AN ARMED POPULATION IS A FREE POPULATION -- THE BASIS FOR A STRONG NATION

THE BASIS FOR A STRONG NATION By R.J. Godlewski © April 4, 2008, All Rights Reserved 6. AN ARMED POPULATION IS A FREE POPULATION

The individual human person is by far the greatest treasure known to us in the universe. Gold, in comparison, is soft, malleable, and free from corrosion but it takes the human spirit to forge it into a work of art. Diamonds, for their part, are the hardest substance known on the planet but when human craftsmen shear away their outer rough, the gems that remain can redirect nature€™s light into a thousand different brilliances that would have theretofore simply bounced off of its surface haphazardly. Within the deepest recesses of outer space, super massive stars explode unleashing more light than entire galaxies and spewing heavy elements such as carbon and silicon into the cosmos, but it is those carbon-based creatures known as humans that can turn these elements into an infinite number of creations such as electronic chips, refined gasoline, and household paint, just to name a very few. What makes the human person so invaluable within the greater universe is that we are unique here on earth. One gold nugget is no different than one gold grain. The Hope Diamond is no different than one that could be found in Hope, Arkansas. The silicone within my computer is no different than the silicon produced by supernovae billions of years ago. Indeed, that is undoubtedly where my computer ultimately inherited its brain from.

I, on the other hand, am as unique as any conceived of within the observable universe. So too are the six and a half billion other people sharing my tiny speck of rock within the unimaginably large universe. True, those that share my two arms and legs, two eyes and ears, and singular mouth and nose are much too numerous to count but they only represent what we are; not who we are and herein lies our infinite value. We don'€™t serve any higher terrestrial function as do herds of American Bison or Cape Buffalo. In crowded New York, for example, it may seem that the teeming masses of people could be considered as no different as lemmings leaping off the cliffs of daily existence, but such observations would indeed be false. Each one of the millions of people occupying New York City is as unique as the tens of millions occupying the greater Tokyo area. Each serves a specific purpose if only known to them.

When our founding fathers therefore set about to create a new nation upon the earth, they began with the most fundamental element of society the individuals they believed were created by a common Creator. They broke away from the monarchy represented by the United Kingdom because they knew that any human system governed by a supreme overlord was doomed to failure and they proceeded to turn world civilization upon its head literally. They fought figuratively and literally€“ to establish a new country based upon the foundations of €œlife, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for its citizenry and not solely for the privileged few of blood. Their chants of “give me liberty or give me death soundly defeated those who prayed for God to save their King. God, they never forgot to understand, died to make men holy so that we could die to make men free€. And make men free we did – in droves.

The €œShot heard around the world was not unleashed by a large and organized army. It was delivered by a ragtag group of ordinary people who simply had had enough of servitude without representation. They realized that no mere mortal – even one as audacious as King George III could deny people of their inalienable rights. Foremost amongst these liberties, was the God-given right to effect a change in government should the power of the citizenry ever be revoked by a privileged few. Simply put, the people of the United States placed their leaders into office and they held the power to remove them by force, if necessary if those €œleaders€ failed to keep the Republic intact.

Equally as important, but nowhere near as acknowledged today, the founding fathers of this great nation chose to include the word €œStates€ in her name. This single word, in our official language, means several things including: 1. Condition. 2. Grandeur; pomp; eminence. 3. A nation. 4. One of the governmental units of a nation. 5. Rank; position; office. 6. To declare. € Could you therefore envision a better word to include within our national name? Hardly! The United States of America therefore means much more than just the fifty states whose capitals befuddle grade school students. Our nation represents a union of diverse races, ethnicities, religions, economic backgrounds, and perhaps most extraordinary of all thought processes. Resting on a planet where no two humans are identical, we represent the most indescribable of all.

Because of the sheer simplicity of our acknowledgment of this complexity, ours is not a nation devoted to the protection of the masses but of the individual. We need no visas or permits to move from bankrupt Michigan to the more economically energetic South. We suffer through no decades long waiting lists to be able to buy a house (indeed, as the current mortgage fiasco shows, we don'€™t even have to be able to €œafford€ our homes before we are allowed to purchase them). Whenever we do find grievances within our nation, we are not sacrificed to the firing squad should we chose to voice our complaints. On the contrary, our legal system was designed to empower us even to the point of €œmillion man marches€ through those same capitals tormenting our grade schoolers. We can immerse ourselves within these liberties and rights because our founding fathers had the foresight to protect our interests by granting us the right€“ in official writing€“ to protect our own selves through the use of arms.

You will note here a decided lack of nomenclature within our U.S. Constitution. They spoke not of flintlocks or rifles or pistols or knives or billy clubs or anything as specific as that. They simply gave citizens the right to bear arms. Why? Because they knew that the most fundamental element of our national existence rested on the laurels of the individual citizen and they just could no€™t allow themselves to fall under the temptations of hypocrisy by restricting our personal selection of personal protection. In a nutshell, they told the world€“ at least that part of it that can read plain English that they believed that every citizen of the United States had a fundamental right to protect themselves and to do so by any means that said citizen would deem necessary. Hypocrisy was never, ever the intent of our Constitution.

When they wrote "€œWe the People" they did not mean only the rich as in Colonial England, or the poor as in later Soviet Russia, or the privileged or the whomever. When they granted us freedom of religion, they did not intend for only that religion endorsed by government or city council; they intended for citizens to €œfreely express€ their religion without preferential treatment. When they set up our Congress, they did not cater merely to the large and wealthy states; they gave every one a pair of senators to balance the privilege of being so blessed. If our founding fathers were so careful as to not single out any group of people save for the very citizens of this nation then they did not desire to dissect our rights to protect ourselves through the possession and ownership of firearms.

Thus they did not intend to single out only those who wished to hunt from those who wished to target practice; those who liked to collect over those who liked to survive. They said that €œthe People have a right to do damn well whatever they pleased with guns and we have no legitimate basis for preventing them from doing so. They weren't hypocrites, but today'€™s generation often is.

Many alive today try to do everything humanly possible to chip away at our unity through fraudulent laws designed to serve no purpose but to safeguard those who wish to break laws and criminalize those who wish to protect themselves. They work through deceit and hyperbole. They try to segregate us citizens into smaller and more vulnerable groups. By laying claims that Assault Weapons have no value as hunting rifles they chip away at our right to protect ourselves on par with those who wish to destroy us. By saying that trigger locks must be attached to our weapons they merely desire for our assailants to have an edge in killing us instead of our killing them. They simply want the millions of us more responsible citizens to pay for the 752 or so people (based upon 2003 census statistics) who get accidentally shot each year. Apparently, we never seem concerned enough about the 1,685 people who die each year from hemorrhoid infections to pass legislation keeping our legislators on their toes every day.

Those who wish to see us unarmed desire so because they simply do not value the individual human being as highly as we do. They attack us from every conceivable quarter from denying us our natural birth right to our ability to die a peaceful and dignified death upon reaching old age. Beyond our mere bodies, they seek to deny us our right to worship our Creator out in the open and even dilute our very citizenship by inviting those who invade us illegally to share in the fruits of our toils. Our founding fathers never intended for us to be so diluted and this is why they gave us the right – not the privilege€“ to defend ourselves with the arms of our choosing.

Some may argue that there are some people out there who might be a danger if they were allowed to arm themselves with, say, a Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun. I might argue that there are those out there who might be a danger if they merely attended a fraternity party. What I personally believe does not matter one iota; our nation was built on the principal of personal evolution and competition. What works, lasts; what doesn't, won'€™t. We simply can'€™t deny the vast majority of honest, hardworking people an ability to protect themselves just because some oafs blow their foot off with a 12 gauge. Consider how many police officers are shown nearly every week engaging within some horrendous crime of their own. We do not even consider banning all police officers because of these villains, do we? Do we deny the rights of whites because of the Ku Klux Klan; of blacks because of the Muslim Brotherhood; of clergy because of pedophiles; of teachers because of rapists; of sports athletes because of steroids?

The United States of America grew to prominence because its founding fathers believed that freedom rests upon the laurels and liberties of concerned citizens. They understood that the greatest threat to these rights came not from the few who challenge themselves mentally, but of the few that sought leadership by way of tyranny. They understood that the power elite of the entire planet would never number more than perhaps two or three hundred and that the only way the rest of the billions could endure was to ensure that they were able to arm and defend themselves against anyone who sought to deny them of their God-given right to live as they so choose. They might not have been able to do much for the rest of the world, but they sure as hell knew how to keep Americans at the forefront of the battle against tyranny. Any law restricting the ownership of any type of firearm is simply another nail in the coffin of freedom. Let'€™s not willingly disarm ourselves through capitulation.


NEXT: SECURE BORDERS, SECURE AMERICA.

(The above article is the 6th in a series by R. J. Godlewski, exclusively for Right Truth. A new installment will be published each Monday. Please leave your comments or questions for Mr. Godlewski here in the comments section and he will respond.)

This is the 6th article in the series, THE BASIS FOR A STRONG NATION. Read the previous articles: Chapter One in the series, "A Return to American basics" ... Chapter Two, "What is an American?" ... Chapter Three, "One Nation Without God?" ... Chapter 4 "Duty and the Responsibility of Citizenship", Chapter 5 "Political Warfare and the Proliferation of the Vote"

Be sure to check out Mr. R.J. Godlewski's website here and the Independent Counterterrorist Training Program written by Mr. Godlewski for Right Truth.

(NOTE: I posted this early, I'll be out of pocket for a bit.)
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rackposted to Outside the Beltway, Rosemary's Thoughts, Adam's Blog, Maggie's Notebook, Cao's Blog, Leaning Straight Up, Conservative Cat, Adeline and Hazel, D equals S, Diary of the Mad Pigeon, McCain Blogs, Woman Honor Thyself, Pirate's Cove, The Pink Flamingo, Wolf Pangloss, Dumb Ox Daily News, Tilting At Windmill Farms, and Right Voices, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.

Comments

[Debbie]

Thanks everybody for the input, comments, links. We are back home now, so programming should get back to normal.

[epaminondas]

"Either the govt fears the people, or the reverse" TJ (paraphrase)

[nanc]

debbie - ironically, charleton heston has passed from our midst. rip moses, nra spokesperson.

http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/080405/clsa013.html?.v=11

[Angel]

youre right..this right to defend ourselves is slowly being taken away as well..sigh

[nanc]

one day, very soon i fear - the rest of the country is going to be dayamed glad we are armed.

they don't know it now, but they are in for a rude awakening, debbie.

o.t. - i have a couple of posts up you may be interested in and fern has put a new one up above mine - first one for him in over three months!

[Francis W. Porretto]

The aspect of civilian armament that I find is always underplayed is its strengthening effect on the perception of the individual as his own responsibility -- in particular, his own responsibility for his defense. There's a wonderful spinoff from that ethic, once internalized: The armed citizen begins to see those around him as worthy of defense, and will more likely come to others' aid when the occasion demands it.

George Herron captured this mindset beautifully:

"The great man of the future, in distinction from the great man of the past, is he who will seek to create power in people, and not gain power over them."

Guns are good for that.

[Rosemary]

This is such a great book! Thank you for taking the time to feed the masses. ;)

[Layla]

Interestingly most keep missing it. It is not the weapon that is the issue or problem, but the person behind that weapon. Unfortunately there may be no happy medium.

[Stormwarning]

And once I get mine, watch out! You realize how dangerous a Yankee is when carrying?

[Skunkfeathers]

Just try and take my weapon, especially if you're a limp-wristed, snivelling liberal appeaser of all things Islamofascist ;)

[KAK]

Yes gun ownership is a big plus(what else would a country boy say, shooting guns was a part of playing). No one will ever take mine!

[Aurora]

Ironic when you think of it that the power elite make up only a few hundred. No wonder they're pushing to disarm the populations of the world. There are only a few nations left that allow arms, and America is one of the only ones in the free world. In Australia, only farmers can own a gun and then only under very strict regulations.
This is a real blessing you have, America.

[Maggie Thornton]

So far, the "rest of the billions," for the most part have failed at keeping themselves free from tyranny.

America's "frontiersman" heart and internal constitution, will rise to the cause with the help of Alito and Roberts.

This essay should be delivered to the doorstep of all Hollywood and surrounds (but BEWARE as you approach their front porch - they keep their arms close - because they are special!).

Maggie