I am tired of cowards.

I am tired of cowards.  Baby boomer cowards terrified of a war.  Generation X cowards terrified of a fist fight.  Millennial cowards terrified of WORDS.  And now we have David Hogg and his ilk terrified of absolutely EVERYTHING, willing to literally sacrifice liberty for safety.  Everybody focuses on the first part of Franklin's quote, but read the whole thing; we do not DESERVE our liberty if we are willing to give it up out of FEAR.  Our founders believed in a society of the brave in order to be a land of the free.  We cannot be one without the other; our system of government is built on the premise that men would behave as men when confronted with foreign invasion, cattle rustlers, highwaymen, frontier justice or the myriad other violent deaths available in a free, criminal-friendly country founded by men committing treason against the Crown.  I am tired of pacifists who believe violence is never the answer and that violence itself is the most evil thing in the world.  These are the people who get slaughtered.  Ask a survivor of a concentration camp how well non-violence and pacifism worked for their family.  I am tired of Americans trying to sacrifice their own freedom because they are afraid.  A wheelchair bound polio suffering ultra-liberal was less afraid than David Hogg because he recognized that "fear itself" is the truly terrifying condition.  Please grow some courage.

I am tired of the NRA getting into screaming matches with these cowards.  We have to do a better job of being the hyper-rational, not the emotional.  We have to argue not just about the Second Amendment, but about The Constitution as a whole.  We have to be scholars of the whole document and argue not just for one aspect of the Bill of Rights, but also for the entire process contained within the document.  It is the undermining of The Constitution at large that is the real threat to a democratic republic.  We cannot look like lunatics in these arguments, because the deck is stacked against the NRA in every one of these "panel" discussions.  Being emotionally attached to guns will not serve us.  Being the most rational person, the most scholarly person, the least emotional person on a stage is the only way we can demonstrate that it's the cowards terrified of violence who are the truly irrational ones.  Stop yelling about guns and making us look like every redneck caricature to ever appear in The New Yorker, and start calmly explaining the importance of respecting The Constitution in its entirety.  Stop arguing the utility, culture and history of firearms, and stop arguing about tyranny of an oppressive government; big government liberals will never be convinced by that argument.  What they can be convinced of is the utility of Due Process of Law, the utility of the Unreasonable Search and Seizure clause, or the utility of the Freedom of Speech.  Also, the process for amending The Constitution.  There is a movement to repeal the Second Amendment through a Constitutional Amendment, as happened with Prohibition; I think that is wonderful because that is how the process is supposed to work.  Defend the greatest aspect of The Constitution, which is that it CAN be amended.  We will not change the minds of people who are already afraid of everybody with a gun by acting like irrational, deranged gun fetishists who only care about the right to own the object.  Argue about the right to self-defense, not the right to use a gun to defend yourself.  Owning the object should not be what we stand for, we have to stand for all of The Constitution, including the ability to amend any aspect or amendment of it should the super-majority required to do so be assembled.  We have to stand for the entire Bill of Rights, stop competing with liberals in some sort of tit-for-tat duel about which is more important of the first two amendments; they are both equally important, as are all the other creator-given rights protected from the government by our founding document.

Every shouting match we get into plays right into their hands of making us look like unhinged, dangerous rednecks.  Be Constitutional scholars, not gun nuts!  Argue not for the Second Amendment, but for the integrity of The Constitution as a whole, which is truly under threat.  Most importantly of all, argue as the Left's greatest hero did that fear, not violence, is the enemy to be overcome.  I have said it thousands of times: The only thing that defeats terror is COURAGE!

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