Indians For Guns

In submitting to a licensing requirement to carry a firearm, we undermine our own case--that the keeping and bearing of arms is a Constitutionally guaranteed, fundamental human right.

In asking for that privilege, we have lent implicit legitimacy to the denial of that which we should demand as free citizens.

There's an old joke in which (to be brief) a man asks a woman if she would be willing to sleep with him for a million dollars. She allows that she probably would. He then shows her a $100 bill, and says "let's go." Deeply offended, the woman asks him, "What kind of person do you think I am?" He replies, "My Dear, we have already established that. Now we are merely haggling over the price."

It's a droll little joke, but the underlying theme is perhaps not so funny. The moment a woman enters into negotiations over the price of what would otherwise have been a priceless gift, to be shared with a lover, she has degraded it to a mere commodity, to be sold to a customer. Restoring it to "priceless gift" status becomes enormously difficult.

It seems to me that similarly, in our willingness to enter into negotiations about what conditions are to be imposed on the granting of liberties that already belong to a free people, we have, in the words of the man in the joke, "already established" what kind of people we are--not free citizens, who command their public servants, but supplicants, who ask the government for a few crumbs of freedom when it suits them to give us a bit more leash. The farther we proceed down that road, the harder it will become to return to being truly free citizens, and the less likely that can happen without bloodshed.