Last month, I urged you to make a New Year’s resolution for 2022 to secure our Second Amendment rights by electing pro-gun majorities to the U.S. Senate and House this November. Today, I want to tell you why our success or failure in that fight could mean the difference between life and death. Why? Because the same anti-gun politicians pushing to revoke your right to defend yourself and your family are also pushing to unleash some of society’s most dangerous predators upon you by eliminating bail. To top it off, they’re also fighting to gut our nation’s police. This could prove to be a perfect storm.
For a glimpse of what it could mean, just look at the violent, recidivist, career-criminal predator who, police say, bulldozed his SUV through the Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wis., last November. Witnesses say the driver zig-zagged his truck over people in the crowd, crushing bodies, breaking bones, killing six innocent people, injuring 62 more, and sending 18 children to the emergency room. Police say this monster wasn’t just free on bail—he was free on bail after jumping bail, and free to commit vehicular homicide after running over a woman just weeks before!
The same anti-gun politicians pushing to revoke your right to defend yourself and your family are also pushing to unleash some of society’s most dangerous predators upon you.
If ever there were a poster child for the deadly “cut ’em loose” agenda of the Biden-Harris anti-gun politicians in Washington, Darrell Brooks Jr., is it. Regardless of whether Brooks is found guilty of this particular crime—even if he’s found not guilty by reason of insanity—the fact is that he never should have been free at the time the crime was committed.
According to multiple published reports, Brooks has a violent criminal record across three states over 22 years. At the time when police say he was driving over parade-goers near Milwaukee, Brooks was a convicted sex offender who still had several pending charges from the previous year, including being a felon in possession of a firearm. Just days before the Waukesha parade mass murder, police filed yet more charges against Brooks, including a third charge of reckless endangering, felony bail jumping, battery and more. Police say he ran over a woman with a vehicle, possibly the same one they say he used in the Christmas parade later that same month. Still Brooks was freed on bail—free to commit murder and mayhem yet again.
Yet anti-gun liberals across this country, led by President Joe Biden, want to do away with bail. In a clever twist of marketing sloganeering, they talk about “ending cash bail.” You might ask, “If they eliminate ‘cash’ bail, then what kind of bail will we have?” What surety will society have that a person accused of a crime will show up in court? The dirty little secret is: None. Because “no cash bail” means “cut ’em loose and let ’em go!”
The crowning hypocrisy of this is that the same so-called “progressives” pushing to end bail—and thus free dangerous predators like Darrell Brooks to slaughter innocents with impunity—are also fighting to deny your right to own a gun to defend yourself and your family, even as they lobby to defund our nation’s police. This isn’t “progress.” It represents a complete reversal and revocation of the life-saving criminal justice reforms that your NRA has fought for decades to achieve.
For more than 30 years, your NRA has fought to put violent criminals behind bars and keep them there through “three strikes and you’re out” and mandatory minimum penalties for the most dangerous armed felons. NRA helped draft and pass Project Exile laws—which sentenced violent armed felons to five years in prison—first in Virginia and then nationwide. And it worked: For more than 20 years, violent crime in the U.S. steadily declined, falling to the lowest levels seen since the 1970s. But now, in the blink of an eye, that trend has reversed. Even The New York Times admitted it’s “the biggest rise in murder since the start of national record-keeping in 1960.”
We have the laws we need. All we need is to enforce them.
The great English philosopher John Locke wrote, “Wherever law ends, tyranny begins.” In the months ahead in this space, I’ll tell you how you can help restore the rule of law in the 2022 elections. Our liberties depend on it, and our lives demand it.
This appeared in the February 2022 issue of America's 1st Freedom.
