When you use a loaded weapon to intimidate, you are the threat.
Liberty comes with responsibility.
Those who fail to recognize that, who abuse their freedom to frighten and demand to be recognized through force and fear rather than reason and persuasion...
1/
...are more responsible for advancing the suppression of liberty than any activist or politician.
A responsible gun owner who uses a weapon to protect others and save lives is to be celebrated for their bravery and instinct.
2/
Lives saved by those who recognize the gravity and responsibility attached to their freedom are the single greatest argument in defense of gun rights.
3/
It is not the vocal masses who despise guns, or the infinitessimally small percentage of people who use them exclusively to cause harm and commit crimes that pose the greatest threat to the right to bear arms.
4/
It is the people who use weapons as a tool to force others to stand and listen, and derive authority from the potential to cause harm rather than the strength of their conviction and the logic of their position who erode and endanger those freedoms.
5/
One misguided or mentally ill person shooting up a school is not -alone -an effective argument for infringing on others' right to bear arms.
One hundred people storming a state house brandishing weapons, risking everything & defending nothing, compensating for insecurity...
6/
..and marginalization by using a weapon to create fear in order to use that fear as a weapon - these are the abuses of our liberty that will result in the willing abandonment of those liberties by a majority forced to weigh those freedoms against all others.
7/
The most shocking thing, to me, amidst this new normal of amplifying benign and misguided messages through intimidation and fear granted by the possession and display of these otherwise indifferent and often useful tools, is the absolute silence of responsible gun owners.
8/
Where are you? How do you not recognize that it is the people abusing gun rights, and not the people opposed to them, that threaten your rights?
9/
Your silence is deafening. And while it is convenient & politically expedient to blame Democrats for the infringements and erosion of your constitutional rights, the truth is that you will have nobody to blame but yourselves when your rights are democratically diminished...
10/
Because when you watched small-minded self-righteous people turn your symbols of freedom into tools of intimidation and fear, you did nothing.
END/
#MichiganProtests #2A #Guns
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