Arms, Atheists and Oppression
Over on NoGodBlog, the ‘house’ Blog of American Atheists, there is a post and comment thread about an attempted railroading of an Oklahoma Atheist family because their daughter objected to being forced into a prayer circle in her tax-payer funded Public School. The story is chilling in what can happen in America today. It is not just Islam that will engage in oppression and tyranny when it gains hegemony over a community. Without a courageous attorney and the support of American Atheists, and innocent man may have been imprisoned and a family run out of a state, forced to abandon their home and business.
So far, this case has attracted little attention outside the Atheist and Freethinker community. I can find no news sources on Google that mention it. Yet the only things this family did not endure were night riders and lynchings.
Corrupt and lying school officials, police, prosecutors and judges, along with biased and bigoted attorneys seeking to exploit and cheat them. It is a story out of the Jim Crow South. All you would need to do is change ‘Atheist’ to ‘African’ and you could not tell this story from others of that era.
Which brings me to arms.
I spend a lot of time, more than I probably should, on the NoGodBlog discussing and arguing with Atheists over politics, against collectivism and gun control, which many, though far from all, seem to support. At least within that grouping.
But one fellow there had a change of heart on guns, like I did over 25 years ago:
I swore I would never resort to gun promotion.
Then I took a job that required me to be armed, to take on the responsibility of protecting others. I leared how to safely handle a firearm.
The gun changed in meaning to me. I realized that it was little more than a tool. A tool when, in the right hands, has as much potential for good as it does for evil! Gun ownership did not transform me into a criminal. It did not give me any more desire to use a firearm on another human being than I already possessed.
It made me question the reason a free nation needs such a tool at all. I had my epiphany - arms make and keep humanity free and safe. Our revolutionaries did not merely bander harsh language with a tyrranical, abusive theocracy. They took lives and gave their own because they believed in their freedom!
I know how I must sound to you. Paranoid, delusional, even insane? I assure you that I’d have held those same sentiments not so terribly long ago! But I was an idealist. I believed in our police, our courts, our laws (and for the most part still do).
But I’ve also taken the bitter pill of realism, I’ve stood face-to-face with men that threatened my very life and the live of those I love. I’ve been forced into the harsh light of the truth: we will never, as a species, stop killing one another and we will never live in the utopias we dream of. The only solution to certain kinds of people will always be violence and it can only be met with violence.
There is more. Go and read the entire post and comments. A worthy story to become familiar with.
In my mostly wasted youth I was also very anti gun. I had stickers on my car from Handgun-Control Inc. The ones with a revolver inside an international ‘NO’ symbol, the circle-slash.
Then I went into the Army, (for the wrong reasons and all too briefly), and actually used some: M-16, M-60, M1911, M2, as well as taking the Armorer course, (not intentionally, it was ‘on the way’).
I still thought they should be severely restricted, but also kept reading on the subject, (among many). Being an activist in the LP, though coming to it from the left, for reason of personal freedom such as an end to Drug Prohibition, as well as an obsessive reader, I was exposed to ideas and thinkers from a wide variety of sources.
Having read the arguments on both sides, and having experience with arms, how they operate and their capabilities and just as important, their limitations, my mind was changed.
Everything I have seen, including the tragedies, since then has only reinforced my belief, a belief based on empirical evidence.
Like drug prohibition, gun prohibition is worse that whatever social ills it is supposed to cure.
While gun prohibition is no guarantee of political tyranny, it sets the stage. Every oppression or slaughter of minorities in history has been prefaced by a disarming of the targeted group. Go back in history before firearms were invented and you will see it. Look at modern history and you will see it.
In the past century alone, disarmed populations have been slaughtered in Armenia, Germany, Russia, China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Uganda, Somalia, Rwanda, more.
The banning of guns has lead to massive increases in crime in Jamaica, Britain and Australia, not to mention cities like Washington, D.C. and Chicago.
Guns in the hands of individuals can lead to tragedies, but they are tragedies limited to what a single person can do.
Guns in the hands of governments, without an equally armed populace to restrain that government, leads to tragedy on a national scale, if not outright slaughter.
Minorities of all persuasions, racial, religious, political, all of them, should always keep arms, and not let the government know it.
The day the government decrees that you must give up your arms is the day you must use them, even if it is just to flee over the border to the safety of asylum in another country.