Contrary to leftist hopes and conservative fears, the Richmond rally was peaceful By Andrea Widburg
Leftists craved the thought of violence occurring at Monday’s Second Amendment in Richmond, Virginia, while Second Amendment supporters were concerned that groups such as Antifa would use false flag operations to make trouble. Fortunately, as Fox News reported, “A gun-rights rally in Richmond that brought thousands of people from across the country to protest a push by Virginia Democrats for comprehensive gun control ended peacefully without any major incidents.”
The rally exposed deep faultlines in America when it comes to guns. On the conservative side, gun rights activists note that the first shots the American revolutionaries fired, on April 19, 1775, were to prevent the British from acting on orders to seize and destroy arms and munitions hidden in Lexington and Concord. From the start, America has been about the people’s right to keep and bear arms.
After the Americans had routed the British, the Founding Fathers remained focused on the fact that the only defense against a tyrannical government is the People. To minimize the risk that could arise from a federal government with a standing army, James Madison, writing in Federalist #46, spoke of the best bulwark against a tyrannical government’s troops:
To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands . . . fighting for their common liberties. . . . It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops. Those who are best acquainted with the last successful resistance of this country against the British arms, will be most inclined to deny the possibility of it.
Moreover, said Madison, in America, the people had the “advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation. . . .” In this, they contrasted with Europe in which “the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”
Significantly, when Madison spoke of the militia, he had something specific in mind: Not a standing army of government-controlled civilians but, instead, the civilians themselves, ready to assemble with their arms to defend against all enemies, foreign or domestic. This had been the case since the early 17th century when every colonist was expected to own a weapon and be ready to use it when called.
This expectation was codified in the Militia Act of 1792, which stated that the militia automatically consisted of free, able-bodied white men between 18 and 45. Now that the notion of an enfranchised citizen has expanded, we are all the militia and, as such, we all have that right to bear arms, whether we are called upon to use them or not.
That’s what the rally in Richmond was about: The right of every citizen to defend himself against a tyrannical government. Those who were led to Turkey’s slaughtering grounds, Hitler’s gas chambers, Stalin’s gulags, Mao’s reeducation camps, Pol Pot’s killing fields, or North Korea’s concentration camps would have given much to have possessed such a right. Likewise, in Iran and Hong Kong today, brave protesters wish they too had a Second Amendment.
That’s the conservative view. The Democrat / Leftist / Progressive view is simpler: Guns are scary and they kill people. The fact that “gun-free zones” are every psychopath’s happy hunting grounds, that guns are used defensively every year at least forty or fifty times more often than they are used offensively, or that having more guns in law-abiding hands really does equal less crime, is irrelevant. Guns are scary and only the government should have them (except, of course, that police are evil race-haters . . . but they should still have guns). Remember that simple does not mean rational.
So, there is a divide. A very great divide. And nothing illustrates that divide more than the tweets flowing from the Richmond rally. Here are some of the best. First, the crowds were huge:
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