I Wish JD Vance Had Challenged the Term "Gun Violence"

I've said all this before, but it still bears repeating

My biggest disappointment in JD Vance’s performance in the Vice-Presidential debate was his acceptance of the propaganda term "gun violence." When you accede to your opponent's vocabulary and nomenclature, you have weakened your own argument.

This is true of accepting the term “climate change” as well. Donald Trump had the courage to label that “a hoax”; I wish Vance had agreed. But I’ll limit my remarks here to “gun violence.”

When No Balz Walz invoked the term, Vance let it go unchallenged. I wish he’d seized the opportunity to attack the term and its erroneous subtext.

The term "gun violence" carries the clear message that it is the guns that are at fault. It blames the object used to commit the violent act, not the actor who actually commits the crime. "Let's just round up those evil guns, and everything will be peaches'n'cream!" WRONG!

I have written about this, but it bears repeating. Please read my essay “What If All the Guns on Earth Just Disappeared?,” originally published by World Net Daily, reprinted here, and recently re-published by JPFO (as well as numerous other places around the Web).

It's not the guns. It's the propensity for violence, and the lack of impulse control. The guns are merely the tool. Eliminating guns will not put everyone on his or her best behavior and have us all living in peace and harmony.

Au contraire, those who wish to kill or maim will access other tools, and their victims will have their ability to to deter such violence and defend themselves severely curtailed, and dependent on their own physical size and strength (the power of the gun as an “equalizer” having been denied to the old, the frail and the weak).

Proof of this is the meteoric rise in knife attacks in nations like the U.K. that have effectively banned firearms. Germany, for example, experienced almost 14,000 incidents of “knife crime” in 2023. This past summer a terrorist slashed the throats of several attendees at a German “diversity festival”. The government’s response was to propose more “knife control.”

One might as well propose a law to reduce traffic fatalities based on the statistical evidence that the majority of fatal accidents involve a Chevrolet; just think of how many lives could be saved if we would just ban Chevrolets!

And, while I’m repeating myself, let me bring up the common claim made by gun-grabbers like Obama, Biden, Harris and, in the Vice-Presidential debate, by Walz, that “No one is coming for your guns.” This is frequently accompanied by the “explanation” that the only guns they want to eliminate from private ownership are “weapons of war” (like the ubiquitous AR15), which they claim an ordinary citizen has no business possessing.

But those of us who truly understand the rationale behind our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and the Second Amendment in particular, know that “weapons of war” are precisely the types of firearms that our Founders intended for citizens to possess (and be competent in their use).

That is because the Right to Keep and Bear Arms has nothing to do with hunting, sport shooting, collecting, or even having the means to protect your family and home from criminals. The Right to Keep and Bear Arms is Constitutionally-protected (not “granted,” but that goes to the very premise of our Constitution) so that the People have the means to deter and, if necessary, resist tyranny.

That’s what makes the United States unique in the history of nations: It is the first and only nation founded on the premise that, rather than the People being in fear of their government, the government should be in fear of the People.

It was best expressed by one of our lesser-known Founders, Tench Coxe (1787 - 1823), whom I never tire of quoting. When asked to elaborate on just what kind of weaponry the Second Amendment protected a citizen’s right to keep and bear, Coxe responded “Every terrible implement of the soldier.” Could it be any more clear that a state-of-the-art military grade firearm is precisely what our Founders intended for every able-bodied citizen to possess?

And, while I’m on the subject, our Founders, in their wisdom, also intended for all able-bodied citizens to be organized into militias. “Militia”! Now there’s a word and a concept that has been effectively demonized and rendered, by Hollywood and other propaganda-meisters of the Left, as synonymous with “white supremacists.”

But consider that if we were to be organized, state by state, town by town, even neighborhood by neighborhood, into militias, the regimentation, training and camaraderie of such organizations would effectively weed out those who had the propensity to misuse their firearms by shooting up a school or a shopping mall or even threatening one’s neighbor.

Training with firearms instills a respect for firearms and discourages the notion (a notion being actively promoted and even glamorized by a certain genre of “music”!) that gunplay is a normal way to resolve arguments.

Oh, and to put this rant to rest (at least for now), it also would help if persons who commit crimes using guns received actual jail time, not suspended sentences, probation or other far-too-lenient slaps-on-the-wrist.

ST