On Thursday, despite Senator Jennifer Jordan's (D-6) shaming, approximately 300 showed up for the 5th Annual 11th District Marksmanship and BBQ Event! Also, despite Senator Jennifer Jordan's shaming, not a single protester showed up either.
But the media sure did, not only to cover the event, but to listen to what NRA President and Cobb County resident Carolyn Meadows and Congressman Barry Loudermilk both had to say.
NPR, the AJC, and the MDJ were all on hand to cover the event.
Congressman Loudermilk has remained very consistent on the issue of the protections afforded to Americans under the 2nd Amendment, even after he was pinned behind a wooden wall as a mass shooter tried to assassinate as many Republican members of Congress as possible at a 2017 practice for the annual Republicans vs. Democrats baseball game.
Back then,
Loudermilk told NPR
,
“I just lived through an incident where I was being shot at and I had no way to shoot back, and if this would have been in Georgia, it probably would have been a different story.”
Thursday
, he told the crowd gathered at Adventure Outdoors on South Cobb Drive, "The whole time that I was being shot at and I see the shooter there, he was pulling the trigger. That gun never arbitrarily shot by itself. It was him that did the act of evil. And he was a radical leftist and a Bernie Sanders supporter, but I never brought that up. ... So I think it’s shameful, and it’s disrespectful to the victims that you take an incident like that and you try to use it for political gain, and that’s what they’re doing.”
There is no doubt that more needs to be done to keep guns out of the hands of people bent on death and destruction, the problem is, like with all terrorism, the good guys have to be right 100% of the time, while the bad guys have to only be right once. The largest act of domestic terrorism in my lifetime was committed on April 19, 1995 outside the federal building in Oklahoma City when the weapon of choice was a rented trunk and fertilizer.
In that incident, 168 died, including 19 children who were in the daycare center in the building. A Ryder truck, some agricultural fertilizer, diesel fuel, and a few chemicals were all it took.
Timothy McVeigh, convicted of the mass murder, died on June 11, 2001 by lethal injection.
I don't know that his calm and relatively peaceful death can be called "justice" for the 168 lives he cut short. All we can do is hope and pray that what he faced in the next life was more fitting of his crime.
While we can do our best to stop these mass killings before they happen, in the end, the last line of defense against a bad guy with a gun is not the good intentions of the gun control activists, but is, and always will be, a good guy with a gun. If you take away the right of a law-abiding citizen to own and carry a gun, then you leave that person, and everyone they could have protected, vulnerable to that bad guy with a gun, who cares little for "gun-free" zones or gun prohibition laws.
As I told the
Marietta Daily Journal
on
Thursday, “If you pass a law taking guns away from law-abiding citizens, law-abiding citizens will give up their guns. But every day in America, good people with guns are stopping bad people with guns. We practice our Second Amendment rights. We have the ability, as law-abiding citizens to stand up against criminal activity.”
This fact has been recognized for more than 100 years. In the 1872 Klu Klux Klan trials in Columbia, South Carolina, U.S. Attorney Daniel Corbin
stated, "[T]he fourteenth amendment changes all that theory, and lays the same restriction upon the States that before lay upon the Congress of the United States—that, as Congress heretofore could not interfere with the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms, now, after the adoption of the fourteenth amendment, the State cannot interfere with the right of the citizen to keep and bear arms." (
Proceedings in the Ku Klux Trials at Columbia, S. C., in the United States Circuit Court, November Term, 1871, p. 147 (1872).)
The reason this was an issue in the Klan prosecutions was that immediately after the Civil War, there were attempts by both the Klan and Southern Democratic controlled legislatures to disarm the newly freed slaves.
As Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens is reported to have said, and as quoted by Justice Clarence Thomas in his concurring opinion in
McDonald v. Chicago
, “[w]hen it was first proposed to free the slaves, and arm the blacks, did not half the nation tremble? The prim conservatives, the snobs, and the male waiting-maids in Congress, were in hysterics.”
Justice Thomas further notes in his opinion, "
The Christian Recorder
, published by the African Methodist Episcopal Church, published the following editorial: 'We have several times alluded to the fact that the Constitution of the United States, guaranties to every citizen the right to keep and bear arms. . . All men, without the distinction of color, have the right to keep arms to defend their homes, families, or themselves. We are glad to learn that [the] Commissioner for this State . . . has given freedmen to understand that they have as good a right to keep fire arms as any other citizens. The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the land, and we will be governed by that at present.'”
As Republicans, we cannot allow the debate to be one of "thoughts and prayers" vs "banning guns and saving lives" like the left wants to make it out to be. The Second Amendment doesn't just articulate a "Constitutional Right," but a CIVIL RIGHT that is universal for all free people.
I was in Adventure Outdoors again on Saturday, and I saw people of all races, ethnicities, and creeds there to legally purchase weapons. Whether it was for hunting, sport, or simply having a weapon for self-defense (for those times when the police are ten minutes from away, but the criminal is only ten seconds away), the ability to defend one's self from harm is not just a Second Amendment right, but a right, as earlier Supreme Court decisions prior to the passage of the 14 Amendment would hold, so universal a natural right that it pre-dates the Constitution itself.
The Second Amendment does not just protect the right that upholds and protects all other rights, but it is the right that ensures that no single person, bent on a criminal act, can deprive the individual of the universal rights of life, liberty, or happiness.
It is not in exercising the freedom of speech that stops the rapist.
It is not in exercising the freedom of press that stops the mugger.
It is not in exercising the freedom of religion that stops the murderer.
It is not in exercising the freedom to vote that stops the child predator.
It is only in exercising the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms, that all criminal acts may be stopped.
It is only then we can enjoy the one freedom that is universally desired and reigns supreme in the hearts of all those who yearn to be free...the freedom from fear.