When my son was four years old, he told me the cat had knocked my favorite coffee cup off a kitchen counter, smashing it to pieces. Now, this might have been a plausible story, if we had a cat.
I smiled, kneeled down to his level and began asking about the cat. As he held his glowing red “lightsaber” in his fidgeting hands, his explanation became more fantastical with each question. Pretty soon the cat was “big as a bicycle” and “had a lot of colors, like a rainbow.”
But then he stopped, bit his lip and said as he looked at the floor, “Sorry, daddy.”
He is now nine, and it is still an ongoing joke between us to make up a wild story now and then to tease the other with. The more outlandish, but somehow believable because of its intricate details, the better. Whomever is hyperbolically pushing the bounds of believability keeps going until the other is in on the joke and starts to laugh.
“Lying is too complicated,” he said recently after one of these playful yarns.
“Yes,” I agreed, “the truth is simpler and better all around, isn’t it?”
I think of this when pondering how big the Left’s lies about America’s legal gun owners have become. Of course, in this case, we’re not talking about the innocence of a child playfully testing the boundaries between right and wrong. And this is no laughing matter, as right now, even the current president of the United States, and others who share his politics, are telling us that good, mature armed citizens are actually a bad element of American society.
But it is amazing how far they’re willing to take this misinformation.
Right now, gun-control’s ideologues don’t even seem to care that their dishonesty is wasting resources that should be hyper-focused on catching and prosecuting the actual bad actors in our society. They don’t appear to care that this political quest for power—something they hope to achieve by disempowering individuals—is misdirecting government agencies and getting in the way of honest discussion.
Without help from the gun-control protection racket that is much of the Left-leaning media, politicians, such as President Joe Biden (D) and Vice President Kamala Harris (D), probably wouldn’t even attempt this level of political demagoguery of law-abiding citizens; instead, they’d be forced to have a more-honest discussion, which would then be more likely to bring us all together behind good policy.
Clearly, the people being divisive here are the activists, members of the media and politicians who are blaming law-abiding gun owners for the actions of criminals.
Incidentally, I have discussed the propaganda and the fake narratives coming from the Left-leaning media and politicians with my son.
“You mean, adults lie to get their way?” he asked.
“All the time,” I told him. “To see through them, you have to question everything, especially sources of information—and their sources’ motivations and biases. A good citizen must use reason to maturely discover what is actually best, not just what sounds best.”
“Even with my teachers?”
“Be very polite, but if your fourth-grade teachers get political, then yes.”
He was grinning at this point. And I was thinking that, in a way, this isn’t bad advice for us all.
This appeared in the February 2022 issue of America's 1st Freedom.
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