In the ongoing battle between personal liberty and government control, few issues ignite passions as fiercely as the Second Amendment. While the Constitution plainly protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms, the federal government’s unconstitutional infringements on that right multiply year after year after year.
Now, maybe because of those frequent infringements, the number of gun owners is rapidly rising, as well.
Consider these results of a survey published in the Annals of Internal Medicine:
An estimated 2.9% of U.S. adults (7.5 million) became new gun owners from 1 January 2019 to 26 April 2021. Most (5.4 million) had lived in homes without guns….
And:
Approximately half of all new gun owners were female (50% in 2019 and 47% in 2020 to 2021), 20% were Black (21% in 2019 and in 2020–2021), and 20% were Hispanic (20% in 2019 and 19% in 2020–2021).
The rise in the number of Americans buying guns is not a new story, and there very well could be a correlation between the government’s continual attempts at confiscation, civilian disarmament, and other onerous and unconstitutional restrictions on the purchase, possession, and use of firearms and the rush of regular Americans — even those who never owned guns before — to arm themselves.
Of course, why would people feel the need to arm themselves? Maybe those 7.5 million new gun owners just took up hunting. That’s it. Those people just got the hankering to hunt.
Or it could be something else.
Seriously, though, why would so many millions of Americans feel compelled to purchase weapons for the first time over the last few years?
I’m reminded of the words of Algernon Sidney:
If he be justly accounted an enemy to all, who injures all; he above all must be the public enemy of a nation, who by usurping a power over them, does the greatest and most public injury that a people can suffer…. The laws which they [those who usurp power over the people] overthrow can give them no protection; and every man is a soldier against him who is a public enemy. (Discourses Concerning Government, Chapter 2, Section 24)
Naturally, a people persuaded that their own government’s policies could be aimed at disarming civilians would not want their names recorded by that same tyrannical government.
This is from a recent article published by Reason on the subject of gun owners evading identification:
“Some individuals are falsely denying firearm ownership, resulting in research not accurately capturing the experiences of all firearm owners in the U.S.,” says Allison Bond, a doctoral student with Rutgers University’s New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center and lead author of “Predicting Potential Underreporting of Firearm Ownership in a Nationally Representative Sample,” published last month in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. “More concerningly, these individuals are not being reached with secure firearm storage messaging and firearm safety resources, which may result in them storing their firearms in an unsecure manner, which in turn increases the risk for firearm injury and death.”
Yes. You see, citizen, the only reason the government wants to know how many guns you own, what type of guns you own, and how much ammunition for those guns you own is so it can provide you with information on how to keep those weapons securely stored! Calm down, conspiracy theorists!
Just in case, let’s look at some additional comments made by Ms. Bond about the danger of nondisclosure:
“The implications of false denials of firearms ownership are substantial,” claim the authors. “First, such practices would result in an underestimation of firearms ownership rates and diminish our capacity to test the association between firearm access and various firearm violence-related outcomes. Furthermore, such practices would skew our understanding of the demographics of firearm ownership, such that we would overemphasize the characteristics of those more apt to disclose. Third, the mere existence of a large group of individuals who falsely deny firearm ownership highlights that intervention aimed at promoting firearm safety (e.g., secure firearm storage) may fail to reach communities in need.”
So, it’s not only safe storage she’s worried, but also knowing who is denying owning firearms so that “intervention” can be made to protect those people who would dare fib to the feds.
I wonder: Who will conduct those “interventions” and how would they be carried out?
Even Ms. Bond and her fellow researchers admit something as possible that the rest of us know is certain: “It may be that a percentage of firearm owners are concerned that their information will be leaked and the government will take their firearms.”
It may be because of that? It may also be because Americans have in their DNA an understanding that, as William Blackstone wrote in his Commentaries on the Laws of England, one of the books most often-quoted by our Founding Fathers,
Free men have arms. Slaves do not…. To vindicate these rights, when actually violated or attacked, the subjects of England are entitled, in the first place, to the regular administration and free course of justice in the courts of law; next, to the right of petitioning the king and parliament for redress of grievances; and, lastly, to the right of having and using arms for self-preservation and defense. And all these rights and liberties it is our birthright to enjoy entire.
Using weapons to defend ourselves, our rights, and our liberties is our birthright. Americans are well aware that farmers armed with inferior weapons have stood up successfully a time or two against permanent, professional armies that had them outnumbered and outgunned.
Despite the clear language of the Second Amendment and the history behind the words of that amendment, federal firearms regulations have steadily encroached upon individual liberties. Edicts masquerading as laws mandating licensing, registration, and background checks place undue and unconstitutional burdens on law-abiding citizens, treating them as suspects rather than citizens and the best hope for perpetuating the “security of a free state.”
But, there again, maybe we have insight into the motivation of the members of Congress and presidents, and judges who would see civilians disarmed to the point that they have no choice but to rely on the government’s promises to protect us and our liberty.
Resisting registration by the government of gun ownership is a pro-freedom impulse. History — even our own colonial history — proves that when a government wishes to rob a people of their liberty, they first rob them of their weapons. In the United States, that robbery comes in the form of regulations.
I’ll give the last word to the inestimable Algernon Sidney, who gave us this warning:
The perpetual jarrings we hear every day; the division of the nation into such factions as threaten us with ruin, and all the disorders that we see or fear, are the effects of this rupture. These things are not to be imputed to our original constitutions, but to those who have subverted them.
The law was plain, but it has been industriously rendered perplex: They who were to have upheld it are overthrown. That which might have been easily performed when the people was armed, and had a great, strong, virtuous and powerful nobility to lead them, is made difficult, now they are disarmed, and that nobility abolished.
Taking our affairs at the worst, we shall soon find, that if we have the same spirit they had, we may easily restore our nation to its ancient liberty, dignity and happiness; and if we do not, the fault is owing to ourselves, and not to any want of virtue and wisdom in them.
