Still, if you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than live as slaves.
– Winston Churchill
|
|||||
Samizdata slogan of the dayJanuary 13th, 2003 |
 5 comments to Samizdata slogan of the day |
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||
In the US I have heard gun owners say that they will fight before they give up their firearms. Some of these same people do nothing in the political sphere to keep from having to fight one day. I answer them with the following picture.
Indeed! Threatening to kill government agents if they enforce a law banning guns is, to put it mildly, an unproductive strategy. For every gun you have, the government has a lot of better trained men and women with more guns. The best place to fight for rights is in the political arena, where people still have some power. By the time a law is passed, it’s too late, since the state is so powerful.
What is the productive strategy? Wait until they take them and then protest their loss? We have 90 million gun owners and 250 million+ firearms. If a gun ban comes WE won’t have the problem, the authoritys will.
Presumably when British forces liberate Baghdad, their first taste of freedom will be a five-year minimum jail term for possessing firearms? That should give those pesky Bedouin a healthy respect for our freedoms!
Iraqis Buying Guns to Fight Possible U.S. Invasion
No, a productive strategy would be to protest against gun control laws and vote for pro-gun rights politicians. Donate to the NRA. Write letters to the editor. By the time the state takes away guns, then it’s really too late to effectively fight them.
Remember that we also have tens (hundreds?) of millions of drug users in the U.S. The government obviously can’t arrest all of them, but they still try. Even generally unenforcible laws are hell on the people on whom they are enforced.