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January 21, 2020

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 fault lines 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 re-education 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:

Of course, the media defamed Second Amendment–supporters:

One person tried to make the media's dreams come true but was quickly shut down:

Conservatives celebrated the occasion:

An astute observer noted that, despite all the guns, law enforcement was minimally present, indicating that police did not believe that this would be a violent crowd (or it believed that crowd members could take care of themselves).  This is in contrast to the mayhem police must deal with when Antifa comes to town, armed with sticks, bricks, and concrete milkshakes, savaging cars, buildings, and people:

Leftists opted for vulgar insults aimed at conservatives and at America:

Some women are sooooo obsessed with men's sexual organs.  It's creepy.

Several Leftists harped on the obscenity of a gun rights rally on Martin Luther King Day:

These Leftists seemed to be unaware that Martin Luther King was a fanatic gun-owner who understood that guns were his best defense against those who sought to kill him.  Indeed, he held those guns illegally because Southern states in the Jim Crow era routinely denied black citizens their Second Amendment right to bear arms.  King would probably have attended this march.  These men are Martin Luther King's true ideological heirs:

King, who believed in equal rights for all, would have approved of this libertarian-tinged sign:

He also would have appreciated this black man's excellent joke about Ralph Northam:

And lastly, for those who are interested, there was a Q flag at the march:

A good time was had by all who attended the march in the spirit in which it was held, to celebrate the Second Amendment, and a terrible time was had by Leftists who predicted or actively sought to stoke violence.

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