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Posted on 04/14/2003 3:26:38 AM PDT by 2nd_Amendment_Defender
The Second Amendment Movement, the ‘pro-gun’ movement, the RKBA movement - whatever you want to call it, needs to grow. It absolutely has to. We must see an overwhelming groundswell of support and identification with the generations who will be running the planet in a decade or three - and it isn’t there! Are public and private ranges crowded with teenagers we’d welcome into our lives, are we seeing to it that the growth rate of new ranges is outpacing the inflation rate? How about cultural and sociological diversity at matches - much less a reasonable representation of men and women?
We’ve developed a remarkable, closed-loop bunker mentality after thirty-something years of Liberal politics, after countless attacks and slurs and bias in mass media, the legal system, and so on. What have we done? We’ve found something that resembles a ‘high ground,’ where we stoically cling to our historical liturgy of quotes from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers. We state that we welcome anybody who embraces (or at least agrees with) our convictions and sentiments.
And that’s about as far as it goes.
On local, State, and National levels, either in formal organizations or individual conversations, we’re doing little real pro-active outreach.
Absolutely, nationally we’re making wonderful headway with ‘Shall-Issue’ CCW legislation, as well as seeing a semblance of contemporary constitutionalist values in legislators - but I think we’ll face the real likelihood of being irrelevant in another decade at the most.
Why?
Because we’re not risking anything. We’re not tangibly connecting with a majority of people who are ten, twenty, or thirty years younger than we are. We’re not reversing the poisonous Liberal slant delivered daily through public education, much less public television. We’re not visible, much less welcomed and valuable in LBGT centers, AIDS hospices, crisis hotlines or teen rec centers. We’re not demonstrably in the forefront as role models and foster parents for ‘at-risk’ kids.
Where are ‘our’ embedded reporters in the theater of operations in the Gulf, wearing MOLON LABE baseball caps?
Admittedly, an unorganized, invisible grassroots groundswell of responsible adults may well succeed in delivering our Republic whole and renewed, even revitalized to some degree to our inheritors - but I worry that, even in such a ‘best-case’ scenario what will be reaped is an even more polarized, almost secularized socio-political climate where neither side will tolerate the other.
And that has given me nightmares.
I’m focused on outreach. Relevant, humanistic, honest efforting that sees us researching and comprehensively learning the stories and lives and beliefs and priorities of people outside a given comfort zone. We have to actually know who our neighbors are, what our cities’ homeless youth value, how a culturally defined perception is formed - to be able to relate, and then accept, even welcome the risk of letting ‘them’ know who we are.
A moral high ground is easily defensible, but tactically, it’s suicide in the long run. An adversary can easily encircle you and isolate you - and then you have no connectivity, no relevance. I forward the concept of celebrating our mutual commitment to the natural right to self-defense by committing ourselves to dismantling and rejecting the very real ‘Conservative Curtain’ that only accepts the individual who comes to us first.
It’s time to grow, to lead with depth and delightful, real confidence and enthusiasm, to gift the reality of what we cherish to the future and the world we will not live to see.
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They will have some direct experience of what happens when tyrants take over a nation, and they will want none of that.
We purchased some life sized Osama and Saddam targets and had a BLAST!
They are both hooked, and when they left they were planning on getting carry permits!
Shooting machine guns is a GREAT way to "turn on" a newbie!
The Assault Weapons Ban renewal will never get to his desk. Congress will kill it. Most Republicans don't want to touch it with a ten foot pole because they know they will feel the wrath of the voters the next month.
What makes you think that if the AWB is renewed it won't be made permanent (and broader, as well)?
Personally, I think that it won't get past the House. However, these things usually turn our worse for our RKBA than they should, especially when aided by a "coincidental" mass killing by some psychopath a week or so before a major vote is scheduled.
Plan "B" might be found in books like "Enemies Foreign and Domestic."
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