No doubt it was, but he was correct to identify the passion
for gun ownership as an element of the cultural life of the United States that is
not only deep, but deep-rooted. Those roots
go back to the very founding of North America by the first colonists,
reinforced by subsequent waves of immigrants.
The very first North American colonists had guns, as essential to
survival as seeds and shovels. As
Germans joined the English, the Scots, and the Dutch in the new land, followed
by Irish, Swedes, Italians and others, guns traveled with the pioneers west.
Western European society invented common firearms and spread
them among the commoners. By means of
firearms the commoners won their new land.
With their firearms those commoners also won their freedom from the
lords and ladies who could no longer control the armed rabble, particularly in
the English colonies, and particularly in the colonies that became the United
States. Guns in the United States have
been instruments of survival, physical and political.
What the kings and nobles of Europe could not know was that
there is something powerfully democratizing in gun possession. Firearms ended the reign of the mounted
knight and made it hard for kings and emperors to keep their thrones. No aristocrat in any palace was invulnerable
to the meanest peasant armed with musket and ball. Guns have been an historically powerful
equalizer and defense against tyranny and pillagers.
That democratizing process worked further and faster in
America, where courage and a gun could tame a wilderness and provide freedom
for the family. Far from the reach of
government, and unanswerable for the
pretended protection of the manor house, the typical American could take
immediate responsibility for himself and his own security and that of his wife
and children, backed up by the very real ability to assert that security. No one seems to know the origin of the
proverb, “God created men, but Sam Colt made them equal,” but the armed nation
builders of the American West understood and believed it.
That is to say that, in the United States at least, people have not needed government, and especially government protection, all that much. Gun
ownership has always been at the core of American independence and democracy,
essential from the founding up into modern times. It is a symbol of American freedom, but more
than that, ownership of firearms is a tangible expression of the independence
and self-reliance that are at the core of American citizenship, a culture of
freedom new and sometimes foreign to people hailing from other parts of the
world. It is not accidental that not
only the right to keep firearms but the active right to bear them is recognized in our Constitution as fundamental,
alongside freedom of expression, the protection of private property, trial by
jury, and other cornerstones of our liberty.
As the dangerous frontiers of violence encroach again on
families beyond the timely protection of law enforcement, that innate American
self-reliance is reenergized, and well it should be. The examples of people saved by their guns
from robbery, murder, and worse, are legion if little noted by the establishment
media reporting from their armed security zones.
In the face of increased violent criminal activity—whether from
terrorists or thugs—why does it make sense to weaken the defenses of law abiding citizens? Why would the
government of a free people impose regulations to expose those who live peacefully
to the barbarous cruelty of those who consider a regulation no barrier to preying
upon the disarmed? I do not understand
it. As an American, I do not understand
it at all.
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