What's to Become of Liberty
if Citizens Neglect its Defense?
It's common sense to expect tyranny.
Give me Liberty or give me death! Really? That’s so-o-o-o old fashioned!
Patrick Henry would scarce recognize today the America his courage and sacrificial conviction helped create. His feet would run to higher ground rather than risk the slippery slope where citizens – Americans! – are willing to sacrifice their personal liberty for a shallow perception of safety.
So weakened are the institutions established for our protection that when they inevitably fail to do so, the hue and cry from government is to give them even more of our liberty, not less. Death indeed!
Sadly as a culture we are amusing ourselves to death, occupied with accumulation, apathy, and appeasement. Many who enjoy the blessings of liberty are at the same time so blithely ignorant of the price paid to preserve it for them, that they willingly surrender it at the first sign of trouble.
It’s common sense that a man willing to cede personal liberty for safety will rarely enjoy either. Republican (little “r”) philosophers theorized that citizens who did not participate in the active protection of their communities would become passive and dependent and easily subjugated. More common sense!
Ordered liberty requires a strenuous defense by the rule of law. But an important check has always been in place – that of the right of an informed and armed citizenry to defend itself should that liberty be threatened by government neglect or, heaven forbid, should they become the aggressor.
Had our founders never written a second amendment to the Constitution, we would still not be naked before aggression. Every citizen is guaranteed the unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. from which floe the natural rights to self-defense, whether by aggression against their personally, their family, their property, or their liberty.
We don’t believe Patrick Henry, Patriot, would be intimidated by an Al Quaeda obsessed with confiscating our freedom; nor cowed by a confiscatory Congress who, pinch by regulatory pinch, will ultimately manage much the same; nor oppressed by a court infected with the same myopic vision and arbitrarily taking what is not theirs – guaranteed rights to property, to self-defense, to free expression, religion, and association, all in concert with the siren song of socialism.
As long as we have breath we will stand against that erosion. And as long as that breath allows we’ll ask you to stand with us.
