Hi Folks,
Brian here. So in firearms related news north of the border, Canadian anti-gunners have won a huge victory. In the wake of a mass shooting by a criminal WHO USED ILLEGAL WEAPONS, Canada has just decided to BAN LEGAL WEAPONS.
So for those of us south of the border, the obvious question is “who cares”? It doesn’t affect us, right?
That is where you are wrong. Let’s start with the obvious. Gun crime in general, and mass shootings, in particular, are extremely rare in Canada. This legislation will do nothing. Of course that never stops an anti-gunner. For them any gun in the hands of a civilian represents a clear and present danger to the collective.
That last line is what is important here. We have a lot of similarities to Canada. We share many of the same values, but on one important principle we are different. With very few exceptions (and honestly I can’t even think of the exceptions right now), most of the world favors the “collective good” over “individual rights”.
Why is this important? As Americans we are unique in the belief that individual freedoms are so important that we are willing to accept a societal loss because the principle is so important. Think about the famous “Miranda rights” that are said to someone who is being arrested. What would happen if someone did a crime and wasn’t given their Miranda rights? The evidence of the crime would be tossed, even if it meant sending a guilty person free. The society suffers (letting a guilty person go free), because we never want an innocent person to be crushed under the weight of government authority, so we are willing to accept some loss.
If you have been in the thick of the 2nd Amendment debate in the United States, you have been on the front lines of the “individual vs. collective” value judgment, perhaps without even knowing it.
The truth is that the collective good crowd has been winning. We might be the last nation to favor the rights of the individual over the collective good in the world, and this Communist Chinese government caused virus has shown us how close we are are to flipping on this issue.
With respect to Canada, believe it or not, they actually have a small but fairly robust firearms community. A few years ago, my good friend, Nick, invited me to take firearms class in Canada, and I was very impressed by the skills of the local shooters. The truth is that these people represented no danger to their society, and might even represent a net positive (although they aren’t allowed to keep guns for self-defense against criminals so that part could be debated).
These are the law abiding citizens of Canada who are being asked to curtail their individual freedoms in favor the collective good. The dirty “not-so secret” is that the collective good is not being advanced by this ban on firearms.
This has become a wider trend, even before the virus, where we have been told that we now have to accept restrictions on our freedom of speech for the collective good, because some people are “triggered” by speech, or some speech is labelled “violence”. Gone are the days when liberals used to day “I may disagree with what you say, but I’ll die for your right to say it.”
Suddenly individual rights, no longer meant just the 2nd Amendment, but now the 1st Amendment as well.
And then the virus came.
Now we know where people stand. Suddenly religious observances are considered expendable. There goes another First Amendment right. Suddenly peacefully assembling can get you fined or arrested. There goes another First Amendment right. Suddenly political protests are considered acts of collective violence.
These same people are praising the Communist dictatorship of China, the ultimate expression of collective good crushing individual liberty. Many prominent Americans have actually deluded themselves into believing that a Communist dictatorship is “not so bad”.
In the gun debate, we often tell the folks who love the less controversial guns, please support us, because they will come after your guns next. We are way past that. We need to tell our friends, please support our rights, because they will come for your rights next.
You may be an atheist, and could care less that religious services are banned, but they will come for something you care about soon. When the most fundamental rights found in the First Amendment are readily expendable by your neighbors, America will cease to have the unique character and value system that has made it the place that all persecuted peoples of the world aspire to come to.
England practically invented individual rights/freedoms, and they created an empire that spanned the globe. Then they embraced the ideology of the collective good, and today you can be arrested for filming a YouTube video on a public street if they don’t like the subject matter that you are talking about (that is not a lie).
The virus response has taken our 2A debate and widened the scope such that we are now debating our core fundamental values in a way that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. And frankly, many Americans have bought into the socialist globalist elitist mentality that individual freedoms are simply not worth the societal bargain. They are craving big brother to come and save us. They are happily handing away the rights that great Americans bled for. We may never look the same.
We will just be like Canada, and we will willingly hand over our rights for illusory promises, and when those promises are not delivered, we will the lack ability to get those rights back.
That is why we need to feel sorry about what is happening in Canada…because there are too many Americans that want us to follow Canada’s lead, and when the 2nd Amendment is gone, the rest of the Bill of Rights will be on the chopping block as well.
www.theblaze.com/news/canada-bans-all-assault-type-rifles-following-deadly-mass-killing
Sent from my T-Mobile 4G LTE Device
Brian Hallaq
