What Gun Rights Are Really About

Both sides of the gun debate tend to talk past one another on a regular basis. In fairness, I only care about what the other side has to say so I can debunk it. They don’t care about what I have to say because their mind is made up.

But we need to understand–we need them to understand, too–what gun control really accomplishes in the grand scheme of things.

We need to understand, though, what gun ownership and the Second Amendment is really about.

Our own Ranjit Singh touched on that in a recent piece he penned for a site called Ordinary Times:

In my world, Saturday afternoons mean the sounds of bullets hitting steel gongs. As I stand behind new shooters taking their first shots, I watch their fear loosen and confidence take hold. These moments motivate me as an instructor and firearms evangelist.

You wouldn’t have guessed it from my background. I grew up knowing next to nothing about guns, and the thought of owning them never crossed my mind because guns weren’t something meant for my hands. Seventeen years ago, I stood where my students stand today.

Then 2008 happened. Watching the grainy footage from the Islamic terror attack on Mumbai, seeing ordinary people trapped with no means to defend themselves, flipped an internal switch I didn’t know existed. Soon after, I sought out firearms instruction and walked away with a new sense of responsibility and resolve.

Since then, I’ve become a citizen-lobbyist. I subscribe to legislative alerts, stay in regular contact with elected officials, and have even met them in person. And at every available opportunity, I take a non-gun owner to the range, volunteering my time and resources for free.

My most impactful work is in those transformative moments when someone who never imagined owning a firearm stands a little taller after their first clean shot, and a new voice joins the voter rolls supporting gun rights.

As a published author, I also write periodically for Bearing Arms. I approach gun rights from a lower-case ‘l’ libertarian lower-case ‘r’ republican perspective. Like most gun owners, I believe self-defense is the first law of nature, and the right to keep and bear arms flows directly from it. It is an inherent right that should never hinge on race, gender, or other immutable traits.

Understand this. I agree with Ranjit on this. I know from conversations with Cam that he, too, agrees with this.

Gun rights don’t exist for a privileged caste, people who fit a mold that also just happens to be largely white, straight, Christian, and potentially even male. They can’t. If they do, it doesn’t take all that much to flip the switch, and suddenly, the mold changes and those folks are expressly forbidden from owning guns for whatever reason.

And understand, this isn’t some hypothetical, either, as Ranjit points out.

Unfortunately, tribalism based on immutable traits or group characteristics is evolutionarily hardwired into the human mind. Bigotry can arise from that tribalism. It takes effort to overcome, and I thought humanity was well on its way there. I especially thought that the Second Amendment community was solidly individualistic and immune to the backward thinking of collectivism.

I guess the bigotry was hiding in plain sight, and I just failed to pay enough attention to it. Some of my past writings celebrated the history and tradition of black firearms ownership. I recall some comments disapproving of it. One of my articles was about firearms ownership in the LGBT community. It featured a Rainbow Gadsden Flag, which channels the “Don’t tread on anyone” libertarian ethos. Again, I saw some negative reception of that work. I ignored it, thinking that such people exist everywhere, albeit in small numbers.

This past year changed that. I witnessed pernicious behavior from people on “my side,” far beyond anonymous trolls. Individuals I once considered decent fellow travelers have shown their true colors.

I didn’t see the comments Ranjit mentions. The one on black gun ownership back in the day doesn’t have any now, but our commenting setup had changed a few times over the year, with older comments being wiped out, so I don’t know that he’s wrong. There are, though, still some negative comments about the Gadsden Flag thing.

But then Ranjit gets into the whole idea that was floated of disarming transgender people, among other things, and what he actually does is provide a wakeup call to the Second Amendment community.

See, we don’t win friends and influence people by openly celebrating the idea that we might disarm an entire group of people because of the actions of a select few. Yes, there are transgender mass killers. There are also a lot of white dudes carrying out mass murders. Why would anyone with half a brain want to go down that road, even without the bigotry aspect, when every bit of gun control can be turned into gun control that targets you or me?

That’s without getting into the simple fact that a lot of us, myself probably included, have really lost the plot this year in various ways.

Rights exist for all of us. We cannot tolerate blanket bans on groups of people simply because we don’t like how they live their lives, and a small number did horrible things. A small number of every group does horrible things. If we start playing that game, if nothing else, the anti-gunners will play it, too. If you don’t have any other reason to see that kind of thing as a problem, then latch onto that.

But honestly, some of the people on this side of the fence need to pull their heads out of their posteriors and stop helping the other side.

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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