Gun owners in Virgina, home of NRA’s Headquarters, are still absorbing the results of last Tuesday’s elections. In addition to the election of Democrat Abigail Spanberger, a former Mom’s Demand Action volunteer, as governor, we now have an attorney general who thinks the shooting of a political rival and the death of his “little fascist” children might finally prompt the gun control he supports. All major branches of Virginia government are now controlled by anti-gun extremists who received huge amounts of financial support from the country’s largest firearm prohibition lobbies. And yet, as NRA faces the fight of its life where many of us live and work, the message of a 100-year-old veteran of the British army urges us on in our task. His sad lament reminds us that too many have paid too great a price for freedom for surrender to be an option. We must carry on the struggle, come what may.
We have often reported on the sorry state of affairs that law-abiding gun owners, and other beleaguered citizens, face in the Commonwealth Countries. Elsewhere this week, we continue to chronicle the slow-motion disaster of Canada’s ill-fated firearm confiscation program, a boondoggle that brings shame and disrepute on everyone involved, who must engage in ever-escalating fraud and deceit.
And in England itself, where citizens are banned from arming themselves defensively, a new campaign has arisen called Let’s Be Blunt to encourage the surrender of … pointy kitchen knives. The campaign’s website should look familiar to anyone who has visited the online pages of an American gun control group, with catchy graphics, questionable factoids, and first-person stories to underscore the group’s message of “being a catalyst” to “create social change.” Joining the effort, of course, are the usual parade of academic, business, and social justice “partners.”
In all cases, the way to be a “good citizen” is to surrender one’s own means of self-sufficiency to prop up a phony and infantilizing mirage of communal “safety” and “progress.”
British World War II veteran Alec Penstone recently appeared on the Good Morning Britain television program as part of a Remembrance Day observance. Mr. Penstone detailed some of his own experiences, which he insisted were common and unremarkable for his era, and the wounding of his father in World War I, in which the elder Penstone lost both legs at the Second Battle of the Somme. He then surprised his hosts with his answer to the question, “What does Remembrance Sunday mean for you? What is your message?
His voice shaking with age and apparent emotion, Mr. Penstone answered:
My message is, I see in my mind’s eye, the rows and rows of white stones, all the hundreds of my friends and everybody else that gave their lives. For what? The country today, now I’m sorry, but the sacrifice wasn’t worth the result that it is now. … What we fought for, and what we fought for, was our freedom. We find that, even now, it’s a darn sight worse than when I fought for it.
It is truly a sad and convicting statement from a man who engaged in the 20th Century’s most monumental battle to save civilization from totalitarianism and oppression. He is among the last who can speak for his generation, and – in honor of their memory – he unflinchingly delivered a stinging verdict on how those who inherited hard-won freedom have squandered it.
NRA is waging its campaign on different fields of battle, but the consequences are no less substantial. We must commit ourselves to the task with the same unyielding determination that saw America through its many conflicts and challenges. And whatever the future holds, may it always be said of NRA and its millions of members that they never gave up the fight and that their efforts, after all, were not in vain.
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