Dustin Hurst
3 min readAug 28, 2015

Come and take my gun

I dare you. No, really.

America is a violent place and day after day we mourn shooting victim after shooting victim. It’s awful.

Shortly following any tragedy, the hardened partisans take their sides to capitalize on grief and some of the most tender human emotions.

The gun-grabbers, a particularly noisy bunch, fit among thks crowd. Minutes after any shooting, the call for America to become more like Australia, which confiscated guns from it’s people a while back.

Sorry, folks. It won’t work here in America. Never. The grabbers might try a piecemeal approach, but that’s as far as they’ll get —at least until properly thinking courts rectify those intrusions.

Charles C.W. Cooke, a brilliant young voice for libterian ideals, wrote a blistering piece scorching the grabbers. You need to read the whole thing, but here’s a small snippet of some of the best writing I’ve seen lately:

Seriously, try it. Start the process. Stop whining about it on Twitter, and on HBO, and at the Daily Kos. Stop playing with some Thomas Jefferson quote you found on Google. Stop jumping on the news cycle and watching the retweets and viral shares rack up. Go out there and begin the movement in earnest. Don’t fall back on excuses. Don’t play cheap motte-and-bailey games. And don’t pretend that you’re okay with the Second Amendment in theory, but you’re just appalled by the Heller decision. You’re not. Heller recognized what was obvious to the amendment’s drafters, to the people who debated it, and to the jurists of their era and beyond: That “right of the people” means “right of the people,” as it does everywhere else in both the Bill of Rights and in the common law that preceded it. A Second Amendment without the supposedly pernicious Heller “interpretation” wouldn’t be any impediment to regulation at all. It would be a dead letter. It would be an effective repeal. It would be the end of the right itself. In other words, it would be exactly what you want! Man up. Put together a plan, and take those words out of the Constitution.

Incredible.

I understand some grabber sentiments. I get it. They see hypocrisy in prolife activists promoting the so-called gun culture. The mourn deeply when they see innocent people die on live TV.

I grieve with them. I do. I hurt for the victims, the affected families and for the shooters, who so obviously need emotional and psychological help.

That said, the world is a scary, tumultuous place. I feel a deep sense of duty to protect my kids, my wife and my home. I will not — read that again — live without a gun in my home. I don’t trust police to react quickly enough to adequately protect my beautiful and wonderful kids.

I don’t necessarily like carrying my gun around. I’ve taken safety courses, but I don’t feel I need it everywhere I go. Here’s the thing, though: others might. You never know if the single mother next to you in line at Walmart doesn’t trust her restraining order against an abusive spouse to protect her.

I hate gun violence. I loathe it. But government cannot end the rights of the many just because a few crazed characters commit senseless acts.

Any politician — one serious and honest enough to openly admit her disdain for the 2nd Amendment — would likely face serious repercussions at the ballot box.

Come and take it.

Read Cooke’s full piece here: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/423183/rant-second-amendment-repeal