Victor Davis Hanson is, without a doubt, one of the bigger names in conservative commentary. He’s been doing it for a long time and, as both an academic and a commentator, he is able to bring something to the table that many of us simply can’t.
Because he’s on the right, it’s easy to simply assume that he supports gun rights. In this case, you’d be correct, though that’s not the given that many assume.
Still, like many people, Hanson valued gun rights as more of an abstract for some time before something made it personal.
Victor was sitting in his farm house, the same house he grew up in, in 1987. At 2 a.m. his eight year old son came down stairs and said someone was throwing rocks at his window and yelling.
Outside Victor found three individuals who were armed and threatened him. Fortunately Victor was armed with his shotgun.
When confronted, one armed gangbanger fell to his knees and started praying. Victor forced them to take him to their car. He took their keys, and had them push the car about a quarter mile down the road. He threw the keys into a vineyard and told them the police were on their way.
More than 30 minutes later, the police showed up. Officially they said he should not have done what he did. Unofficially, they told him he did the right thing. Later the police department contacted him, informed him one of the three had just been released from prison, but they could not prosecute because the three denied doing anything, and they did not find any firearm.
From that day on, Victor Davis Hanson had a strong, personal understanding of the importance of the Second Amendment. The story finishes about 20:50 on the video.
An old joke says: A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. Once a person uses rights protected by the Second Amendment to protect themselves and their loved ones, respect for the Second Amendment becomes personal.
It’s easy to support something in the abstract. You can recognize how gun control is unconstitutional, and you can logically understand all of the fallacies that go into the gun control arguments, but things change when you find yourself needing that gun to protect yourself.
At that point, it’s kind of hard to tell someone that no, they don’t need a gun to protect themselves. As someone who has been there as well, I know that it’s laughable when some anti-gunner tries to tell me that, in that moment, I should have just waited for the police and apparently just hope that the person with a weapon in hand doesn’t actually have malicious intent.
The Second Amendment became personal for me, too, that day, just as it did for Hanson.
Bad people abound. You’re not going to just wish them into extinction. Whether they take the reins of government or decide to engage in their own form of more petty tyrannies, our Founding Fathers had no wish for us to be a nation of victims.
The Second Amendment is meant to prevent that, which means it should become personal to every freedom-loving American.
Editor’s Note: President Trump and Republicans across the country are doing everything they can to protect our Second Amendment rights and right to self-defense.
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