The right to keep and bear arms is preserved in our Constitution thanks to the Second Amendment. Other nations have seen their rights whittled away into nothingness, often starting with gun rights and continuing onward from there. In the UK, what started as a supposedly commonsense response to a mass murder has now morphed into a society that wants to arrest people for memes.
Here, though, we’ve held firm. Our rights are still here, and in many places, they’ve been restored well beyond what was common when I was a kid.
Yet as Charles C.W. Cooke notes at America’s 1st Freedom, how it’s happened is a bit of a story.
Whenever they make a big push for gun control, the legacy media preens and preaches and acts as if they have the high moral ground. Invariably, though, people look at their own situations and realize they need the chance to defend themselves; and they speak with their gun-owning neighbor, friend or family member and think: The people I know who own guns aren’t doing any harm, and they are prepared to do something should evil darken their doorstep.
Indeed, almost everywhere, the opposite of what the legacy media advocates for on this issue is happening. People are asking their neighbors if they own a gun, and, if so, what type; NRA members are telling friends and neighbors all they have to do is log on on to nrainstructors.org to find a quality gun-training class near them; uncles are asking their nephews and nieces if they have any interest in going hunting next weekend.
Since I moved to the United States 14 years ago, I have been taken by how naturally viral American gun ownership is. In many of the countries in which the people have lost their rights, there is less chance of a revival of freedom because there exists no underlying culture to sustain this critical right. This is the key reason that the enemies of the Second Amendment try so hard to vilify gun owners and to stigmatize their choices: They understand that the fastest way to prohibition is to go after the demand as well as the supply. Admirably, Americans have resisted this ploy. Certainly, people are persuadable. But they are being persuaded in the other direction.
Some of this persuasion is done by public figures who share their expertise online. It has been fascinating to watch friends of mine who were previously agnostic on the question of firearms discover a given reviewer or competition shooter or legal expert and realize that much of the information about firearms that they absorbed was either flawed or outright false.
There’s much more there, but this is the gist of what I want to talk about.
On every level, anti-gun forces control almost all of our institutions. Our colleges and universities are staffed almost entirely with anti-gun professors and administrators. The media–both the news and entertainment media–vehemently oppose the right to keep and bear arms and use that bias to inform everything they do as it applies to guns. The bureaucracy is littered with anti-gun voices who have long tried to use their authority to hurt our Second Amendment rights.
And yet, we keep gaining ground in most places.
See, the truth is that the institutions may have all bought in on gun control, but the American people haven’t bought in on the idea that they have to be beholden to those institutions.
The American people have instead decided to try and largely think for themselves.
YouTube has been accused of creating a funnel that takes young people from an interest in video game content and directs them toward gun content. Considering the way the site’s algorithm works for me, I can potentially see that.
But that also means it does it for adults who can lawfully own firearms. Many of today’s adults grew up playing video games and continue to do so. They consume gaming content on YouTube and may well get fed content from someone like Demolition Ranch or Kentucky Ballistics. They start watching because those two guys are just having fun with firearms, but that leads them to stuff that starts getting into the Second Amendment and what anti-gunners are wrong about.
They start looking up information, which might bring them here, where we routinely rip apart the anti-gun narrative.
And that’s only made it harder for the anti-gun forces to push the narrative without being challenged.
So, we win. We keep winning in so many places because far fewer people will listen to those institutions anymore. They’re finding the truth, even if they didn’t know they needed to look for it, and it’s killing the anti-gun agenda.
But while this is good news, it’s not a reason to rest on our laurels. It’s time to step it up and push even harder so we can win back those rights that have been stripped from us ages ago.
That can happen, and it should happen, and anti-gunners will just need to learn to deal with disappointment.
Read the full article here
