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We Are a Gun Culture and We Should Embrace It, Not Reject It

(AP Photo/Eric Gay, File)

Without the Second Amendment, the rest of the Bill of Rights is just a wishlist. A private citizen carrying their own weapon was so integral to a free nation that the founding fathers wrote it into the recipe. As a result, America’s metaphoric foundations are mixed with gunpowder. America and guns go hand in hand.

There are people out there (too many in fact) who lament this fact. They believe the founders had miscalculated how advanced guns would be and, as such, should never have included the right to bear arms. This is demonstrably false. The founding fathers were in the midst of technological advancement when it came to all sorts of things, including firearms. They knew what they were doing.

The founding fathers intentionally created America to be a gun culture because they knew that a gun culture would be much harder to subjugate both from without its borders and from within. Having overcome an oppressive government, the founders knew how governments could get when they became too powerful and too cocky.

Fast forward to today, and it’s true that issues have arisen. Freedom and chaos are cousins. People do have easier access to effective weapons here than they do in many other countries, and to be sure there are individuals out there who utilize it to do great evil. We’ve seen it happen on multiple occasions, the most recent being the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers died to a young man intent on doing great evil.

I’ve repeatedly written of various solutions since then, one of which is the arming of teachers.

(READ: It’s Time to Arm Teachers)

A question kept running through my mind; why aren’t they armed already?

I used to hear stories from my dad, uncles, and almost anyone above the age of 50 about how students would come to schools with their rifles and shotguns displayed in the back window of their trucks. Mike Rowe told a story about a friend of his who brought a Mauser, an old German sniper rifle, to school and was stopped by the principal. He wasn’t stopped because he was in trouble, he was stopped because the principal thought it was cool and wanted to get a closer look at it.

There is a myriad of reasons why our society devolved into one where school shootings are an ever-present fear. There’s never been more pressure on an individual to perform for the public. Political correctness has limited our expression so that our thoughts are prisoners in our own minds.

But one thing I’ve arrived back at is that we became a society that can’t defend itself. Nowadays, a child can get in trouble for defending himself from a bully with violence. We’re told violence is never the answer and that we should always tell an authority figure. Anyone who’s been bullied knows this is no deterrent.

But also, thanks to leftist meddling in our mainstream culture, we’ve developed an unhealthy fear of firearms. Where once a man could keep his rifle in his back window, a kid will now be suspended from school for chewing his pop tart into the shape of a gun. We’re told repeatedly that guns are an issue. They’re dangerous and volatile. They’re capable of great evil.

Guns are either voluntarily or legally subtracted from the equation and, to the surprise of too many, crime increases.

You have to wonder what would happen in situations like Uvalde if we embraced our gun culture instead of fleeing from it. If we pursued education and training instead of blind panic and lies.

Throughout our history, ignorance has been one of the greatest flaws of man and we’re eternally struggling to crawl more and more into the light. Once we do, everything seems to become better. Life expectancy increases, technology advances, and we’re given a new view on life.

One thing we’re very aware of is that an armed society is a polite one. If we embrace our gun culture and arm ourselves, it will take care of many problems all at once. Rioting will become a rare occasion, as will mass shootings. Crime will decrease as criminals will begin weighing their crime with their life.

Society will become that much more peaceful.

Our founders knew what they were doing, and had faith that we would do right by each other. Millions of law-abiding gun owners say that they were right, and I think we should trust each other as much as they trusted us.

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