It’s been funny how the anti-gun left has suddenly discovered the Second Amendment since Alex Pretti was killed.
I’m not someone who thinks it’s wise to bring a gun to a “protest,” particularly when part of that protest is to interfere with federal law enforcement officers. Even if you don’t intend to interfere with anyone, it’s still just a bad idea as a general thing.
It doesn’t mean you don’t have a right to do it, but there are a lot of things I have a right to do that would be a terrible idea.
My right to free speech means I have a right to say, “Yes, those jeans actually do make you look fat,” but we all know that’s not the best way to live a long and happy life as a married man, don’t we?
In a recent piece in the San Luis Obispo Tribune, one voice highlighted something that followed in the post-Pretti aftermath that I’ve been wanting to address for a while.
In recent weeks, the conversation around protests and immigration enforcement has taken a sharp turn.
Some voices on the left are no longer just criticizing ICE or calling for policy changes. They are openly asking why “Second Amendment people” aren’t showing up at protests and, by implication, why they aren’t armed. That framing turns a constitutional right into a political challenge and ignores how these situations actually play out in the real world.
I believe in the Second Amendment, and I will defend it without hesitation. The right to keep and bear arms isn’t a slogan you pull out when it’s convenient. It’s a serious constitutional protection that comes with responsibility and judgment. Having the right doesn’t mean you should use it in every situation. Defending that right doesn’t mean pretending every use of it makes sense or leads to a good outcome.
This debate came into focus on recent episodes of the Dave Congalton Show. Tribune editor Joe Tarica pointed to District Attorney Dan Dow and framed Dow’s view that people should not bring guns to protests as the flip side of the Second Amendment, questioning how someone can support the right to bear arms while also urging restraint in that setting.
Now, the author has his own take on this, which is fine, though I don’t think I’d frame it quite the same way he did, as I can see that being flipped way too easily by anti-gunners, but I think he means well.
My own take on this is that these people seem to think that they get to determine which situations are sufficiently bad, at least in their view, that people like you and I–people who often don’t share their views on much of anything–can and should be willing to show up to a cause that isn’t ours, just to engage in a gun battle with law enforcement officers because people who want to disarm us think we should.
I’m sorry, but you don’t get to decide where the line in the sand is for us.
Yeah, I’ve spilled a lot of digital ink taking issue with some of the comments coming out of the ostensibly pro-gun Trump administration, but words are words, and until they start coming for our guns, I’m not going to suddenly decide the anti-ICE cause is my own.
I don’t like the visual of armed federal agents swarming neighborhoods any more than they do, but immigration laws have been on the books for decades, and were enforced by every president before the Biden administration. I recognize that these swarms are taking place in sanctuary cities that refused to cooperate with ICE in the past, meaning a large concentration of illegal aliens is there, necessitating these swarms of federal agents having to come in to do their jobs.
Why would I put my life on the line to show up at a protest for a cause I disagree with, just because someone who legally had a gun in a bad situation got shot after putting his hands on a federal agent, then not cooperating with the ensuing arrest? It shouldn’t have happened, but as it’s being investigated now, I’m not about to go down in some blaze of glory just because it happened.
Most gun owners, particularly those concerned with the rise of tyranny, have their own tripwires. Gun confiscation is the typical one for most of us, but even if we’re willing to die to defend this nation from its own government for other topics, that’s not something the anti-gunners get to pick.
I can defend the right to keep and bear arms while urging restraint because, frankly, this isn’t the hill to die on. Figuratively or literally, and no newspaper editor or leftist agitator gets to dictate to me otherwise.
You don’t get to spend decades demonizing people like me, then suddenly decide that the moment it’s convenient for you, we’re suddenly supposed to forget everything we stand for just so we can be your meat shield.
No, you don’t get that call. You don’t get to decide that we, as Americans, should die protecting violent illegal aliens who simply don’t want to go back to their home countries, or even defending the masses of illegal aliens who will get counted in the next census and give your enclaves higher representation so you can come and take our guns later on.
That’s not what you get to decide for us. You don’t get to decide what we’re willing to die for.
We decide that, and trust me, what most of us are willing to die over is something you will not be fond of.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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