By Walter Hass
Anti-gun people can ask some silly questions. Recently a reader who obviously has a problem with AR-15 rifles and those who own them asked me, “Can you tell me one good thing they ever accomplished with your AR-15 rifle?”
Amazingly transparent question. Again I wonder how Q’ Anon’ers can take it. The amount of troll questions about the USA and it’s 2nd amendment are almost as abundant as there are AR-15 owners these days. Nonetheless I will attempt to speak to the rational reader that asks questions to gain insight and actually expand their knowledge. Many other good folks here have addressed the factual, basis and form of your question in a, hopefully, productive exercise in education. So I leave that part to the eloquent authors of the other responses.
My tack will be an attempt to show the nature of your answer. Firstly remove the gun from the question. Because the moment you bring the tool of the bad actor into a discussion, and not the bad actor, you have a non sequitur. It’s as if the survivors of a drunk driver would ask you what good thing have YOU done with your car? It fits because the implication of your question is what could you possibly do with a gun that is worth the lives recently and tragically ended in Parkland Fl. Are alcohol or cars worth the thousands of lives lost to drunk driving?
These issues are always brought to the forefront after a tragedy. The unique aspect of this particular issue is the politic of guns. Fortunately, our liberties, as enumerated in the bill of rights, are not granted. They are simply listed. If I wrote a list of your appendages, arms, legs etc, the list doesn’t give you arms and legs. You were born with them. Same with the bill of rights. The 5 freedoms listed in the 1st amendment ( religion, speech, press, assembly and petition) are natural rights of all human beings. I realize that to many non-Americans this concept is foreign. Especially those that have been saddled with the yoke of elitist rule for millennia. Like Europeans.
Standing guard for those freedoms is the 2nd amendment. Again an natural born right. Every human has the right to protect themselves and their kin. What this, in its foundation, means is beyond guns. It stands there as a affirmation that a human has the choice of being governed. When that choice is removed, either in the small sense of someone breaking into your home or the large sense of a totalitarian government, you have the absolute right, actually it says in the Declaration of Independence that you have the DUTY, to defend your freedom from tyranny.
So basically your question asks for a demonstrable good action that any gun owner experienced with specifically their AR platform rifle. I offer that all of us, tens of millions of AR platform rifle owners, through the exercise of our natural right, is a good thing. We are doing exactly what our founders intended us to do. In that very act we solidify what it is to be an American.
The rest of the arguments all, while good, miss the point of the natural right to own and bear an AR platform rifle, the modern version of the common flintlock smooth bore in the Founders’ time.
Before you run off on the advance of technology and that the founders couldn’t possibly have envisioned people owning an AR platform rifle. Keep in mind that they also never envisioned this very medium I’m writing on. Nor television town halls, or anything beyond nailing a document to the post in the center of town. Social media bullying has caused the self-inflicted deaths of thousands of innocents. Deaths made possible by the anonymous and free exercise of the natural right of freedom of speech. Where are the marches? Protests? The boycotts against the social media platforms? Are videos of cats playing the piano worth the thousand of deaths abetted by these social media platforms? So I ask YOU, tell me one good thing you accomplished with your social media platform that is worth the thousand of lives lost and injured through bad actors’ bullying?
Author: Walter Hass is a gun enthusiast who lives in the United States, is Self Employed and Studied at School of Hard Knocks. Other than that he’s a bit of a mystery.
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