Quote of the day—John M. Snyder

American gun owners should resolve to drive gun grabbers into social and political oblivion. Gun owners and gun owner groups should develop, promote and implement an attack strategy against gun grabbing establishmentarians.

For over four decades law-abiding gun owners and gun rights organizations have fought the enemies of freedom generally from a defensive position, reacting against anti-gun proposals as they are advanced.

However, gun rights people and interests should go on the offensive.  It’s time to attack ideologically and practically the gun-grabbing establishment and its spokesmen and adherents with vim, vigor and absolute determination.

John M. Snyder
April 25, 2013
USA Should Drive Gun Grabbers into Oblivion
[Other than “YES!” I have nothing to add.—Joe]

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7 thoughts on “Quote of the day—John M. Snyder

  1. The only way to effectuate this strategy is to form a Gun Party. Not just a Gun Lobby, but a Gun Party. The Left will throw huge amuonts of money in to kill that Party, and probably the RINO part of the GOP as well. This makes any putative Gun Party a minority outfit, and it’s only path to survival would be to help a slight underdog party win an election, and hope the favor was repaid with pro-gun actions.

    Isn’t that pretty much what we have now?

  2. Rivrdog: I think what Snyder is talking about there is seizing of the cultural high ground. Making people who are bigoted against gun ownership as socially (un)acceptable as people who are bigoted against Jews or blacks or gays.

    Of course, I don’t have any idea how to do it…

    • That makes sense. And people like Aaron Zelman and Robert Avrech have done a great deal of work showing how. Ditto William Tonso (“The gun culture and its enemies”) — for example, one essay in that fine book discusses how critically important the right to bear arms was to the civil rights movement opposing the Klan.

      My personal approach is a “zero tolerance” policy. No more “vote for the lesser evil” — that’s how we got where we are today. Instead, zero tolerance of anti-gun policies. Vote against the right to arms, and I’ll vote against you in the next election — no matter what party label you wear, no matter who your opponent is. Zero tolerance.

      (The NRA could do its part on this by dropping its A-F scale of grading politicians, and instead grading them on a pass/fail basis. Anything below A is a failing grade.)

  3. You’re all going to hate me for this;

    Of course if you’re attached to the concept of liberty, then advocacy of gun rights is one of the natural results.

    In other words, you needn’t have any personal interest in guns or shooting at all, to recognize a right as opposed to a trespass upon a right.

    In other words, it isn’t pass/fail on guns per se. It’s pass/fail on liberty, and THERE is where we will find our public support such as there is to be found. A person’s position on guns rights is therefore an excellent test, but it’s a test for that all-important attachment to liberty.

    With liberty of course comes personal responsibility and independence, and those are moral concepts.

    In other words, focusing like a laser on guns and gun rights issues, in this culture which has been systematically degraded over many generations to the point that dependency and servitude are seen as “freedom” is to put the cart before the horse, and IT WILL FAIL in the long run. If you “win”, cool– You’ll be forced to use those guns in a civil war.

    In other words; we have a cultural/moral problem. Gun rights violations are one of many symptoms of that cultural/moral problem. Focusing on the gun rights issue without addressing the cultural/moral problem is like taking a pill for a compound fractured arm, because it hurts, and then saying you’ve addressed the problem head-on, proactively, with a vengeance. With a pill. Several analogies come to mind. We’re hacking away at the foliage on the outer branches of the tree of dictatorship. That foliage will keep growing back, and so we’ll hack more feverishly, but unless we address the roots that are feeding the whole thing, we’ll never be able to kill it.

    • I don’t understand why I’m supposed to hate you. I agree 100% with you.

      The hatred of guns, fat, sugar, drugs, etc. All the regulation, rules, limits, and so forth. It’s all got the same root cause, and that root cause is either fear or hatred (or both!) of liberty.

  4. In a way that is true. But I think that it’s perfectly valid to treat a politician’s position on guns as a proxy for their position on liberty generally. Every one of them who opposes guns is anti-liberty in many other ways. Conversely, it’s hard to imagine someone who goes wrong on liberty yet supports the right to bear arms without abridgment. I certainly can’t think of any good example.

    Neil Smith spells it out in detail in “Why did have to be … guns?” (http://www.lneilsmith.org/). For example: “What his attitude—toward your ownership and use of weapons—conveys is his real attitude about you. And if he doesn’t trust you, then why in the name of John Moses Browning should you trust him?”

    I agree with Neil. Yes, the actual fundamental thing that matters is liberty. But use a razor focus on guns, and you will get the correct answer, and much more easily — because it’s far harder to waffle on guns than it is to waffle about large and fuzzy and complex subjects like liberty.

  5. Yes; someone’s position on gun rights is an excellent marker, but beware the imposter.

    As the song lyrics go; “There is no political solution.”

    If the culture is attached to liberty, gun rights are not at risk. If the culture is not attached to liberty, guns aren’t much help except in a civil war that will probably end very badly.

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