The Last Civil-Rights Struggle?
Discrimination And Prejudice Are Still Encouraged.
Gun Owners Have Taken It Long Enough
It’s time for the last oppressed class to regain its lawful place in society.The days of blatant unwarranted discrimination must end. We’ve learned bigotry is wrong. Segregation is wrong. The time has come to expand the basic fairness principle to all of us who exercise our fundamental human and civil right to defend ourselves against harm, by exercising our constitutionally explicit Second Amendment rights.
Exercising rights protected in the US Bill of Rights is about equal protection under the law. The idea of “protected classes” of people, however controversial, is the law of the land at this point in time. So-called “private-property rights” is no longer a valid excuse to exclude entire classes of people from places open to the public.
Our nation must come to recognize one of those classes is people who choose to lawfully keep and bear arms. Blatant fear-mongering discrimination against this class is as humiliating, disgraceful and wrong as Jim Crow laws. It must screech to a halt. This is not some new right discovered (invented?) in penumbras and emanations (shadows and radiation) by the US Supreme Court in 1965. It is, as the Heller case properly framed it, “a specific enumerated right,” right there in the Constitution since 1791, for all to see.
Every wild-eyed expression of doom this afflicted class has had to endure, voiced by the fearful, the haters, the delusional paranoids, echoed in hopelessly biased media coverage about “dangerous carry-permit holders,” has been proven false beyond doubt. All 50 states now have some form of recognized carry regimen. Every new permit plan faced phony bloody hyperbole by anti-rights mobs. None of this ever came to pass. Corrections were never issued. Shame on journalists and their RICO-style cohorts terrifying the public at large with lies.
We recently witnessed more than 80,000 gun owners, most of them armed, spend four days at NRA’s conference in Georgia. Everyone survived. No shots were fired. Police stood around idly talking to each other with little to do in the safest rooms in town. The President of the United States showed up, safely. The bigots are flat-out wrong. The media refuse to acknowledge it, still perpetuating prejudiced myths. They disgrace their profession. Truth doesn’t matter to them.
Legal gun owners do not shoot people, unless in defense. Criminals shoot people. The blood and Wild West the gunist-bigots promise never happens. Never. They’ve been demonstrably wrong 50 times in a row. Every time another state enacted a permit system, the so-called “news” and highly coordinated prejudice-interest groups geared up their anti-rights machines anyway, with reporters in lockstep.
Permits?
What’s with this permit system anyway? Would black folks, church goers, gays — or anyone — ever remotely accept the idea you need a government-issued permission slip to exercise your right to be on the street, or walk into a building? Does the idea you need to pass government tests, or pay taxes called “license fees” sound remarkably like poll taxes to you? That’s because they are the same thing.
How can anyone running a public place demand “private-property rights!” and keep you out? It is preposterous — unless you’re finally willing to concede the libertarian principle private-property rights should trump everything else, race, religion and sex included.
Who owns a store anyway — you, the owner, or the government dictating what you can do with your property? The argument true freedom advocates make is hard to deny — you own you. But that ship has sailed, with the Civil Rights Act, the Disabilities Act and more. Those may be among America’s biggest mistakes.
But it’s no longer up to the shopkeeper/owner to decide who can enter and who can’t. Until owners can run a dance club for blacks only, or no blacks, or women, or no women, or exclude any of the mind-numbing list of “protected classes” that have proliferated — excluding peaceful law-abiding armed citizens based on creed, philosophy or possession of personal private property is unacceptable behavior. It must stop. The excluders are the law breakers. It is segregationists who earn arrest. That’s the law.
Discriminating against your neighbors in public has negative side-effects you must remember. Banning them by posting obnoxious signs creates make-believe gun-free zones, which are known to be dangerous, reckless and negligent.
By denying people their rights you encourage negative consequences. Restrict a religious group, or women or any other group defined by who they are, what they own or what they believe and you create a disgruntled underclass that can rise up against you. It has happened throughout history. The last thing we want in America is for bigots and gunist hate mongers to win the battle for our property, place us in figurative cages without our arms, while they keep theirs. It could hardly be more discriminatory and outrageous.
It’s time for the last minority to regain its lawful place in society. It’s way past time for decent law-abiding gun owners to stop quietly accepting the criminally detestable abuse they suffer every time they are told to go to a different lunch counter or drink at a different fountain.
Keeping good people out of public transit is intolerable. Erecting sanctuary cities for people who snuck into America, regardless of felonies they may have committed, while castigating decent, peaceful, law-abiding fellow citizens for practicing the Bill of Rights is the height of hypocrisy. The days of blatant unjustifiable segregation against armed Americans must end. It is the bigots who belong incarcerated, not the good guys.
Alan Korwin’s website features plain-English books on state and federal gun laws for the public. He invites you to write to him or see his work, at GunLaws.com.
Nov/Dec 2017 Cover
