The slippery slope - my friends in the United States, say no to gun control

The slippery slope - my friends in the United States, say no to gun control

In my country, Canada, over the past couple of decades I have been witnessing an attack on civil rights - freedoms hard-won and long-held in western democracies. The one thing that has shored my will in the promotion of liberty has been knowing that just below us was the United States – the bastion of enlightenment values as expressed in the constitution of your country. It grieves me to watch, as the narrative that carried the United States to lead the western world to prosperity and to be more peaceful, is being fractured; this is happening to the extent that the stability you’ve given the world is in jeopardy. Civilizations end because they give up on their core values and the will to defend them. I shudder at the thought of what has been and can still be, the beacon of liberty for the world, being lost to us all.

In the 800 years since the Magna Carta came to be, there has been a bid to emancipate the people, to allow the autonomous individual to come into existence and let a thousand flowers bloom – this bid has been aptly dubbed the cause of freedom. As with all movements, the pursuit of the movement’s end goal ebbs and flows. As an observer of the United States, and a most appreciative neighbour, I see the cause of freedom ebbing. On the occasions where the cause of freedom has ebbed in the past, it has been done a little at a time – one concession at a time, until one night you’re awakened to the sound of hob-nailed boots on your front stairs. The population is always horrified when it happens as the lead-up is a slow and insidious series of concessions, and then there is a tipping point, and a tyrant has the reins.

The founders of the United States were students of history. They understood what happened when absolute power landed in the hands of a few. Therefore, they designed a modality of governance to prevent that very thing from happening – competing arms of government, and competing centers of power. This was done with an eye to having the government answerable to the people. They knew something else, it is a cruel truth, but a truth to be reckoned with, that truth being, if people can steal power from a legitimate government they will and then there are only people to attend to their own defence and the preservation and restoration of liberty. They knew another cruel truth, sometimes words fail, and force becomes necessary and when that day comes you want more than a rock in your hand.

In Canada, I have written letters to the government attempting to share the wisdom of your founding fathers with people of influence, but my words have fallen on deaf ears. When I was 14 years old, I walked into the McCleod’s hardware store with $135 I earned working on a ranch, I purchased a 30-30 rifle and two boxes of ammunition and walked down the main street of Vernon BC to my father’s office to get a ride home – no one was endangered by me doing that. As time progressed the government began gun control measures. This started with us having to register our guns and get a license to possess firearms after having a background check. Now, the government has decided to take away certain classes of firearms, and now again, the government has banned handguns. The millions of lawful gun owners who are having their right to own firearms taken away, one step at a time, have done nothing wrong – they have been vetted for criminality. The facts and figures I have accumulated on this subject are outside the scope of this document. However, I can tell you there is no justification in the context of public safety for these measures. I want to warn my friends in the United States, that gun control initiatives, while wrapped up in public safety offer no advancement in public safety and they will end with your right to keep and bear arms taken away.

When they tell you that the state will look after your security of person, remind them that no matter how committed a police officer is, they can only drive a car so fast and that most acts of violence occur in an instance. When they scoff at you saying you want the right to protect the hard-earned freedoms that are the legacy of millions who gave their lives in the cause of freedom, by discounting the fact that a collection of individuals with small arms can subdue a misdirected modern army, you’ll have one word for them – Afghanistan. When they tell you that the founding fathers really wanted firearms in the hands of government-controlled entities, tell them to look at history. There are a lot of forces at work eroding all that is the United States. Please never give up on your constitution, where it goes the cause of freedom goes.