Tag: 2nd Amendment

Golf and Guns

My problem in the world is that I enjoy too many things. But to be successful, traditionally, we have a culture that values specificity, where we immerse ourselves into one particular thing. For instance when it comes to this blog site, there is a political context and a narrative that has to be fulfilled for it to work. And since my audience is largely Trump supporters and Second Amendment advocates, going off the rails too far on a tangent doesn’t fulfil that market necessity. So I talk about guns and my love of Cowboy Fast Draw a lot as opposed to other kinds of sports, like baseball and golf. But to my mind they are all the same. In fact, I view Cowboy Fast Draw as another kind of game not at all unlike golf or bowling. We make games at life to represent our culture in various ways and to me they are all the same. The gun and their use is purely a sporting activity and are directly applicable to other sports. Truth be told, I enjoy every sport though. When I go to a sporting goods store, I am absolutely in heaven because every section is something I enjoy. I love baseball, I love football, I love the outdoor section, I love soccer, golf, I love everything. And to me they are all one big story.

I do resent being put into a classification with people who are limited in their scope of enjoyment of life though. I understand their limits and I hope that at some point they overcome them, but it certainly isn’t my task to yield myself to their handicaps. This is an issue that has come up more than once recently among several people. A politician friend recently asked me to take them out of a video they appeared in many years ago because their life had changed and they now had a much higher social profile, and political enemies were using it against them. One of the weapons that was used against this person was that I am a “gun advocate dressed to kill” which is shown on this blog site quite audaciously. But that’s not how I see it. To me a gun and holster rig with the gunfighting garb of Cowboy Fast Draw is no different from a group of people hitting the golf course with a dress code that would otherwise be laughed at during a visit to any local mall. Or a baseball player stepping off the field and without changing going to a nice restaurant. The baseball outfit would be considered odd in any other public setting except for a game. So the gunslinger outfit to me is something of an American heritage, no different from the Japanese reverence for their samurai or some other warrior reference that a culture wants to remember honorably. If you take away the politics all these sports are fun and have their place and I enjoy them all.

I was thinking about all this while I was looking for a nice golf bag and I found one, a really cool red, white and blue patriotic golf bag that I thought was really cool. Then I found a great baseball bat that was all decked out in patriotic colors, and so it went for several hours that day, I had a great visit to the sporting goods store. But I was also thinking about the objectives of those games and how they fit culturally into our society. And also specifically, they have a very unique style of dress for each of them. Something we have culturally come to accept. Except somehow the way I dress on this blog site was considered by some to be politically dangerous, and divisive. But the game of golf wasn’t? Both sports had the object of hitting targets. In shooting there are obviously targets to hit and you are measured by your success or failure in hitting them. And in golf the whole point of the game is to hit the target in as few strokes possible. Where is the problem with guns, other than they have been made politically volatile by a political class that has sought them out for their own purposes? In America guns are a sport like any other sport and I am personally offended that its even an issue.

One of my very good friends, an old radio guy, who was very talented had to completely erase his social media imprint into saving the Republic of America, which he felt very strongly about. But to work for this company they made him make a choice. A six-figure income or he couldn’t be promoted into this new position and as I held that American flag baseball bat I couldn’t help but think of how dangerous that offer really was. I understand the decision he made; he picked the money. A lot of people would. I obviously haven’t. I’ve had similar offers and I picked the blog, my books, my guns and the generalities of my life because in the end those are the things that the people who really matter to me care about. But such a choice should never have to be made, and honestly, we have been stupid as a civilization to let people make such divisiveness over anything, especially among our sports.

A visit to a sporting goods store shows just how rich our American culture is. I’d love to explore them all but unfortunately there is only time for a few of them. However to allow politics to ruin any of them is what I consider reprehensible. To allow a censorship of some with an emphasis on others is a further hypocrisy. Golf especially in the business world is considered a game for upper management, and I can see why. The goals of the game are very similar to those in the business world. Get to the goal in the shortest way possible using the various tools in your golf bag to get there. We don’t think about the people who actually kill other people with golf clubs every year when we play the game even though often the number is higher than with rifles. Yet liberals want to ban rifles and the game of golf is promoted, especially in business as if the two were radically different. But they aren’t different. Both sports, guns and golf are all about hitting targets. Both represent aspects of culture that are valuable and metaphorical, yet one is attacked and one is supported and that standard is very hypocritical.

I think we should enjoy everything, and I do. And I personally resent any judgments cast against me when what I do is part of the sport of shooting. The views that I value about an America that predates this liberal censorship trend that is going on in our media, companies and our politics is dangerous. That it is even considered radical to proudly display a gun rig that I am very proud of is a disgrace. Now if I was in a picture with that new golf bag which would cost about half as much as the gun and the holster rig then the world would be happy. That is not how things should be and it’s a shame we’ve let it become that way. I’m certainly not going to change the way I do things, but it’s a shame that so many people are forced to, just to fulfill a social norm that has been shaped by anti-American forces. It is my assertion that we shouldn’t have such limits.

Rich Hoffman

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We Need Guns for Civilization to Work Properly

The Democrats continue to propose this notion of impeachment of President Trump and to be honest, this makes the best argument for the Second Amendment that could be provoked. President Trump was elected by an honest election process, and with all the legal scrutiny that could be generated against him, he was found innocent of any wrong doing, yet the calls for his removal from office continue on, and have even increased as Democrats realize they are losing power at a rapid rate. It is a reminder why we must have the Second Amendment, because if a president of the United States can be abused the way that Trump has been, it can happen to any of us and the only way to defend ourselves truly is not in a court of law, but with the barrel of a gun, as is obvious by the antics of our present circumstances. I put my message to those who want to impeach President Trump on Instagram and for me it would be a last resort but its safe to say, that if Trump were to be impeached, I would consider the law and order of our governing system to be too far gone to hold any merit, and the only thing that would hold our society together would be our guns.

Not having guns as the foundation of our country and our entire legal system is simply not an option. I will never trust anything mankind proposes by way of justice without a gun being somewhere nearby. People are fallible and they often abuse words on paper if they can get away with it to obtain power at someone else’s cost, and that is just not permissible. I’m not going to allow it, and the only way to enforce that is with gun ownership. Guns are the stabilizing factor of western civilization which keeps us free. Without them our society would have fallen apart a long time ago. Guns keep everyone honest and that has been a good thing. But let’s face it, the Second Amendment isn’t for hunting, it’s for taking back our government from the powerful, if we need to. And if Trump is impeached, then when would we declare that everything is too far gone to deal with things without violence? There are elections every four years, and that is the time where the opposition can knock out someone from power if they can. That’s how our system is supposed to work. But if someone cheats and tries to do it with legal gymnastics and an abuse of the law, which is clearly what happened to President Trump, then what other recourse do any of us really have?

I propose that guns should be a greater part of our lives, we should wear them openly and allow all those we are dealing with to know that we are all functioning from an equal footing. Guns are the great equalizers, they are what makes us respect each other, not some words on a page. Guns are an invention by mankind that have brought in the notion for equality in the first place. Without guns, we would not have had many of the social revolutions that we have had in the United States. Guns have played a much larger role than many people give them credit for. There has been no political figure that we’ve had in the world that would convince me that guns were not needed to keep everything balanced and in order.

The shame of it is that we’ve allowed a political class to define gun ownership and their use as dangerous and a safety hazard, as if they were in the same category as tobacco and alcohol. From a government perspective they know they can’t truly rule over our society without having guns removed from the discussion, and truly, deep down inside, that is what “government” as an entity wants to do, they want to control us. That’s sort of their job title. But what keeps the tendency for human failure from harming us? Well, it’s the fear that if government abuses its power that the people they rule over will shoot back. I would contend that without guns or at least a culture of weapons, that no foundation of law and order would persist in any culture.

I have been around the world a few times and visited some of our greatest cities on earth and I can say honestly that the lack of guns have made most of them armpits. In order to have a gun free society work the intellectual aptitude of the inhabitants must yield themselves to the weaknesses of their culture because that is the only way that peace is achieved. Whereas in cultures where guns are openly worn and discussed, the intellectual curiosity of the world around them tends to go up. As I write this I’m thinking of England, a place where they clearly don’t understand gun ownership in a personal way. They love their institutions in England and they are willing to trade their personal freedoms and security away toward a trust in their authority figures. But at a cost, they are a declining culture that is limited to the whims of their government, and that is a dangerous place to be.

Then there is the example in Paris, which I have called many bad names due to their present state chaos. They have their yellow vest protests which have been going on for a long time and are the result of the failed socialism there for many years. After the fire at Notre Dame over 900 million dollars were contributed to help restore the cathedral prompting many of those weekend protestors to question why similar contributes didn’t flow toward their pockets. After all, it was gas prices and taxes that were keeping them poor and middle class. Why couldn’t “the rich” just give them all 900 million dollars so they could sit around their homes all day and play video games? What isn’t understood by these people was the value Notre Dame had to so many people around the world, and that value was reflected in the contributions. Notre Dame had value. A bunch of dirty, stinky, lazy socialists do not have value, so nobody wants to give them 900 million dollars to sit around complaining and playing games all day. It is that lack of understanding that can often make governments dangerous because they seek to appease those types of dumb, shortsighted people in elections which means that the mobs of the angry can then confiscate the wealth of the hard-working. In Europe this is a real problem, which is why more people don’t have more things. A culture that embraces gun ownership tends to be one that also understands the nature of value and it prevents more violence, it doesn’t act as an agitator of more instances.

Gun ownership I consider to be the foundation of civilization. Without it governments and the people they are supposed to represent fall apart quickly. So it’s a great benefit to have more guns in more places in any culture. And it’s what keeps the bad guys away. It’s also what keeps the temptations to impeach presidents from getting out of control because we know from history that people in power will do just about anything to stay there. And when they feel they can abuse others to keep their power, or to advance it, they certainly will. What I can say is that if my president is impeached, I’m not going to be very happy about it, and I will look toward the Second Amendment to restore balance, and order. Yielding to authority is simply not an option. I never see a day where guns aren’t the center of civilized discourse, because of their equalizing effect. It puts everyone on equal footing which should be encouraged, not discouraged. But then again, people who want more gun regulations are not really interested in peace and equality. They want power and they want us disarmed so they can have their way with us. And that is the deep, dark secret nobody wants to talk about.

Rich Hoffman

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So You’ve Played Red Dead Redemption 2 and Loved it: Be a gunslinger in real life, join the Cowboy Fast Draw Association

As much as I talk about other things, I am not completely lost like a lot of people my age might otherwise be on the magical world of video games and their relatively new impact on global entertainment. But let me just say to my usual readers, its big business. I finally finished the story mode of Red Dead Redemption 2 after around 100 hours of game play, taking my time when I could and I have to say that I was absolutely amazed by the result. The game is such an astonishing technical achievement and it is by far the best thing that could have ever happened to the entertainment format of the American Western. As a story and experience it really is like taking a real-life cowboy experience like the movie City Slickers and placing them into a 1960s spaghetti western with all the high drama of something like Game of Thrones. It is big, bold and beautiful in so many ways. And I knew that as I completed the game and all the epilogue missions that there was going to be a Red Dead online coming at the end of November. I planned to revisit the game at that time but wasn’t expecting much. But let me say that I have been pleasantly surprised. It looks like as massive as Red Dead Redemption 2 is as a game with sales well over a billion dollars already and something like 20 million copies sold before the Holiday season, that the purposed of the online play is to use the game as a kind of training experience for the online world that they have created. It is just vast and ultimately never-ending in what it allows players to do and interact with one another.

I couldn’t help but think as I was playing missions with other people the other day, most of them much younger than I am, that this game is really their only experience with a real American western and for many they are very touched by it. The game itself is a very moral story about good and bad and the many quandaries of the critical decisions that went into exploding life across the American frontier. But at its core it’s about gunfighting and is clearly one of the best arguments for the real-life problems of the Second Amendment. A lot of young people may not be paying attention to the real political problems going on in the outside world, but they sure care a lot about earning enough money in the game to purchase upgrades for their guns and dress in the coolest gunfighting outfits. But I couldn’t help notice that many of them probably didn’t know that they could do all the things they are doing in Read Dead Redemption in real life with Cowboy Fast Draw as seen at the following link:

http://www.COWBOYFASTDRAW.com

Belonging to the Cowboy Fast Draw Association is one of the groups I am most proud to affiliate with, they are really a good group of people who meet all over the United States to compete in real life fast draw competitions using real guns. It’s what I think of as one of the coolest sports in the world right now as other countries are trying to participate but have too strict of gun laws to actually do it. But in the good ol’ United States it is much easier to participate in. Yet I have noticed that most of the members are well over 40, largely because guns and holster rigs are expensive so it takes a little upfront investment to get involved. But once you do, it is infinitely rewarding. I enjoyed the original Red Dead Redemption enormously and getting my own fast draw rig was always something I had planned to do. But raising a family every last dollar that I made went into family needs, a car was always breaking down, a kid always needed a school fee or band instrument. Someone needed braces of a family member across the country wanted us to visit them, so there was always something for like twenty years that kept me from getting my own fast draw gun rig.

I ran across a substantial amount of money for a big job I had been working on so I treated myself to my gun rig and have been practicing at Cowboy Fast Draw for several years now, and am getting pretty good at it. After probably 30,000 to 35,000 shots at a fast draw target, I am starting to feel good about my speed and accuracy. It did take a while. It was something that had been on my mind well before I ever played the first Red Dead going way back into my twenties when I was going through a really tough time. Westerns and western music really kept the zest for life alive in me. On their most basic foundations westerns are about the meaning of life so they always had great appeal to me so when I grew up I wanted to be as much of a gunfighter as society could endure. Ironically, I had acquired my gun rig and some advanced fast draw skill before Red Dead Redemption 2 came out which had even more meaning for me because of the new hobby I had.

Traveling around the online world it has become very obvious that many young people are deeply touched by Red Dead Redemption 2 and likely would like to have a similar experience as I have. So let me put this little invite out there. If you are unsure of how to get involved in Cowboy Fast Draw because you are enjoying playing Red Dead Redemption but would like to take everything up a notch, don’t hesitate to ask me. I can help you get started on something that would be infinitely rewarding. While my regular audience here is much older than the people playing Red Dead Redemption 2 I would personally love to see more young people getting involved in Cowboy Fast Draw. It really isn’t any different from what you do in the game, but that it never ends. While the content of Red Dead Redemption does eventually run out, the challenges in real life never do.

In the Cowboy Fast Draw Association, you get to dress up as a gunslinger for real, and have a reason to do it. You have a reason to buy fancy guns for real and learn to take care of them. And the scoring format is safe and fun. Its one of the most satisfying things I’ve done in my life and I would recommend it to anybody. I had been thinking that membership in the cowboy sports may just flicker away because new generations just do not have many positive western entertainment venues that are cool enough to hold their attention, that is until Red Dead Redemption 2 came along and inspired millions of people to live in that world quite authentically. And for those who just want to climb into the world of Red Dead Redemption for real and live it in real life I’d point you to the Cowboy Fast Draw Association at the link shown here. If you have any questions, just ask. I’d love to help as many new people get involved in the sport as possible. While I personally love the world of Red Dead Redemption, it is no match for having a real fast draw rig on your hip which is an experience I have every day. And wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.

Rich Hoffman

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Standing and Fighting: Big name Republicans gather at Premier Shooting to draw battlelines for the upcoming midterms


The Premier Shooting and Training facility in West Chester, Ohio has since its inception been a very special place. I can never think of a bad time in visiting it, which I often do. It has essentially become the Second Amendment center of Southern Ohio. And to deserve that kind of credit they have to be more than just a target range, which is fundamentally what they are. They are one of the best indoor ranges out there for the sport of shooting. Yet they are more than that by a lot, education is what most comes to my mind when I think of Premier Shooting.

They are deeply committed to teaching self-defense to the residents of West Chester and the surrounding area, and they aren’t shy about it. And what’s inside the shooting range is only part of the Premier complex, outside they have a very large fishing lake and a lot of outdoor seating that allowed them to host a very unusual event in dedication to the Second Amendment on Friday, September 28, 2018. And for that event a lot of big-name politicians gathered to allow the public to get to know them better and show their dedication to the Second Amendment in very bold ways as shown in the videos below. It was unusual to have even federal representatives fly in from Washington D.C. at great expense to themselves to be at this remarkable event. Jim Renacci and Warren Davidson for instance were there under a setting sun fresh off the Kavanaugh hearings in Washington just hours before. But Columbus representatives like Supreme Court Justice Sharon Kennedy, George Lang, Keith Faber, John Husted, Ken Blackwell, along with local representatives like Sheriff Jones, Mark Welsh and Ann Becker were gathered as well in a remarkable gathering that wasn’t a Republican fundraiser or political rally for thousands of spectators, but just a lot of concerned people coming together for a common cause.

The biggest problem that Republicans have is that they are generally good people just trying to live their lives. There are different degrees of Republicans of course, some of more libertarian while others are more strict traditionalists, but in essence, they are people who want to live in peace and be left alone from the conflicts of the world. Presently with Donald Trump in the White House, many Republicans feel that they can step away from politics and live their lives while many of the people gathered at the Premier shooting Center event under a setting sun manage the business of running the country for them. But as we have all seen with the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, that isn’t enough.

There are always people out there who don’t like that we are living our lives free of their influence and they will seek to impose themselves on us. In its most basic description, Republicans are good people who want to be left alone, where Democrats want to stick their noses in everyone’s business for the task of making everyone part of their illicit schemes. And what really prevents Democrats from achieving their aims is the threat of force that comes from the Second Amendment. While the First Amendment protects political speech and gives an option to those who do not want to be a part of Democratic impositions, the Second Amendment tells individuals that they do not have to worry about any threats of force upon their individual existence.

Over a hundred years, before the advent of Progressivism which spread from Europe and embedded itself in the Democratic Party, and in some cases the Republicans, events like this gathering at Premier Shooting were commonplace. Key politicians would interact with the public in this way without Secret Service agents and armed security everywhere. This event stripped away all those barriers and allowed people to just talk to each other as concerned citizens joined by their foundation beliefs in American ideas. Steve Chabot and I had a nice talk in the foyer of the complex as he was leaving for the night and talked about football a bit. The titles we all have in life were stripped away for a few hours and we all just enjoyed rallying behind ideas we could all agree with for the cause of continued liberty.

BBQ2GO had a vendor truck parked by the lake along with other food suppliers making the gathering place outside a very comfortable experience. There was food, fire pits and a lot of cigar smoke as we all contemplated together the necessity to keep a fighting spirit going into this upcoming midterm election. That was in essence why so many big-name representatives were present, because the typical cycle is that the previous political party in power loses their edge and don’t have very high voter turnout in the next elections once they win the presidency or hold the House and Senate at the federal level. President Trump makes it even more of a risk because he has such a big voice that people who don’t like to fight so much are happy to get behind, but are not inspired to act for themselves, which was required for the midterms. Democrats were energized to work together because they want to take something from us. Republicans already have it, so they usually don’t act until someone like a Barack Obama is elected.

As the gathering at Premier was forming early in the night I was watching the Kavanaugh hearings in the VIP lounge when the Trump administration announced that it would launch an F.B.I. investigation into the allegations leveled at Brett Kavanaugh just to appease the Democrats. Of course, the strategy is to take away any leverage they might have in the future, but the risk is that their radicalism would have another week to torpedo the nomination process. Democrats have shown that they will do just about anything to stop the vote for Brett Kavanaugh onto the Supreme Court so there is always danger even if people are just minding their own business in living their lives without trying to impose themselves on others.

Democrats are always looking to attach themselves to other people so as long as they exist, there is always a threat and Republicans need to understand that. It was good to be at an event like this one at Premier where everyone understood what was at stake. Republicans were certainly in the driver’s seat. History did not have to repeat itself. Voter turnout for Republicans did not have to be surpassed by encroaching Democrats. There was a chance to gain seats not lose them, but people needed to get out there and fight, which was the key terminology of the evening. Complacency wasn’t going to work, people needed to know that the necessity for fighting never went away, even in times of peace, and that was why all these personalities had gathered in the same place to defend the Second Amendment. Without the Second Amendment, everything philosophically fell apart in America, and we just can’t have that.

I thought it was a great evening and I give a lot of credit to the operators at Premier Shooting and Training for the really hard work of organizing such an event. And Sean Maloney did a really fabulous job with everything from getting everyone where they needed to go to arranging some of the speeches and keeping the pace of the night moving forward so that there wasn’t ever any stagnant standing around. There were several representatives from the NRA there as well, one of them was Sean and they really elevated the entire event. But as nice as everything was, the undercurrent of the necessity to stand and fight was certainly there. While the gathering was friendly, the beer was cold, the barbecue was delicious, and the Friday night setting sun under a late September sky was absolutely stunning, the grim reality that out there in that big world was a fight for our lives was certainly present.

While the people there both in the public arena and those who work in special ops within the seams of society were enjoying themselves, the realities of the greater fight were quite evident. And that fight is just getting started. Just because we have something today doesn’t mean we’ll have it tomorrow. Trump may be in the White House, but we have to defend it. We can’t just show up for one election and hope its fixed forever. There is a lot more fighting that needs to be done and for all of us the upcoming election day is the minimum—everyone needs to get out there and vote.

But for some of us, many who were at that event, a lot more is required. Fighting is a necessity so long as evil people function in the world, and in this case, evil is defined by others who seek to impose upon individuals their collective manifestations of insanity and rebellion. And that cannot be tolerated. Just look at what they are trying to do to Brett Kavanaugh and what they have been doing to Donald Trump. And if they can do it to you dear reader, they surely will.

Rich Hoffman

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Cody Wilson’s ‘Come and Take it’: They don’t like ice in their English drinks, but Americans do

They don’t come along too often these days, but occasionally I read a book that really hits home with me. I am often very surprised when I read them, especially when they come from someone younger than me, but it does happen sometimes. And that is certainly the case with Cody Wilson’s 2016 book Come and Take It: The Gun Printer’s Guide to Thinking Free. It was remarkably well written and provided real insight into the mind of Millennials and how they view liberty. Wilson was remarkably colorful in his literature as he traveled all over Europe and the North American continent from San Francisco, Austin and New York on a journey of self-discovery while taking on the basic understanding of legalisms insulating the federal government from the people they intend to rule. Wilson considers himself an anarchist in the book and takes readers on an almost cryptic behind the scenes look at how such figures think in their natural habitats of London, Austin and even Spain, but what I hear from the young man is a staunch Republican the way they were always supposed to be, and his journey of self-discovery from a sympathetic liberal to an Alex Jones conservative is quite fascinating, largely because he is working with an extensive vocabulary and a real knack for literature and understanding law.

As I was reading this book literally enjoying every page, I kept thinking of how they don’t give you ice in your drinks in London unless you ask for it. When you do ask they treat you like some second-class citizen which of course to an American is a real insult. Who in the hell doesn’t want ice in their Coke? When you go to a McDonald’s or a Burger King in England and you ask for a large drink, what they give you is what we’d consider a child’s cup in America and they think of it as “big.” And it’s not just England, I remember trying to get a large Coke in Paris and what they gave me was this little mini can of pop that was ridiculously small. It was gone in one drink from the can. It reminded me that Europe and America really aren’t compatible. Of course, the rest of the world views both as part of the western world, but the differences are quite extreme and as Cody Wilson reported in his book Come and Take It, he was advised to print something else on his 3D printers, not guns, because Europeans didn’t like them.

Yet that is the point of Come and Take It, Americans love their guns because of what those guns mean and Cody Wilson has done something quite remarkable from a legal perspective. He is challenging in this book and his work at Defense Distributed the very legal foundation for any form of gun control. He’s not just doing what the NRA is committed to, which is preservation of the Second Amendment through activism and legal pressure on the Hill. Cody Wilson is attacking the legal premise for any gun control by a state, and I found him to make a compelling argument that makes a lot of sense. That makes his book Come and Take It one of the greats of American literature right up there with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ayn Rand—because what he is challenging is a premise that has long been surrendered to all state-run authority and his idea of freedom is at the core of our very Constitution. His position is something that has been nagging at the back of my mind all of my life, but what he has managed to do is put a fine point on it and approach the topic as something we all fear to lose—access to the Second Amendment—but something we can never lose so long as we dare to live, and by the time I closed the book I realized he was 100% correct. He had figured out the answer to a long-mused problem in America, what does the right to bear arms mean and can it be regulated away? The answer is no.

When I first heard about Cody Wilson it was years ago when he first started trying to print a gun on a 3D printer. That is after all what brought so much attention to Wilson, was that he proposed that we were in the age of 3D printing and no matter what kind of gun legislation politicians could come up with that guns were here to stay forever in America, and the world, because the ability to make them and use them had become decentralized through technology. Only back then, I wasn’t too impressed with his Liberator as a weapon. Being made of a kind of plastic, I never had any thoughts that it would hold up as a weapon, so I didn’t pay it much mind. But that was me thinking of the problem in terms of the past, a past that I grew up in where things were manufactured at a store and purchased by driving to the store and picking up what it was you wanted. A society to a large degree decided how you would get those items, whether or not there was a road to even drive on to get to that store. So a certain assumption about the regulation of the manufacturing process was always on my mind. Yet we are living in the age of immediate gratification. My daughter was telling me that she was having her groceries delivered to her house the other day because she didn’t have time to go and that seemed odd to me. There are so many things that you can get brought to your home now, everything from movies to any information in all the most well stocked libraries in the world—everything is literally at our fingertips, and it is happening so rapidly that no government can really hope to regulate it all. It has evolved beyond their control.

Wilson even diagnosis this issue with himself in the book, he correctly understands that the reason the federal government gave him an FFL to begin with is that he stated that he intended to sell firearms, which makes him a contributor to the state. If you contribute to the state’s coffers, they will love you, even if they hate you. Why is Sean Hannity not in jail, because he overpays his taxes. That is why he’s still on the air. Wilson managed to put real thoughts and definitions to this global problem in Come and Take It which was truly fascinating—and refreshing. Why is Paul Manafort in jail, because he sought to deny the state of income—its that simple. Yet how can the state properly regulate firearms when it needs the freedom of the people to perform in order for it to get its money. There lay the problems for the state in regulating firearms in any manner. If the state, whoever the state may be—America, Germany, or China—if they turn off the means for a people to be informed and protect themselves with printable firearms, they also lose the type of economy that produces other forms of great wealth for which the state hungers. Quite and interesting paradox.

Once Wilson won parts of his court case recently and got the attention of President Trump did I revisit some of his work and buy Come and Take It: The Gun Printer’s Guide to Thinking Free. I figured it was worth reading since the kid was in the news so often these days. I wanted to know more about him. I was worried that he’d be one of these Antifa freaks, but as it turned out, he is quite a smart young man who truly does love guns and the Second Amendment. And that love of resistance comes out in this very articulate book that written by anybody else would have been boring and all too legal. Instead, colored by Cody Wilson it has become a work of art and law, and a philosophy that is taking America in a direction it was always destined to take. And gun control is not part of that future because control is not to the state’s advantage. The state needs the freedom of people to feed its massive appetite for taxes and wealth building. And so long as Cody Wilson operates his company Defense Distributed and makes his new Ghost Gunner milling machines, and pays his taxes, the reality of gun control is that it doesn’t exists and can never exist without crushing the very essence for which the state strives. And that is a realization that is very powerful.

Come and Take It: The Gun Printer’s Guide to Thinking Free is a remarkable book, a real treasure. If you haven’t read it yet, you should.

Rich Hoffman
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Annie Oakely Western Showcase 2018: Adjusting to the heat in the kitchen

As I do every year I look forward to the Annie Oakley Western Showcase in Greenville, Ohio which took place over this past weekend. Most of the footage from this Gery Deer segment on Living Dayton came from me, which gives context to what a cool event it is.

The event was moved back to the Darke County fairgrounds this year and was set up a bit differently than it had been in the past, which was an improvement over previous years. As my time is usually very short due to a very full schedule I usually show up for the bullwhip competitions at 1 PM on Saturday afternoon and stay for a few hours than get back to my regular life. But most of the performers there stay for the entire weekend and it’s always good to see everyone even if it’s just for a little while. Gery Deer puts on this event every year and he’s about as busy as I am much of the time, but these kinds of things are his business so he’s usually there through the entire weekend. Whenever I arrive in Greenville I can’t help but think of it as the gateway to the west as history remembers it, the Treaty of Greenville after the Battle of Fallen Timbers and the efforts of western expansion that took place immediately after. It’s big sky country in that part of the world and its one of the few times I can walk around and eat funnel cakes with bullwhips and guns strapped to my hip and nobody thinks anything of it.

I felt very fast this year in the competitions which was good. Professionally I had just come off a really tough week. I had been thinking that even the biggest high stakes poker games broadcast on television did not have the pressure I was under. But I wouldn’t have it any other way, I like it in the kitchen with the heat turned up. The more pressure, the better I do. But to manage all that professional stress I rely on the Annie Oakley Western Showcase every year to recalibrate myself. The Ohio Fast Draw Association had their shooting range set up right across from our Showcase area and I spent time with them as well which has been my new thing of late, shooting Cowboy Fast draw which I practice nearly every day. Because of that everything was faster for me and I felt it in the bullwhip competitions.

We mostly do the competitions for the crowd because it gives a good narrative to the greater show that Gery Deer puts on each year. We keep things pretty loose and fun. But for me it’s a step out of a very intense business and political world that I normally live in where I get to wear my cowboy hat and be around genuinely good people who do things for all the right reasons. That for me is very refreshing and that one event satisfies me for the entire upcoming year. If I could make a good career living life in the manner that we do during that western showcase, I would. However, for me the drawback is that it would require being on the road all the time and with the size of my family, that just wouldn’t work.

Gery and I always talk about ideas for the future and how to expand on our experience, but with both of us being so busy the next year usually comes faster than we can call each other to make arrangements, but all that freezes for just a few hours on the last Saturday of the month of July when Darke County celebrates the life of Annie Oakley’s birthday in her home town. As Gery reported to me, every hotel and motel room was booked for the weekend, and under the new location, there was a very large crowd attending to watch us have a little fun with our bullwhips. As I’ve said, I use those competitions every year as a kind of gauge for myself to manage stress. I practice a lot in private but its good to get out in front of people and to perform because the added pressure provides context to all the hours of practicing.

One of the reasons I joined up with the Cowboy Fast Draw Association is to have more of these kinds of weekends in the future. The more intense my private life gets professionally the more I seek these Annie Oakley type of events to balance out all that pressure. I always like to strip things away to the most essential ingredients and nothing does it quite as well as eating a funnel cake under a clear blue sky after sweating profusely performing in front of a crowd with a gun strapped to your hip. I solve more problems under those conditions than I could under any other circumstance. When everything is going well in my head it shows in my performance which is why I enjoy the event so much. Among my bullwhip friends they really can be broken down into two categories, performers and competitors. Performers do the same show over and over again making minor changes, and they travel all over the country making their money off that raw talent. I am of the competitor orientation, because that’s the life I live. There is always someone competitive and pushing, so the pressure to always be the best is a daily thing, and to apply that to a unique skill such as bullwhip work, gives me a chance to work through the process of refining basic skills that carry over into everything.

This past year I had practiced cowboy fast draw nearly every day and that had improved my reaction times with the bullwhips. When your body and intellect is working well, it feels good, especially when you get up over 50 like I am now. You tend to take those things for granted when you’re younger, but life has a way of chipping away at you, so knocking off all that buildup so that your body and mind is functioning efficiently and in an optimal fashion is very satisfying. In that way I think it would be good if everyone found something like that to do, where they pushed themselves to perform better and carried over the results into their private and business life. What’s encouraging to me is that even after all this time, I’ve been going to the Annie Oakley Western Showcase for the past 15 years, there is still room to get better, faster, and to learn new things. Learning the cowboy fast draw had improved everything for me, and it felt good. And that’s why we do those events, to push ourselves and spend time with people who are doing their best to live the best life possible within the framework of traditional western arts. I am proud to know knife throwers, bullwhip artists, and gunslingers as some of my closest confidants. That was the way it was in the early days of Ohio as a state which was the gateway to western expansion and it still is. Sure technology and modernization add layers of complication to the modern life of business, but if you strip it all way to the basic essentials, those elements are always present at the Annie Oakley Western Showcase and I always leave there feeling recharged for more heat in the hot kitchen.

Rich Hoffman

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Wayne LaPierre gets it Right Again: The trend of returning to the state of the primitive

I continue to be impressed with Wayne LaPierre’s columns in American Rifleman, one of the official magazines of the NRA. In his latest, “We Won’t Waver Despite Media Attacks” LaPierre identifies correctly the vast influence of socialism in American culture and how it has seeped into our education system and created a media environment that is predictably anti-American, and more specifically, anti-gun. This of course didn’t happen overnight—it has occurred essentially from the 1930s and has now culminated into a culture that is clashing with traditional American values which is in essence the cause of this modern civil war. The media are overwhelmingly liberal because those are the types of people who survive the vetting process, the years of college and pre-interviews which get young people into media careers. If they aren’t detectably liberal, they won’t get work in the publishing and television industry. Liberalism is one of the key ingredients that prospective employers look for in new media applicants and this has been going on for decades, so it should come as no surprise that we find a liberalized media establishment that is now coming after NRA members, and conservatism in general. The difference is that now we are starting to talk about it.

https://www.americas1stfreedom.org/articles/2018/4/23/standing-guard-nra-will-not-waver-despite-media-attacks/

The first thing I thought when the troubled 29-year-old Travis Reinking shot up four people at a Waffle House in Nashville was that someone should have shot the kid on the spot so police wouldn’t have had to waste two days looking for him. There was a good Samaritan on the scene who challenged Reinking but there wasn’t anybody there to put the kid down saving countless manhours of investigation. As it turned out Reinking was a troubled kid who found his guns confiscated for being in a danger zone recently at the White House, so the signs were there well in advance that Reinking was going to snap at some point and do something stupid which he did late on a Saturday night at a Waffle House. There are probably thousands of people like Rainking running around out there in the world and when they show up to terrorize us, we need to have the ability to defend ourselves.

That liberalized media baulks at those types of proclamations. They’ll say that this isn’t the Wild Wild West and that we are a more civilized society now and shouldn’t need guns. They say this as the current crop of youth springing from the public-school system is desiring to return to primitive exhibitions of adulthood that were practiced in Neolithic times, body piercings and tattoos to show that they have left childhood and should now be considered adults. Those type of rituals are innate and part of human biological intellect. I know several very young women in their 20s who are extremely well-educated. At first glance they look like typical young ladies fresh out of college who have access to the best fashion of our day and they have the money to buy them. They live upper middle class lifestyles with their peers. Yet upon a closer look they have tattoos behind their ears and all over their backs and chests. They have the common tramp stamps on their lower backs as well which are intended to show people they are intimate with that they are a little wild and crazy which is part of their ritualistic sex practices. They demonstrate orthodox behavior professionally, but raw savagery privately. This is a relatively new phenomenon and that I have asked them about which of course they answer like I’m 2000 years old out of touch with laughs. But they are young people still fresh from their liberalized educations, and it was there that they learned this type of behavior.

The tattoo story is important because young ladies like that just a few decades ago wouldn’t behave in that fashion. They’d be concerned that once they found a husband and started having babies that they might not be able to explain such wildness to their future families. Those instincts have been taught out of them resulting in the product of youth that we see today. The same tragedy could be said to have occurred in young men—especially young men with poor intellect and rotten family histories. For instance, it could be easily established that if a young woman has a good relationship with her father, she probably isn’t going to be easy to sleep with by a predatory male looking for a quick trip to the bed. That is because she will likely have traditional self-confidence and won’t be prone to whimsical seductions by young men looking to paint themselves on her blank sheet of paper. Young girls who don’t have good relationships with their fathers tend to be sleep arounds and dress wildly because they are seeking the attention they didn’t get from a father figure. In a similar way young men like Travis Reinking act out in a similar way when they don’t get the proper male attention in their lives from an elderly figure—and this can make them very dangerous. The primitive instinct of young males is to prove themselves in battle even to the point of killing another human being—so as our liberal society craves more primitive foundation values, young males are becoming more and more dangerous socially. Travis Reinking is just the latest, there are many more like him out there looking for something to latch onto so to prove they are great warriors—whether it be ISIS, the Neo Nazis, the latest ANTIFA socialist protests, or even a college football game—young people more than ever are struggling to show their adulthood, and for a certain percentage they are turning to violence to earn their respect as grown-ups. Most of the gang violence that we are dealing with in America can be reduced to that very simple human need.

It will take years after admitting that this is the fundamental problem in America to solve it—likely five or six decades. Liberalism has destroyed the lives of many young people, in many cases irreversibly—yet our society must still continue to function. That means that the only way to contain the violence that is coming at us so rapidly these days, is with personal firearm protection and quick resolutions when some stupid kid like Travis Reinking does go into future Waffle Houses and shoot up the place, that we can end the attempt there on the spot within seconds. The institutions of liberalism have created this problem and once again it is up to regular traditional Americans to fix it, which is why the NRA is such a valuable organization. They stand pretty much alone these days to offering real solutions to these classic problems. In this case, liberalism has taken young people back to the needs of a more primitive time and it is the philosophic value behind personal firearms which stands as leverage against that social incursion.

Without the NRA the process of transforming America into just another European colony would have taken place. Because of the NRA the liberalized media has not shaped American society into something unrecognizable to our traditional values. And because of personal firearms there aren’t those thousands of Travis Reinkings out there shooting everyone up ever five seconds. Even without a firearm, killers like Reinking could still drive a rented van into groups of people to conduct their primitive need for public malice. But because of the way American society is, there are more often than not heroes lurking in every Waffle House, in every shopping mall and camped outside every church ready to take action, because they have the personal protection of firearms, which has been the game changer on the world stage in America. And it’s about time we appreciate it more for what it has always

Rich Hoffman

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There is No Society without the Second Amendment: Weeds in the garden and why we must remove them

Like we always knew it was, ANY form of gun control is a goal to eventually repeal the Second Amendment as former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens indicated on his New York Times op-ed piece after the March for Our Lives rallies the previous weekend. The same people who support murdering babies before they are born, the same people who support drug abuse, open boarders and have no respect for private property are the people who want to ban the Second Amendment. That is because the rights to possess firearms is to protect ourselves from those types of people as they emerge in any society—which they always do. Only in America we are meant to have a defense against them. Liberals are like weeds in a nice garden. If you don’t remove them from a well-cared for garden, they will eventually overwhelm all the nice flowers and bushes that are carefully placed there and in no time at all, a wonderful outdoor display ends up looking like a tattered mess. Guns are our means of maintaining our ability to clean out our garden should too many weeds arise to take over our healthy plants. Valueless weeds do not have the right to destroy what we put in our gardens that we value. Be it a shovel or a gun, we are talking about tools which allow us to retake what’s ours to begin with, and without the gun, there is no chance of that ever happening if society swings radically out of control.

The 93-year-old Stevens said a lot in his liberal New York Times piece—he basically stated what was behind all gun control measures. The implication is that government should be trusted therefore we have evolved as a society beyond the need to have a well-regulated militia. We have in the United States a wonderful military, the most powerful in the world—so we no longer need a militia to defend ourselves from foreign invasion, so its time to abandon the Second Amendment—and while we’re at it, probably the 4th, 5th, 6th the 10th, the 14th—and eventually the 1st. Heck, why not just re-write the entire Constitution with all these modern smart people like old man Stevens? That’s their assumption. To the liberal, the weeds of our society—they want to live just like any other plant in the garden and if there are more of them than the well cared for flowers of spring, so be it. Of course, as valueless weeds, they don’t have a problem with that.

But those of us who are really smart, who have worked hard to keep this Republic a nice garden full of wonderful diversity and esthetics understand that we can’t just let any willing nilly weed grow in our garden. We must have a set of rules to live by, which is our Constitution which says how the garden should be cared for—and anybody who wants to change it would be the weeds looking to overtake all the other plants for their own objectives. The difference in thinking couldn’t be clearer, travel to some place in the world that doesn’t have a gun culture and you will immediately see on the faces of their people the effect of growing up in a society of weeds. Their intellectual growth is stunted, the beauty of their culture hidden, and chaos is certainly ruling their lives. Even in downtown London such a thought is unavoidable. On the streets of Paris where the highest concepts of civilization realized through art danced on the imaginations of mankind, in their gun less society of today the weeds of liberalism have completely taken over. In Mexico they long ago had their own versions of John Paul Stevens and they have destroyed the lives of the people for any kind of prosperity—unless you are part of a criminal syndicate.

I will never accept a society that repeals the Second Amendment. I will go to war with any political insurgency that seeks to change one word of meaning in our current Constitution. The primary reason is that I do not see any evidence which states that we are a more sophisticated society today than we were in 1776. I have read Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations for which America was founded, and it is far more intelligent than the work of Karl Marx or any professor of economics seen in Harvard, Princeton or Oxford presently. In fact, I don’t think the university system has done a good job at all in the last 100 years of advancing society in any way. By my observation we have regressed, and that is because we have let the weeds take over the garden of human knowledge and they’ve brought with them lots of terrible ideas which is killing all the healthy plants of our society. The great minds that would otherwise be flourishing are being drowned out by the noise of the liberal left starting by thinkers like John Paul Stevens and drooling out of the side of the mouths of modern zombies like Sean Penn and Miley Cyrus.

As I watched Ariana Grande singing and dancing on stage at the March for Our Lives event in Washington D.C. I saw a weed sucking the lives away from the beautiful roses, and tulips of a spring time blossom. In the crowd were many potential great minds locked by the youthful sexuality of a pop star icon limiting their scope in life to her political ideology of collectivism and gun grabbing only to find themselves heading to a stunted existence for the rest of their lives. That’s not a good thing. We all know how the birds and the bees work in the procreation of the human race. Young women present themselves as blossoming flowers trying to attract the pollination process of potential males ready to discharge the ingredient B into the womb of ingredient A. When they are young bodies like Ariana Grande at the height of their sexual powers they attract a great many incumbents to their lairs of destruction. And too late many unsuspecting visitors find out that the tulip was really a Venus Flytrap—and their lives are sucked from them ensnared for eternity by the lures of sexuality—even weeds can look appealing at first glance. Twenty years from now nobody will care about Ariana Grande, she will just be another plant in the garden that will be plucked and replaced with something that will bloom in the spring with beauty as by that time she will have withered away into old age. That’s what the political left hates about capitalism and why they like weeds so much. In a competitive society, people have to always reinvent themselves and work to stay relevant beyond their sexual nature—their primal attributes. Intelligence is the real beauty of a capitalist society. Where weeds just want to grow and take what they can while they can. Liberals hate guns because they don’t want to live in a competitive world—because they require the looting of others just to survive the basics in life. They need to take value from others just to function.

Yet it’s the competitive world that generates all the greatness of society. It’s what caused the creation of iPhones and sent us into space. It’s the difference between an untended garden of weeds and a well-managed landscape. The value of that managed landscape is protected by the gun, as all things of life must have a way to protect themselves from the lazy parasites of existence. All life after all is not valuable. Some life yearns to advance, some life yearns to be parasitic in nature and to live off other lives—thus destroying what’s good in the other. Our value systems give us the ability to make that judgment call—to decide who are weeds and who are the plants in our garden that contribute to the aesthetic beauty of our landscape.

Of course, the eye of beauty is in the beholder and we are all left to our own versions of what type of gardens we wish to grow. We aren’t talking about social eugenics here, but personal preference based on our ownership of private property. If we don’t want a bunch of pot smokers in our garden, we can tell them to go away. If we don’t like a bunch of devil worshipping losers near us, we can tell them to go elsewhere. But we can’t do that if we can’t protect the value of our individual landscapes. We don’t have a right to tell them how to live, but we can certainly determine our own fates and that is why the gun is essential to American society. Without it the weeds of life will certainly seek to take over everything of value. So without the Second Amendment we don’t have an America. We would be no better than all the other dumps around the globe who have allowed the weeds to take over and the good that is within their cultures to be sucked dry of their value just as a withering flower fades away once youth has left it—only to be remembered by pictures, literature and a few passing spectators.

Rich Hoffman
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How the NRA and America are One in the Same: Understanding what defends values and why its important

There is a very philosophic reason for supporting the NRA if one wishes to protect the basic foundations that founded the United States of America. Of course, those who want to change the American idea into something else are against the NRA and things really do play out along those lines. People would like to believe that there is some waiver room there, room to have varying opinions, but basically if someone or a group of people are working against the 2nd Amendment, they are working against the political philosophy of America—and essentially against me and you personally. To that effect, I have never been prouder to be an NRA member. Over the last few weeks after the latest gun free zone shooting I have heard the NRA being bashed by just about everyone but the members themselves and that has only solidified my resolve on this matter. I am the NRA. You are the NRA. We are the people who make the NRA what it is—a lobby group representing our interests and when people talk about abolishing it, they are talking about abolishing us.

We are told that the two things we are not supposed to talk about are politics and religion—so to allow for the non-conflict type of discussion that should go on between people of different backgrounds and beliefs. The only problem with that are that both are part of the basic philosophy epistemology of our culture—and if those basic foundations aren’t agreed on, there really can’t be a society at all. Without a foundational philosophy, no society can hope to preserve themselves into the future. Essentially a country is just an organized group of people who have decided to live a certain way under constitutional foundations. Anyone who wants to change those basic foundations is looking to overthrow the nation as it was. And that is why it became popular to suggest that when speaking with other people that we don’t talk about politics or religion—because both provide the foundations for which nations are built.

Politics is the study of the principles governing the proper organization of society, it is based on ethics, the study of the proper values to guide man’s choices and actions. Politics and ethics have been fundamental branches of philosophy from the beginning. Religion of course is typically associated with the type of ethics a society uses to flourish. With these things stripped away from society mankind has nothing to hold their values to, which is precisely why we can say that we live in a time where values are stripped from us and people are functioning from a rootless existence. The people of today with all their problems were made that way because the essential foundations of philosophy for which they would otherwise function have been removed from them and they are left empty and open to whatever tyrant of activism might come along to sweep them off their feet.

And we’ve seen the worst of these people in the days after Donald Trump was elected president. If there was anything that really was wonderful about his election it was that these types of people who have been seeking to reshape American foundational philosophy were rooted out. ANTIFA comes to mind with their violent protests in our city streets and the lunatic feminists who proposed very violent actions against our government yet do not expect to see the wrath of justice thrown back at them—because they understand that they are hiding behind the destruction of America’s basic foundational premise. This is also why the FBI expects to get away with serious crimes they committed against the Trump transition team and even in tampering in an American election—then trying to blame the Russians. These criminals know that a vast majority of the people within America these days have been stripped of their basic philosophies of goodness, righteousness, and valor—and that they are naked and afraid waiting for the gods of institutionalism to shape their opinions to the flavor of the day—rootless into history or any kind of sense.

Philosophy is the science that studies the fundamental aspects of the nature of existence. The task of philosophy is to provide people with a comprehensive view of life. When that comprehensive view is disrupted or even reshaped into something destructive—such as what we see from the ANTIFA members where they are exactly what they declare themselves not to be—anti-fascists fighting for the right to be fascists, then the forces behind that thought corruption can sell any contrary idea to the public and not expect to be questioned back. We live in an age where young people have been taught that nobody should judge their actions, and once they are adults they believe they can conduct their lives in this fashion. This is largely how Hillary Clinton’s campaign expected to hide her many crimes, and she succeeded largely by those who call themselves Democrats, because their foundational philosophies have been stripped away from them to the point where they can no longer make value judgments about anything. They can talk about their favorite music, what they are watching on Netflix, or what the latest fashions are at Hot Topic, but they can’t tell you what they think of Hillary Clinton other than they want to see the first woman president sitting in the White House. Since so many people have been taught not to judge others, it allows criminals like the Clintons to roam through our political stratosphere without consequence for their power play politics.

The political left has been in the practice of deforming human beings essentially since their political philosophy shaped largely by Immanuel Kant and the peripherals took to the global stage challenging the Aristotelian foundations of Adam Smith, Thomas Paine, and John Locke. To beat those philosophies which caused people to create their own country in North America away from the European failures, the political left had to introduce decades of philosophic deformity to the basic foundations of American ideas to nonviolently introduce the type of political suppression which would advance the political left and stunt the growth of the political right. Leftists did this essentially by taking over the education institutions and seeking quite openly to remold the American youth from their very foundations so that they could pull off the destruction of America without any military assault or mass protest in the streets—but home by home and over a long period of time.

But, those forces of insurrection ran into the membership of the NRA and nobody who has supported that Second Amendment group has budged at all for well over 100 years. The NRA was founded in 1871 and has maintained a firm grounding into the type of roots that founded our country and the members which have supported that cause have been very successful in preventing the type of deformation of our basic philosophy which the political left has been so aggressive in perpetuating. The secret to the success of the political left in how they essentially lobotomize people in what they know has been the threat of force to bring harm to people who think differently than they do. Yet the essence of the Second Amendment is to provide protections from that very threat. Free people armed to defend themselves do not have to fear having their basic philosophic foundations robbed from them by force—and that has really been all that’s kept America going all these years. Its been those 5 million NRA supporters and the 10 to 20 million others who support the NRA but haven’t yet sent a check to the organization to lobby on their behalf. We become members so that the NRA will work on our behalf to prevent violence. Because if there isn’t an NRA and the political left comes to attempt to remove reason from our minds—what are we supposed to do—just sit there and let them do it? Of course not.

Rich Hoffman
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The Answer to Sam Zeil’s White House Question: Why we can buy “weapons of war” at the local store

I was impressed with the 18-year-old Sam Zeif who spoke at the White House after the Parkland, Florida school shooting. He lost his best friend and was very sad about it. He spoke very intelligently and was extremely articulate. But he asked a question that deserves an answer, and a lot of people who don’t shoot much, or understand the philosophic premise of the Second Amendment are asking the same question. Young Zeif said it a couple of times, he wanted to know why he could still buy “weapons of war” at the store and suggested that we’d all be better off if America adopted a similar policy as Australia—and had a general gun confiscation policy. I heard that and a natural tension went up my spine wanting to defend the basic assumption. However, I don’t blame the kids so much for not understanding the scope of the situation, they have learned it in their schools and in the temperament of their intuitional interaction. Yet most gun owners know and understand otherwise, and that knowledge is often traditionally transferred from generation to generation for a reason that is specific to American culture and is why we can go to the store and buy weapons of war. Young Sam apparently has not had the benefit of this generational exchange, so I’ll offer it here for him and those of a like mind.

Whenever I buy a new gun it is always a magical experience. I love every single new one and the thrill of it never stops. Guns always represent power and strength and the bigger and meaner the better. Being weapons of war is a very foundational way to look at them, but what they represent is aggression and defense. Yet ultimately, they stand for freedom, freedom from aggression, freedom from authoritarian rule, freedom from any sinister forces that might want to steer your life in a direction of their choosing, not yours. Having big, mean, powerful guns means you are on equal terms with even the most vicious aggressor out there in the world that may have ill intentions toward you, and having an option against those forces brings about freedom that only a gun can yield.

The world that many rock stars have sung about, and what Sam Zeif by default articulated does not exist. There is no institution in the world that is completely trustworthy, especially with our lives. We may wish for that to be the case, but even in the Parkland school shooting there were so many hired people who failed from the institutional point of view that no reasonable argument in their defense can be made. We would be fools to trust completely that the FBI would do their jobs 100% of the time. We’d be idiots to assume that local law enforcement will get it right in every circumstance. In the Parkland shooting there are reports now that up to four officers near the incident failed to confront the shooter, so even those officially sanctioned to use guns get it wrong a lot of the time—more than is acceptable. That doesn’t mean we should scrap our society into anarchy, but it does mean that we need another layer of security in our lives that is individually driven. We should leave it to the professionals—those we pay to worry about security and the laws we make as a society, but we should always look to ourselves first.

To assume that if all the guns in the world were confiscated that we would all by default fall into a society of peace is just ridiculous. Human beings probably have at least 100,000 more years of evolution before the basic natures of our existences change for the better, where aggression isn’t part of our interaction with each other. People are always competing with one another, there are always bigger people, smarter people, faster people, better looking people, etc., who will leverage their talents and abilities against others to acquire what they think they need to live. It was only through the invention of the gun and the general distribution of reading through the printing press that freedom from static institutions began to falter and the cultures of individuality began to spring up around the world, most notably in the early American colonies for which our Constitution was written. Before people could read things for themselves and defend what they acquired through that knowledge with personal defense, societies were strung together through kingships and nobility. The gun freed us all from that enslavement.

But go to any corporate environment and you will see the same primitive mechanisms at work, people using whatever skills of superiority they have over others to acquire advantages for themselves. War is a trait of human beings, even two nicely mannered women will fight over who has the best flower bed, the best pie, or even the largest diamond ring. It is in the nature of human beings to be competitive, even if the foundations are rooted in destruction. But when a person has a gun and they are smaller than another person with a gun, they are both suddenly equal. Guns are the ultimate equalizers, having guns puts everyone on the same footing essentially making firearms a major contributor to the furtherance of a human species working toward objectives that supersede the typical primitive motivations of past millennia. Many of the advancements made in America are because of the gun, not in spite of them. People who might in any other society be pushed to the back of the pecking order line were able to profess their ideas about things knowing that they wouldn’t be gunned down in the street for professing them, because everyone is armed and retaliation is always a possibility. For the first time in the history of the world, individuals had power over the institutions so they could contribute to the nature of existence. If the threat of retaliation is not present, such as a big person being tempted to abuse a person of smaller stature, too often with humans an abuse of that relationship will take place because the larger person can, then the smaller person will find themselves in a weak position individually. If the smaller person has a gun, suddenly the size of the other person no longer gives them an advantage and a more equal exchange of information is possible leading to a better relationship.

Owning weapons of war even though nobody of a right mind ever thinks of using them for a destination of violence eases a mind that may always be concerned that the size of institutions may inhibit their options in life. Having big scary weapons in personal possession means that the big scary authorities who have lots of weapons of war will think twice before kicking down your door in the middle of the night to abuse their authority—just because they can. When there are people out in the world carrying around big scary weapons to prevent terrorists from attacking the foundations of our society there must also be checks in place to keep law enforcement from using that power to abuse their authority to take the possessions of people they are supposed to be watching over. We all hear of cases where traffic cops pull over a car full of girls and have forced them to perform sex acts to get out of expensive fines. Or cops detain an attractive woman and force them into a state of undress accusing them of carrying dangerous weapons just so they can have the power to strip down a beautiful woman. It happens much more than it should. The people we pay to protect us are much less prone to abuse that relationship if they have to worry that people might shoot back if they abuse their authority. We’d hope that such a thing might never happen but just looking at the abuse of the FBI against the Trump administration tells us that even at the highest levels of our government that trust is only as deep as the threat of danger that might come back at the perpetrators. Without that threat, abuse often happens in any relationship.

Ironically weapons of war are the foundations to a civil society. You will never see a lot of pushing and shoving going on at gun events where everyone is armed with a gun. Big people, small people, smart people and dumb people all treat each other respectfully because in those meetings everyone is truly equal because it’s not the biological gifts that we have which make us that way, it is the invention of the gun that takes over and puts everyone on equal footing. By taking away the temptation for aggression it forces everyone to treat each other fairly and with great respect. That’s why you don’t see mass shootings at gun shows or NRA events—and why those people tend to be very polite and respectful. The gun is an invention of equality and it works wonderfully.

So to answer Sam’s question, why can he go to the store to buy weapons of war, well, because those weapons are needed to keep human beings on an equal playing field. Institutions by themselves cannot be trusted, they often do abuse their power and so long as that is the case, which isn’t necessarily a learned behavior, but a biological one, equality must be achieved between people through an inventive process. The beauty of a fine weapon that is big and scary is that it gives the owner the ability to function in life with a level of equality that has never been possible prior to the invention of the firearm. Having that firearm forces others to deal with you at a level of respect that is unmistakable and takes away the temptations to abuse relationships for the gain of a one-sided exchange. If young women had more guns in an open carry part of their fashion, they would get harassed sexually a lot less. Because the natural relationship between a large man of 250 pounds is to show superiority over the 120-pound woman. But when she has on her hip a nice Glock or a Smith & Wesson revolver, the large man will treat the woman differently because his size and strength are no longer assets that he can claim superiority over. She is just as strong as he is just because she has a gun. If he has a gun as well, then the two are truly equal.

Traditionally when a father or grandfather gave a young man his first gun, the gift wasn’t just a weapon of war, it was an assignment of equality that let the youth engage with the world on an equal footing—even among his parental peers. For instance, the implication of the dad to the son, “you are now as strong as I am and I trust you enough to give you this gun.” Many such people never use their guns in any kind of aggressive manner, but they know if they needed to, they could and that leads to a society of greater respect in personal exchanges. If the behavior of Nickolas Cruz, the shooter in the Parkland massacre, were to be studied correctly it would be revealed that the kid was small, had been picked on for much of his life and his parents failed to give him a good philosophic foundation to live with. So he turned to the gun to become superior to his oppressors. If people at the school also had guns, then Cruz would not have such a claim to superiority that he had on the day of the shooting. But taking guns away doesn’t solve the problem—Cruz was still a kid who was picked on for being such a small person, humans are always looking for leverage over one another. Only in an equally armed society do we actually have the basis for a proper interaction based on fairness. That is why we have weapons of war for sale at an area store. They are essential to a proper and justice-based society.

Rich Hoffman

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