Across the country this weekend were March For Our Lives marches. Like the Women’s March before them, different points of view were forbidden, even different points of view from Parkland students and their family members.
Some of the most outrageous signs said, “Okay, we will pry it from your cold dead hands!”
Or, “Is ‘Freedom’ More Important than Safety?”
The dumbest was a sign that claimed it’s easier to get a gun than a ticket to Coachella.
The signs that really bothered me though, the signs that weren’t just stupid but stupid and cruel, were the ones that attacked me and my fellow gun owners for supposedly loving our guns more than we love our kids. Signs like, “Protect your kids, not your guns.”
This is exactly wrong. I love my guns because I love my kids.
These marchers do not know me; they do not know you; they do not understand the ramifications of telling a single mom in the Southside of Chicago she can’t have a CCW to defend herself or her kid.
They haven’t met or spoken with a woman whose son had to kill an ex-husband in self defense (there are instances like this almost daily).
They probably were too busy reading their talking points to learn about a bada** biker chick who had to shoot a man attempting to beat her to death in a road rage incident.
They don’t see the numerous instances every day in which people (men, women and children) who would have been victims were able to use the strength and force of a gun to defend themselves and their families.
I don’t expect the people who attended March For Our Lives to know the examples cited above, or to even know the arguments on the other side, although that would be nice.
But I do expect them to give gun owners like me the benefit of the doubt. I do expect them to grant that we love our kids as much as they love theirs, if they are even parents yet.
But they don’t. They actually think we’re bad parents. They really believe that I think that guns endanger my children but that I still want them in my house because I love my guns more than my children.
Let’s say, just for the sake of argument (because it’s not true), that guns did not make my home safer. Would that outweigh the fact that my husband and I don’t smoke, don’t do drugs, feed and clothe our girls, love them unconditionally, read to them daily and the list goes on . . .
I can do everything right as a parent, but if I own a gun then it all goes out the window? I must love it more than my two precious daughters?
The Left uses this argument because by saying their opponents have bad motives, and not merely bad ideas, they render the argument moot. You don’t debate bad people. You fight them. And all they want is a good fight, never a debate.
This weekend’s marches speak to the blatant ignorance of many of the people marching. They are insulated and brutally unaware not only of our foundational rights, but of what will happen when they start to chip away at those rights.
They want to repeal the Second Amendment. They don’t want to have a dialogue. When we give them an inch, they admit that they’ll take a mile. They will never stop.