By Lynda Bryant-Work

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Benjamin Franklin, 1755. 

Every student of American history knows the words. And every lover of liberty has heard them and known that they speak to that great truth about the constitution of civilized government – that governments are empowered to protect its citizens in a devil’s bargain from which they will lose in the long run.

Through the history of the world, tyrants have sought power under the guise of protecting the citizens and people they deem to rule.

The Founding Fathers were highly suspicious of government after living under the king’s heavy hand. They understood that big government is tyrannical, and whether being forced to pay taxes, host the king’s soldiers or writs of assistance, tyranny was at every turn.

When the colonials got tired of British rule, did they petition the government for change – knowing full well what the answer would be? Did they ask nicely? Did they try to move somewhere else? No.

They armed themselves and fought for freedom because they knew the only way to be free was with the blood of tyrants. All it takes to be free is the courage to pick up arms and battle the tyrants.

The Second Amendment

The Founding Fathers laid down the Constitution and Bill of Rights to protect the citizenry from the government, and in that great document were two critical elements to protect the people – the First Amendment and the Second Amendment, or the right to a voice and the right to bear arms to protect themselves.

What two things do tyrants want to remove? The voice of the people and their ability to fight back, because at some point, the bigger the government, the more freedom is taken from the citizen. 

Thomas Jefferson stated, “Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.”

Each day, each year, with increasing acceleration, the United States government has grown bigger and more overreaching.

Government has become bloated and dangerous under both the Republicans and Democrats.                                                                  

The national debt doubled under Presidents Bush and Obama. Add to the danger, the Bush Patriot Act which authorized mass surveillance and was unconstitutional under the Fourth Amendment, followed by Obama authorizing even worse attacks on American’s privacy.

“The means of defense against a foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home,” warned James Madison in his 1787 speech.

And with each passing day, the things that were claimed to be for the protection of the people, have gradually become oppressive laws stealing away the freedoms the Founding Fathers fought and died for.

And now, there are those in government edging towards censorship, politically correct speech that is directed by leftist thinking, and worse, totally removing free thought and any dissenting opinion that would go against the power grab and destruction of the Constitution.

As most have experienced on some level, asking a school-yard bully nicely to stop what he is doing doesn’t always work. It is the same with government tyrants.

The world has always faced tyrants and dictators and either tolerated them or defeated them and citizens must be armed to defeat them. Tyrants do not want 80 million or so gun owners to stand up to them.  

All it takes to be free, is the courage to pick up arms and just fight back.  This is the primary reason every dictator in modern history confiscated guns and disarmed the populace.   

The American people are in danger of accepting arguments that they would be safer disarmed, and it will be the biggest mistake they will ever make.

As Federal Appellate Judge Alex Kozinski pointed out in a dissenting opinion in the case of Silveira v. Lockyer, it is a mistake that a free people make only once.

That’s because once the error becomes manifest, there is no way to correct it.

Consider Kozinski’s words:

“All too many of the other great tragedies of history — Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few — were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and 20 bullets apiece. If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars.”

Gun-control advocates argue, the possibility that the U.S. government would ever be headed by a tyrannical regime is virtually non-existent, owing to America’s exceptional nature. Tyranny happens in other countries. It could never happen here, they say.

The Bill of Rights was written to prevent what the British had done to the Americans from ever happening again. History has shown us time and time again that when the population is disarmed that the Government presiding over them takes complete control and tyranny reigns free.

The Burmese (Myanmar), Cambodia, North Korea, Belarus, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Rome, Cuba, Zimbabwe and Chinese governments are all modern-day examples of tyrannical governments. These countries also happened to have very little or no gun ownership.

History repeats itself, and while some may believe it would not happen in the U.S., it is happening.  If Americans do not stand up for their rights and defend them now, they too will be added to the list.

Tyranny and treason already exist on a large scale inside the United States and is only becoming more and more oppressive.

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