Recently by James Ostrowski: My Remarks at the AmherstNY Presidential StrawPoll
Note: This is the text of my remarks to the Buffalo Second Amendment Rally on February 23, 2013.
I want to talk today about some things they don't teach in government school and that the lying progressive politicians won't tell you.
The right to bear arms is a natural right of the individual. It wasn't and isn't granted by the government or the Constitution or some slimy politician any more than your right to breathe comes from the government. If you have the right to life, then you must have the means to defend that life against those who would stop you from breathing or who would turn you into a slave or a laboratory rat, which, judging from current trends, appears to be about where we are headed in this country.
We live under the most powerful government that ever existed and it's getting bigger and stronger every week as new laws are passed taking over more and more aspects of life that used to be free. There is no literally no aspect of life, no matter how trivial or formerly private that progressive politicians do not have designs on: Little League football, the size of soft drinks, or what you say on Twitter about your government school jailers. These days, there is no aspect of your life, liberty or property or family life that is absolutely secure against this crazed progressive onslaught.
That is why we must resist this current gun grab by all means the Founding Fathers sanctioned in the Declaration of Independence including the right to alter or abolish a government destructive to our liberties. That's right, Governor, abolishing this government is on the table.
Now, these days, those words in the Declaration are ignored or edited out when politicians quote the document. Rather, the phrase "all men are created equal" is offered up as some sort of Marxist balderdash about the state making us all equal. The meaning of that phrase is clear, however. We are all equal in natural rights such as liberty which precludes any form of progressivism, socialism or Marxism. Sorry Barack!
Consider this. Isn't the right to bear arms implied in the right of revolution that is proclaimed in the founding document of our nation? Of course it is. Good luck fighting a revolution against a state that can send a drone to your house and make you disappear when all you have to fight back is a squirt gun.
Not only is the right to bear arms implied in our founding document, but the actual start of the revolution was an act of resistance against British gun control at Lexington and Concord. America was born when the Minute Men picked up their privately-owned muskets and formed a line of defense against government troops coming up the road to take their guns away.
They don't teach this stuff in government school.
It is critical to realize that progressives never address the actual reason for the right to bear arms. Rather, they seek to confuse the issue by answering arguments for the right to bear arms that were never made. The Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting, sport or target shooting, or collecting antiques and its main purpose is not to allow you to protect yourself from criminals although that is a secondary and important purpose. It is an undeniable historical fact that the central purpose of the right to bear arms is to allow the people to protect themselves against the government.
Now, why do progressives ignore or pretend not to know the true purpose behind the Second Amendment even though our side has been explaining it for many, many years? Two reasons. First, they cannot rebut the argument! History and logic show that governments are dangerous to people when they get too much power, get too crazed in their ideologies and when the people are weak, disorganized and unarmed or disarmed. In the 20th century, 170 million people were murdered by their own governments according to historian RJ Rummel. The Soviets, a US ally, killed 62 million; the Communist Chinese killed 35 million. The Nazis killed 21 million. US ally Nationalist China killed 10 million. Japan killed 6 million, Cambodia killed 2 million and Turkey killed 1.8 million.
How can they deny obvious facts? Can they argue that Germans are so different from Americans? After all, they were an advanced Western, Christian nation and German-Americans are the largest ethnic group in America. To say it can't happen here is a bad argument. They could argue that the US state has never engaged in mass murder against its own citizens but that's a bad argument because our citizens have always been well-armed, so that proves our point. That's another bad argument they don't make.
So, instead of making bad arguments against the true purpose of the Second Amendment, they make good arguments against an imaginary Second Amendment that never existed. It's extremely effective in a population short on critical thinking skills they never learned in government school. If government schools taught critical thinking skills, the first thing the students would ask is why the hell in a free country does the government have the right to kidnap children for 12 years, send them to daytime juvenile detention centers run by progressive Democratic union members and send their parents the bill, threatening to foreclose on their houses if they don't pay up?
The second reason why progressives never confront the true reason behind the Second Amendment is even more interesting and more important. The notion that a government with a monopoly of armed force could be an evil thing is abhorrent to them. It goes against the core of their ideology – that government guns pointed at peaceful citizens can create a utopia on earth. That can't happen if the citizens are pointing guns back.
But progressives don't want to admit that their ideology contains no room for privately-owned guns since there presently is too much support for the right to bear arms. So, again, they simply ignore the issue and try to confuse people by talking about hunting, target shooting and shotguns for home defense. By narrowing the scope of the purposes of gun ownership, they hope to be able to continually chip away at gun rights until all private guns are banned which is of course their actual goal. The more honest among them will admit, in response to our question – what do I do when a burglar tries to break the door down – "Call the police." Right, so the crime historians can draw a chalk line around your family's bodies and call the medical examiner.
But that's what they think. They really believe we would be better off if only the government had guns. That's why they love to cite phony statistics that Professor Kleck has refuted that allegedly prove that guns in the home are likely to be used, not for defense, but against one of the members of the family. They really think we'd be better off without any guns even though they won't admit it. That's why Cuomo's treasonous gun law is not the end, any more than that weasel George Pataki's gun law was the end in the 1990's. Since progressives are utopians who wish to use the power of the state to make life perfect on earth, there is never an end to their efforts to grab power from us.
Here's another thing you won't learn in government school or out of the mouths of lying progressive politicians. Most crime in America is caused by failed progressive policies such as welfare, the war on drugs and government schools. By their very nature, progressives are unable to acknowledge the failure of their own ideology. So they use guns as a scapegoat to distract attention away from their failures and avoid having to change their policies. The data is clear. The rise of the welfare state led to the destruction of the family unit in minority communities. Fathers left the home and teenage boys joined criminal gangs as a perverted form of father substitute.
Government schools failed to provide what was missing at home and merely served as a recruiting ground for gangs and a distribution point for drugs. Local high schools in this area compete for the nickname, "heroin high." The progressives' war on drugs is an abysmal failure which merely sucks poor kids into a criminal and violent lifestyle once they realize that government school gave them no job skills and that progressive policies sucked all the economic vitality out of once bustling inner city neighborhoods.
Now, we don't really know much about the cause of the latest school shooting – they are suppressing the lab report and other information. But we do know that several school shooters were bullied in government school and went back for revenge. Also, the politicians brag that they have made government schools gun-free zones, assuring mass killers of an easy target.
The state kidnaps kids, bullies them, turns them into bullies of the weaker, gives them dangerous psychotropic drugs, then leaves the students defenseless, and it's the fault of the shotgun locked in your safe at home? That's madness. School shootings are a failure of progressive policies. They invented the daytime juvenile detention center in the first place. Beyond school shootings, government schools are bad places for your kids for reasons I explained in a book and you should take them out anyway and soon.
I'm not going to argue statistics today but consider the fact that the folks in suburban and rural areas surrounding Buffalo are armed to the teeth but do not suffer from the decades-old crime wave and reign of terror criminals have imposed on the city of Buffalo. Case closed. Why should guns be confiscated from law-abiding people because progressives have unleashed a crime wave in America?
By the way, if you want people to accept your right to possess private property, guns, you had better consider accepting the right of other people to possess private property, drugs, if they so choose. Liberty is seamless and does not allow for exceptions. Liberty is doing what you wish with what you own. Doing what you wish with what you own. In fact, the war on drugs has proved to be the major driving force behind the war on guns. Same war, different name.
A couple more things they don't teach in government school. Progressives don't hate guns; they love guns. They love them so much they want to be the only ones who have any. They want a gun monopoly. Again, a progressive is a person who has this fantastic dream of creating a utopia on earth by threatening people with government guns if they don't comply with their utopian schemes. The difference between progressives and us is this. They want to use guns aggressively, to make peaceful people do things they don't want to do. We wish to use them only defensively, to stop a government that gets out of control and engages in mass murder, or systemically tramples the Bill of Rights.
The progressive state uses guns against us on a daily basis to impose their will on us. Yet, to my knowledge, not a single Patriot has fired a gun back. We have exercised remarkable restraint. So, again, the government schools, the politicians and the mainstream media lie. The truly violent gun fanatics and gun lovers are the progressive gun grabbers, not us.
One last point before I close. I have seen very few African-Americans at these rallies. I don't understand that. No group has suffered more under government tyranny than blacks. The federal government kept them in slavery for 75 years. Slavery is a form of slow motion, mass murder. After slavery, governments took their guns away and failed to provide police protection.
One of the purposes of the 14th Amendment was to allow blacks to own guns for protection. Blacks are more likely to be the victims of violent crime. Finally, if you study the history of the various mass murders perpetrated by governments, they very often are aimed at ethnic, racial or religious minorities as they were in Germany and Turkey. If I was a member of a racial minority in a hostile world, I would be a ferocious defender of the right to bear arms.
So those are a few points about the right to bear arms they don't teach in government school and that you won't hear from lying politicians or the state-controlled media.
James Ostrowski is an attorney in Buffalo, New York and author of Government Schools Are Bad for Your Kids: What You Need to Know and Political Class Dismissed: Essays Against Politics, Including "What’s Wrong With Buffalo." His latest book is Direct Citizen Action: How We Can Win the Second American Revolution Without Firing a Shot. See his website.
