The Second Amendment: America’s Last Stand Against Tyranny

The Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, ratified in 1791, states: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

For 234 years, this amendment has stood as a unique cornerstone of American liberty, a guarantee that citizens can protect themselves from tyranny. Yet, as Democrats push anti-gun legislation and activist courts uphold laws that clearly violate the Constitution, an uncomfortable reality emerges:

• The system that is supposed to protect our rights is failing;
• Legislators and judges are actively undermining our rights;
• The very right designed to safeguard all others may be the last line of defense against encroaching tyranny.

The Democratic Party’s platform emphasizes gun control, framing it as a “public safety” issue. Their solutions range from universal background checks to bans on so-called “assault weapons” and standard-capacity magazines, along with use of “red flag” laws that violate due process. Adding insult to injury, they claim that young adults don’t deserve these rights, and have passed numerous laws exempting 18-20-year-olds from firearms possession, most recently in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.

Time and again their propaganda asserts that these disarmament measures reduce violence, citing mass shootings and urban crime statistics, ignoring the obvious reality that criminals by definition do not obey laws of any sort. A simple internet search for “shootings in Chicago” on any given Monday morning proves this to be true. Chicago has some of the nation’s strictest gun controls. On one weekend in 2021, 104 were shot and 19 were murdered – those are battlefield level casualties.

Although the left’s gun-control stats have been discredited many times over, they are not deterred in pushing their narrative. In fact, last year, the Biden FBI was caught red-handed revising 2023 violent crime statistics in an attempt to show that gun control measures reduced crime, when in fact data for that time period showed crime rose significantly. Simultaneously, the left dismisses the millions of documented defensive gun uses every year that save lives.

The 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, signed into law under President Biden, which created the so-called “Office of Gun Violence Prevention,” ended up being a giant slush fund aimed at suppressing Second Amendment rights, to the tune of BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars spent in that effort, as we reported. If you haven’t read about this government-backed disarmament effort, we encourage you to do so immediately.

There are seemingly no upper limits on the left’s efforts to disarm Americans, as evidenced by recently-introduced legislation in Colorado and Minnesota that seeks to ban nearly all semi-automatic firearms – firearms that are owned by law-abiding citizens to the tune of tens of millions.

Judicial activism serves as the left’s opposing flank in the pincer movement on Second Amendment rights. Courts, particularly in liberal-leaning jurisdictions, have upheld restrictions that defy the Supreme Court’s rulings in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022). Heller affirmed an individual right to bear arms for self-defense, while Bruen struck down subjective “may-issue” concealed carry laws, mandating that restrictions align with historical traditions of firearm regulation.

Despite the very clear precedent and instructions, lower courts have slow-walked compliance, sometimes defiantly, by upholding bans on commonly owned firearms like the popular AR-15. This judicial defiance evidences a willingness to prioritize political agendas over fidelity to the Constitution, eroding trust in the system meant to protect individual rights against government oppression and encroachment.

This erosion leaves individual citizens in a precarious position. If the checks and balances intended to negate the collusion between the legislative and judicial branches in undermining a fundamental right are failing, what recourse do we have?

The Founding Fathers wrote ad nausem on the subject of citizens being armed for the express purposes of resisting a tyrannical government. This was not a theoretical safeguard but a practical necessity given the history at our founding. After all, it was British gun control and disarmament that acted as a significant stimulus to start the revolution.

Perhaps a modern perspective in our parlance better illustrates the concept. Charles Krauthammer, a highly respected conservative thought leader and journalist put it thus:

Passing a law like the “assault weapons” ban is a symbolic – purely symbolic – move in that direction. Its only real justification is not to reduce crime but to desensitize the public to the regulation of weapons in preparation for their ultimate confiscation.

History corroborates with sobering reminders: disarmed populations in nations like Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and communist Cuba faced oppression with no means of resistance to the tune of over 100,000,000 dead.

Once surrendered, firearms are rarely reclaimed without significant struggle, either legal, or physical. Make no mistake, the left is playing a long game in an attempt to create a monopoly of force by the state through which it can – and will – wield absolute power arbitrarily. The last four years are evidence of this. In countries that don’t have a Second Amendment, citizens are being jailed simply for speech. The left salivates at their plans for imposing their will on disarmed Americans, in every aspect of life.

The uncomfortable conclusion is that if politically-motivated legislators and courts continue to erode our rights through the legal system, there remains only one safeguard. It is the nuclear option. This is not a call to arms. As with many defensive gun uses on the individual level, the true value of being armed lies in deterrence. However, sometimes the only deterrent to stopping crime is deadly force. Similarly, we are drawing ever nearer to a time when the only way to stop tyranny may be the very tool given to us by our Founding Fathers.