to
groupthink, bigotry, hatred, censorship, and incitement to open violence
against them for holding the very beliefs upon which this country thrived for
hundreds of years. They do not realize the rights that Americans once had
relative to those they now have, or see where that erosion inevitably has led
throughout history. They do not understand that the extent of
degradation of our culture and society is directly proportionate to the rise of
progressivism. The shooters whom so many fear have appeared in direct
proportion to the left's control of education, entertainment, media, health
care, perception of religion, and the criminal justice system.
Lambs are not
equipped to lead their shepherds, yet they are told they are guiding us as they
are herded where their adult handlers want them to go. They have no idea
what they stand to lose, or how much harm they are being led to commit.
If they succeed, they will only have diminished their own country and their own
future. Once our rights are forfeit, theirs are, too. Shame on the
adults who are doing this to them and to us.