Ballot offers peaceful protection of the Constitution
Using your ballot to protect the Constitution first will protect your freedoms as a hunter, firearms owner, and American.
Reader Note: This editorial is solely the opinion of the OWO publisher
On the campaign trail, Donald Trump had taken the stick to the beehive again. The “Second Amendment people may have other ideas” the candidate had said in a few word prediction that Americans won’t forfeit their right to gun ownership even by order of a Clinton-nominated Supreme Court.
The media had swarmed over it as a threat of violence. On the contrary, I found Trump’s words insightful. Trump was acknowledging my own second amendment advocacy and pre-election commitment to help protect our Constitution and freedoms as we are obligated to protect it.
This election is a call to arms. We are loaded, however, with the greatest gift handed us as Americans; the right to remove or elect leadership non-violently, with the ballot.
Trump’s latest confrontation with the media was also a reminder of the late Charlton Heston’s speech to the National Press Club that remains pinned on my office wall.
“Today, I want to talk to you about guns; why we have them, why the Bill of Rights guarantees that we have them, and why my right to have a gun is more important than your right to rail against it in the press,” Heston said. “It is time that our youth found out that the politically correct doctrine of today has misled them. And when they reach legal age, if they do not break our laws they have a right to choose to own a gun to defend themselves and their loved ones or to engage in any lawful purpose they desire without apology or explanation to anyone, ever.”
“This is their first freedom. If you say that it’s outdated, then you haven’t read your own headlines. If you say guns create only carnage, I would answer that you know better. Declining morals, disintegrating families, vacillation of political leadership, an eroding criminal justice system and social morals that blur right from wrong are more to blame than any legally owned firearms.”
Declining morals, in fact, that we have allowed to infiltrate our political leadership to the point that lies and misconduct are commonplace and elected and appointed officials feel comfortable enough with the complacency of the voter that they spew their deceit in the light of day, without embarrassment or humiliation. Recent scandals beginning with leadership at the VA, IRS, and DOJ offer further evidence that the inner circle in Washington believes its more worthy than you, the 320 million American citizens that they work for. They are King George, or the Noblemen in Braveheart. You are something less. Did you know that when the FBI interviewed Clinton in July, she was not administered a sworn oath, the discussion was not recorded or transcribed, and that Director James Comey was not even in the room? And where is that watchdog media?
Judicial activism which ignores existing law disregards judicial oaths to defend the Constitution and seeks to establish from the bench rulings based on personal or political consideration remains our greatest threat to freedom. Trump has publically released a closely scrutinized list of 11 candidates from which he would nominate for the Supreme Court. Each is a constitutionalist committed to render rulings from existing law, not to creating law.
Clinton nominees will push the balance of the Supreme Court currently deadlocked to the radical extreme. We can outlast any party’s presidential term, and remove Trump after four years if warranted. Our Constitutional Republic, though, will not outlast a radical Supreme Court majority appointed for a lifetime.
The war on freedom is here. The means to fight it, even if our gun ownership someday soon translates into making each of us “felons” with the stroke of our lawmakers’ pen, is already here too. But we won’t be turning in our guns. Ever.
“The answer has been here all along,” wrote Heston, who marched for Civil Rights with Dr. Martin Luther King. “You simply…disobey. Peaceably, yes. Respectfully, of course. Non-violently, absolutely. But when told how to think or what to say or how to behave, we don’t. We disobey social protocol that stifles and stigmatizes personal freedom. I learned the awesome power of disobedience from Dr. King…who learned it from Gandhi, and Thoreau and Jesus, and every great man who led those in right against those in might.”
The tyrant is at the door, as surely as it was 240 years ago. November 8, use the gift.