U.S. Gun Banner Tells UK Paper ‘Traitors’ Think 2nd Amendment is to Fight Tyranny

U.S.A. – -(Ammoland.com)- “The idea that individuals have the right to fight against tyranny is as old as the republic,” Coalition to Stop Gun Violence Executive Director Josh Horwitz tells the UK’s The Guardian in another segment of the paper’s aptly titled “Guns and Lies” series of anti-gun propaganda pieces masked as “news.”

“This year-long project investigates what works to reduce the daily toll of gun violence in America, exploring how California’s Bay Area has defied expectations and seen a dramatic decline in gun homicides,” the series launch” page declares. Don’t tell the ace “reporters,” but East Oakland is in the Bay area, and it “has emerged as the epicenter in a wave of shootings and homicides in a city that has logged more than 80 slayings in 2020, up from 58 at this time last year.”

“The project is funded in part by a grant to theguardian.org from the California Wellness Foundation,” The Guardian tells us about its anti-gun project. “All of our journalism is editorially independent and follows GNM’s published editorial code.”

Forgive me if I get a Michael Bloomberg/The Trace vibe off that assurance, particularly since the foundation benefactor makes a point of promoting gun-grab groups and demanding disarmament edicts under the guise of “public health.” And The Guardian doesn’t do itself any favors by linking to its “editorial code,” where we learn:

“Fairness ‘The voice of opponents no less than of friends has a right to be heard…’ [and] If you are employed as a columnist — with your views openly on display — you may have more latitude than a staff reporter, who would be expected to bring qualities of objectivity to their work.”

The Horwitz puff piece did not present opposing viewpoints, which would be pathetically easy to find and/or solicit. And writer Lois Beckett identifies as a “senior reporter,” not a columnist – but one who has pinned to her Twitter feed:

“I am sick of media outlets making a case for hopelessness and stalemate after the latest mass shooting. There are ways to prevent some of these shootings. But people don’t know about them because WE DON’T COVER THEM.”

Isn’t that exactly what she’s doing in her Horwitz ad?

As for Horwitz’s contention that fighting tyranny has been a key component of our understanding of the Second Amendment since the founding, some of us have been saying that all along. That, along with being necessary to the security of a free State, putting down real insurrections, and being a bulwark of societal and personal defense are all part and parcel of a right its advocates have long argued for. Contrary to CSGV accusations, some of us don’t avoid the first thirteen words — we chastise those who do.

But that’s not the point he’s trying to make. He thinks there is no individual right. Or at least that’s the line CSGV wants those who don’t know any better to swallow:

“Heller ‘reads an ambiguous constitutional provision as creating a substantive right that the Court had never acknowledged in the more than two hundred years since the amendment’s enactment.’”

Three lies in one brief assertion must qualify as some sort of gun grab trifecta.

There is nothing ambiguous about “shall not be infringed.”

The Heller court, citing Cruikshank specifically acknowledged:

“This is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent upon that instrument for its existence.”

And, of course, the Court acknowledged the individual right to keep and bear arms in the otherwise shameful Dredd Scott decision back in 1856 when it fretted that if blacks “were entitled to the privileges and immunities of citizens … it would give them the full liberty … to keep and carry arms wherever they went.”

Horwitz has had a thing about screaming “Insurrectionist!” at Second Amendment founding intent “fundamentalists” for years, and like all his kind, with all his exposure and all his opportunities to promulgate his message, he and they have never once manned up to the simplest of challenges: Provide evidence, based on their writings and speeches, that the leaders of the United States’ founding era, men who had just risen up to throw off the shackles of British tyranny, did not intend to protect the right of individual citizens to keep and bear arms from government infringement.

Instead, he resorts to personal attacks on individual rights advocates, saying this about me:

“Quotes from David Codrea: Careful … You’re talking about testing the ultimate last-resort purpose behind the Second Amendment. Some of us armed Americans take our Bill of Rights seriously and will not go gentle into that good night, bundled or by ourselves. You and your fellow travelers are playing a most dangerous game. Source: Codrea responding to a columnist who suggested that Anyone who shows up armed at a forum where a public official or political candidate is due to appear ought to be detained-and possibly prosecuted.  Guns Magazine, “The Most Dangerous Game,” January 2010”

As anyone who has actually read that article will see, that is a deliberately deceptive mischaracterization of what I actually wrote. As I explained in my rebuttal (‘Gun grab group lies about … me’):

I was responding directly to these lines from “The Guns of August” by statist cheerleader Ted Rall, and my article made that clear: “These town hall terrorists could be declared enemy combatants and bundled off to Bagram with the stroke of a pen. If ever there were a reason for suspending civil rights, this is it.”

Just in case we’re still not clear, Rall is saying he wants government enforcers to take gun owners who have committed no violation of any law, but who have peaceably assembled in protest as per our First Amendment-recognized right—to a torture camp, without due process, without trial…

So you’re damn right, Josh. What kind of devoid-of-principles coward wouldn’t fight stormtroopers trying to do that to free Americans? And what kind of subversive traitor to every precept of the Republic, not to mention common decency, would hold that against a man and view it as an opportunity for his public condemnation?

In typical Orwellian projection fashion, here’s Horwitz’s bottom line that he feeds The Guardian:

“Number one: there needs to be a clear public response, that people who exercise this ‘right’ are not patriots, but traitors.”

And we know what happens to traitors, that is, what he wants to see armed enforcers for his dreamed-of Monopoly of Violence do to us.

He tried hanging the “insurrectionist” tag on me again in our New York Times “debate” a year after the Virginia Tech “gun-free zone” massacre (where the paper deliberately pitted me against half-a-dozen antis, just to keep the odds fair) when he wrote:

“Mr. Codrea writes a blog titled, ‘The War on Guns, Notes from the Resistance’ (who is he resisting?)”

Why, I’m resisting you, Mr. Horwitz. And everyone who believes as you do, and particularly those who finance your subversions. If that makes me deserving of a traitor’s fate in your eyes, you and your fellow gun-grabbers get the same response I gave Ted Rall. At least that’s all I can post here.

And as for the UK and it’s happily disarmed subjects of the Queen, I weigh in firmly on the side of “No” to a question I’ve been asking for years.

About David Codrea:

David Codrea is the winner of multiple journalist awards for investigating/defending the RKBA and a long-time gun owner rights advocate who defiantly challenges the folly of citizen disarmament. He blogs at “The War on Guns: Notes from the Resistance,” is a regularly featured contributor to Firearms News, and posts on Twitter: @dcodrea and Facebook.