It was September 2008 and I was in a radio studio with G. Gordon Liddy, the man’s man not even prison could break; a man whose 1980 book, Will, made me view fear as if it were nothing more than the hot breath of a dare—and I’d read his book when I was 10 years old.
I was in this glass box of a radio studio with him for his entire three-hour show. We were bringing a series of guests on the phone to talk about Second Amendment issues. Barack Obama was then just over a month away from winning his first term and he was up in the polls.
When we were between guests, I said live on air that Obama would be the most anti-Second Amendment president of all time. Mr. Liddy looked at me hard from four feet away as he considered what I’d said. He then shook his head and said, “I’m not so sure about that. Obama has said many times that he isn’t opposed to the Second Amendment.”
This astounded me. Mr. Liddy had been around Washington, D.C., for a long time. He had gone to jail rather than testify against a president. He was a man whose word was gold in a city of Machiavellians. He was no fool, yet he was being foolish.
Though it is very poor form to criticize the host of a show who has kindly invited you on their program, I couldn’t politely give his judgment a pass, so I said, “When it comes to politicians, Mr. Liddy, I believe their records over their rhetoric.”
I then cited various positions Obama had taken in Illinois’ state government showing that he was, as we all now know, very much opposed to our constitutional right to keep and bear arms.
I bring this up now because, as Democrats pick their candidate for president of the United States, this is, once again, a time when we need to deeply and soberly consider what these candidates would do to our freedom.
That is why this issue’s cover story asks the important question: What if one of these anti-gun candidates wins?
And it’s a surprisingly easy question to answer in this election cycle, as all of the Democratic candidates still in the race for president aren’t doing what Obama did; instead, they are telling us outright that they blame American freedom for the actions of criminals. We know this because all of their gun-related policy positions are aimed at America’s 100-plus-million legal gun owners, not at the criminal element in our society.
Interestingly, even a lot of Democratic primary voters are clearly uncomfortable with this attack on individual freedom. This must be part of the reason why candidates who made disempowering individual Americans a central part of their platforms, like Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) and Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), failed to gain support of even Democratic primary voters.
Promising to make, for example, any young woman who wishes to live alone powerless before the evil intentions of a small but dangerous segment of our society (or of any society) just doesn’t makes sense to any reasonable person. Actually, that kind of convoluted progressive wokeness runs so counter to the American spirit of freedom that it must make all but the most ideologically left voters instinctually reel back.
That's why whichever candidate wins the Democratic nomination will likely try to reposition themselves back to the middle for the general election. When they do, we must remind everyone what they really stand for.
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