Americans' God-Given Liberty Is Under Attack
Well, that didn't take long.
They come for the Second Amendment, then they come for the First. Because liberty is always under attack. Follow me here:
1. Only a small group of Parkland students have been embraced by the mainstream media. Specifically, five. Commonality? They all hate guns, the NRA, and Republicans. (Democrats are never mentioned by the five.)
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2. At least two of the of select students are radically extreme in their language. Cameron Kasky told Sen. Marco Rubio to his face: "It's hard to look at you and not look down the barrel on an AR-15." What kind of person even says that? David Hogg has said that NRA members are "pathetic f—ers that want to keep killing our children." For the record, the NRA is a Second Amendment civil rights group funded by 5 million citizens – including me. Its members have been involved in zero mass shootings. This kind of rabid hate-filled screed is immoral and it harshes my mellow.
3. The government's failures are legion. I'm 100 percent hardcore Blue Lives Matter, but in this case, the list of law enforcement failures that allowed this shooting to happen (including officers sitting outside listening to kids being shot) are so mind-numbingly numerous I can't list them all, but you can read them here (Wall Street Journal) and here (Miami Herald).
Bottom line? Had local law enforcement and the FBI had done their jobs, at least some and maybe all of the 17 lives would've been saved. Let that sink in before you get to No. 4.
4. In spite of No. 3, the "gun control" Parkland students, have expressed NO interest in holding law enforcement accountable. ZERO. If law enforcement failed and the result was that your friends were MURDERED, wouldn't you be raging from the rooftops? That would be a rational response. But not for the gun control Parkland students:
- Student Emma Gonzalez said she resents the criticism of law enforcement in this case.
- Student David Hogg defended the officer who sat outside the entire time students were being murdered and has refused to criticize law enforcement failures that killed his fellow students.
5. Apparently, only survivors who favor gun control are "legitimate" survivors. At the "March for Our Lives," any Parkland students that were not pro-gun control were deliberately excluded (Kyle Kashuv, Hunter Pollack – brother of murdered student Meadow Pollack). Their friends (and sister) were just as dead, but they were not deemed to be legitimate voices because they were off message.
6. The "Repeal the Second Amendment" push. In the wake of Parkland, there has been a call (by a former Supreme Court justice and others) for the repeal of the Second Amendment. Both Obama and Clinton are fans of repeal, having praised Australia's gun confiscation as a good model for the U.S.
So obviously, this movement isn't about school safety, keeping our kids safe, or even right the wrongs. It's about power and guns and assaulting liberty. It's an attack on the Second Amendment.
And so we move from an attack on the Second Amendment to the First.
For years there has been a push against free speech with speech codes, warnings about "microaggressions" and hate speech. Since Donald Trump's election, students have violently rioted against free speech, destroying property at places like Berkeley (home of the free speech movement) to stop the free expression of ideas they disagree with. The result? Speakers the anarchists disagreed with were uninvited. Free speech violently crushed.
So unsurprisingly, Parkland student David Hogg has advanced to attacking free speech. Laura Ingraham hurt his feelings with a tweet, so rather than debate he immediately initiated a boycott of her sponsors to silence her.
When she apologized in the spirit of Easter, he said he would not accept her apology until she started speaking exactly the way he wants her to. He wants to control her speech.
Does he really want her silenced because she hurt his feelings? I doubt it. My guess is he wants her silenced because her voice is an impediment to his power.
Liberty is always under assault.
That explains why there's this media steam behind an amazingly illogical argument to increase government power in the face of government failure. That's why there's a movement against speech on campuses and calls to boycott anyone who hurts a radical's feelings. People want to control people – that's the essence of tyranny and, unfortunately, human nature.
The Bible calls this our "sin nature," and the nation's founders understood it. They knew that "power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." They understood that the only safeguard against corruption was to make sure no one person or one group or the government had "absolute power."
How did they do that? They recognized that God is the giver of certain absolute rights, not the government. Among those is freedom of speech, religion, and freedom to defend life, property, and liberty. Whenever those are infringed upon, you have tyranny (see China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela).
When people are willing to ignore the facts and the failure of government, so they can use that same government to limit the rights of the law-abiding, it's critical we recognize their attempts for what they really are: an attack on our God-given liberty.
Posted with permission from https://ilikemycoffeeblack.com
