Escapees from rights-challenged lands revere 2nd Amd. more than many born here

After decades of statist policies, ostensibly to make us "safer" (offensively misnamed "Patriot Act," anyone?), the United States is far less the beacon of liberty than it once was. And yet, given the sad state of much of the rest of the world, the U.S. is still about the best place in the world for a freedom loving individual.

Gun-hating Americans are working hard to change that, with U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) going so far as trying to sell the public on her forcible citizen disarmament agenda by pointing out that tyrannical countries would respect us more if we, too, were rendered disarmed and helpless to resist government excesses.

Of course, many who have lived under such oppressive governments, but are now American citizens, enjoying the Constitutional guarantee of their fundamental human right of the individual to keep and bear arms, would beg to differ. Or no--scratch that--they know that they are now in no position to have to beg for anything.

Henson Ong, born abroad, but now "an American by choice," as he refers to himself, is such an individual. At the "Gun Violence" Prevention Working Group public hearing in Hartford, Connecticut Monday, Mr. Ong delivered a powerful, moving, and extremely lucid argument against restrictive gun laws. The video of his speech (see sidebar video) is about five minutes long, and is well worth the time.

Another "American by choice" comes from one of the countries claiming that Americans' right to keep and bear arms is a "human rights violation." He is an eyewitness to the Chinese government's slaughter of hundreds (thousands?) of peacefully protesting students in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Now an American citizen--an armed American citizen--he is another who defends the right to keep and bear arms

I have been surprised several times in recent years by immigrants (legal) from communist or former Communist countries who were quite clear and forceful about their relative lack of freedom in the US.

One was a woman who came here at 24 years of age from China who was very clear that - except for political dissidents - people in China had much greater freedom in their daily affairs than those in the US. She had been stunned by the amount of bureaucracy and the number of laws and regulations and the invasive lack of privacy fostered by the government here.

Another was a woman from the Ukraine, who just laughed and laughed sarcastically about “the Land of the Free” and the inability of her family to use their land and home as if it was private property, citing a long string of government intrusiveness and obstacles they had endured to build and get settled on land they had bought here. Her parents had built a home on similar land years ago when the Ukraine was Communist: she didn’t want to simply trust her adolescent memory from decades ago, so she picked her parents’ brains when they had been over here for a visit, and her parents confirmed that, yes, in the Ukraine, even under Communist rule at that time, property rights in such matters were honored.

Liberals won’t get the real message until its too late. Common sense and a knowledge of how the real world is, is something that they can’t quite grasp. The old saying “You don’t know what you’ve got till it gone” will finally have a clear meaning to them.

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