Hello Texas! Thank you. It is a real honor to be here tonight.
We’re living in interesting times. I want to start with something I don’t think anybody else at the NRA has ever started with before: a picture of a naked hippie.
That’s actually going to play a role in the talk tonight, but I’ll come back to it in a minute.
The first time I spoke at the NRA, it was in Louisville, Kentucky. They gave me this gun. It was such an amazing honor for me, but it was also one of the most terrifying times in my life.
They were doing a retrospective of Charlton Heston because he had just died. And so this is the Charlton Heston gun. They had a gigantic 25 foot image of him behind me with him holding the gun just like this: “Out of my cold dead hands!”
Then they froze the image behind me and said: “This year we would like to award this rifle to Glenn Beck.”
Wayne leaned in and said: “Glenn, say something!”
So as I walked to the podium, I just thought “Don’t say ‘I hope you didn’t take it out of his cold dead hands, did you?’ Just don’t say that!”
I have no idea what I said, but I know I didn’t say that!
Charlton Heston’s words were meant to wake people up.
He needed to shock us into realizing who our opponent really was: an out of control growing government under Jimmy Carter.
Today we are in a different place than we were in 1976.
The problem is worse today. It wasn’t just Jimmy Carter, just as it isn’t just this president. It’s not just the Democrats either—it’s the republicans too.
The problem is everywhere.
It’s in our media, churches, educational systems, in our own homes. It is the Progressive ideology, which is antithetical to our Constitutional Republic. They want to fundamentally transform the country.
We used to ask how did this happen? If we’re here to tell the truth then we must accept much of the blame as well, since even our families are imploding.
Our Constitution, our rights, our way of life is at stake.
The Freedom of all mankind is at stake. And because of that, so are our souls.
As I have prepared my remarks over the past few weeks, I wondered what your reaction would be tonight as well as the reaction of the rest of the country.
I am going to take a different approach from what many might expect. Parts of it will be a bit tough, but they have to be said.
I grew up in the small farming town of Mt. Vernon Washington. I have also lived in midtown Manhattan. I have picked raspberries and hunted pheasants on my grandfather’s farm. I have been in the boardrooms of the powerful on Wall Street.
In the end here is what I know: I am blessed to have grown up in America.
I cherish my country and the way I was raised, but I also know we are all unique, and I respect the way you grew up as well.
I understand that many can’t understand me or the what I believe, and I’m okay with that. I don’t understand many in New York, but I appreciate the difference. Until recently, it seemed, we were all okay with our differences and we tended to get along.
We have a tough journey ahead.
This weekend, I believe, is one of the most important moments in history for America and certainly the NRA
It is right for this convention to happen in TX. Because this is where the Alamo happened. It’s where “Draw a line in the sand” came from.
General William Travis knew he had to stand on one side of the line, because it was right for him. He did not hold contempt for others who chose differently. He just said: “Best be goin’…”
If we are going to stand and fight we must love those who choose a different path.
We must also know 4 things:
-What we fight
-Who we fight
-Why we fight and most importantly,
-How we fight.
The media would have you believe that we’re silly, selfish, and think our gun rights and our guns are more important than our own children.
But we believe they are important because of our children.
Where the real rub begins is that the progressive elite believes it can make choices better than we can.
Choices on what we eat, what we drive, what we believe is moral and immoral, how to raise our children, and even if— and how— we can worship our God.
They think we’re wrong so they must regulate us until we comply.
I will not comply.
We, on the other hand, believe that it is they who are in error.
And we are once again ready to live as Americans always have: we agree to disagree. We appreciate our freedoms—or as they would say ‘celebrate the diversity!’—and return to focus on those things that unite us rather than divide us.
There are those who believe in the philosophies of man, whether it’s Marx and Engle or Saul Alinsky’s rules of divide and conquer.
We not only believe those ideas are wrong, we also believe them to be dangerous and evil.
We stand against those who want to close our hearts by absolving us of our own personal responsibilities and duties to each other. Who want to force us to accept a faceless bureaucracy and call it charity. Charity is not something a government forces you to do; charity is something that our belief in God compels us to do.
There are Americans who really think they know better than everyone else. They truly believe they should be put in charge of making choices because their choice will be better than ours.
We think they are arrogant and wrong. America has been calling out for someone to take responsibility. The culture of ‘pass the buck’ is so prevalent that our ‘bucks’ no longer have any value.
Tonight, that era of shame ends now.
And it begins with us. Here we are, millions of Americans and NRA members. And millions more who are home who aren’t NRA members, who aren’t Democrats or Republicans but are willing to stand and declare the ‘buck stops here’
I not only will take responsibility but will cry out for my God given right to own, not only my choices, but my consequences. This is our biggest difference. Not rights, but responsibilities.
A righteous cause must be cemented in the truths of the past, but because the world is dynamic we must build on those truths. Patrick Henry once said, “give me liberty or give me death!” But may I clarify and deepen its meaning?
It is time to say, “Give me responsibility or give me death” for there is no real liberty, no real freedom if one is not allowed to make his/her own choices and then fully accept the responsibility of those choices.
We fight against those who stand against what our founders called nature’s laws. They believe they are qualified to make decisions for the collective.
May I humbly remind them that God himself does not make decisions for the collective? God himself sent His son to help individuals. God himself saves the individual, thus saving the collective.
While we have a responsibility to love, help, and care for one another, in the end, it is each of us taking responsibility as it is the only way to progress as individuals and as a people.
We fight against those who deny the Creator, His power and then have the audacity to grant to themselves the collective power which even God denies himself.
Please hear me clearly: this is not presidents or parties. We wrestle against those powers and principalities, against the rulers of the darkness of this world. We stand against spiritual wickedness in high places. And we fight them with the eternal truths that man once felt were so obvious that they were declared self-evident.
I believe we were all born at this time for a reason. We were born here at this time with a profound responsibility to ensure that the flame of liberty is not snuffed out.
It will be up to the people in this room, and anywhere upon the face of the earth, who carry the understanding and can verbally defend nature’s God and nature’s law.
It is in the hands of those in this room and all with eyes and ears to protect man’s liberties and set this ship right to once again begin the long march toward true freedom.
I find myself in a strange position; I’m the owner of a growing media company. I’m not beholden to any special interest groups or parties. I can’t tell you that I’m afraid to speak the truth, and I will speak the truth.
A couple months ago, I instructed my editors at The Blaze to report on stories where people who used a gun saved the day. We hear all the other stories. About three months ago, right after the Sandy Hook shootings I wanted to find the stories of everyday people who had saved lives with guns. And with very rare exceptions, we’ve had a new story on the front page every day for the last 100 days.
My partner on the radio Pat said to me: “Glenn, have you been looking at The Blaze? Every day there’s a new story about someone who’s stopped a rape or a robbery with a gun! It’s like a new epidemic of good with guns!”
I said, “Pat, there’s no epidemic. I’ve just made a policy that we do actual honest journalism.”
Let me give you a couple of the stories:
On April 4, just one month ago, in Portland Oregon, a woman was attacked around 10pm after she had gotten out of her car.
A man approached her from behind and dragged her backwards by her ponytail.
We know what would have happened next. But this woman had a gun. She pointed it at the man. He fled.
A week earlier, in Youngstown, Ohio, an elderly woman strapped to an oxygen tank was at home, and she saw the shadow of a man lurking outside her window. Then her front door rattled. Then glass broke.
The man was inside her home.
She retrieved her revolver and she called out: “Leave me alone!” “Get out of here!”
But the guy kept coming at her. So she shot him and held him at gun point in her kitchen until police arrived.
Then a few weeks before that, in Dickinson, Texas, there’s a home invasion, and the attackers were sexually assaulting a woman and her daughter. An unspeakable horror.
The woman’s young son was tied up, but broke from his restraints and grabbed the family handgun. Upon seeing the gun, the two men fled from the home.
It happens every day. And the Blaze is the only major media outlet in the country with the guts to report it.
Guns save lives. Guns protect homes and businesses. Guns protect our children.
And only in very rare occasions are they used by madmen to kill our children.
The truth is that guns on so many occasions are the only difference between your mom or sister getting raped and them walking home unmolested. It happens all the time. And it can happen to anyone.
The other side knows this and have counted on a compliant and willing partner in the mainstream media to overlook these stories. They are counting on you not to be able to find these stories.
But what they haven’t counted on are broadcast entities like mine and bloggers like Michelle Malkin, Dana Loesch, Ben Shapiro, and others.
What they didn’t count on or see coming……is you. Your willingness to share these stories To Tweet, Facebook, or even email them to friends.
They are counting on organizations like the NRA and people who have committed to stand to fold out of fear. They’re counting on us to be quiet. They’re counting on our soldiers to come home, sit down and be quiet, to not to have the courage like so many soldiers who come home and tell the truth like Marcus Luttrell and Chris Kyle—nor his sweet wife who will now power-on and pick up the torch.
You see, they don’t know us.
They didn’t foresee the Colorado sheriffs who stood up to Obama’s gun-grabbing measures or the officers who were told “it was in their best interest” to be at the Denver police academy to stand behind the president’s anti-gun measures. Because they answer to a higher power and because they know the truth, they refused to betray the idea of freedom of conscience and the Bill of Rights.
Let me tell you something that the sheriffs knew: it’s never in our “best interests”… to sit down, shut up, and be quiet.
It is always right to stand, always right to speak, and always right to defend the truth.
No matter how high the price, we know that there is a difference between right and wrong, and it is far past time for us to begin declaring it. Never give up. Never give in.
Since when in America is standing up against your own beliefs “your best interests?”
Some of our friends who don’t understand why we make such a big deal out of what is happening don’t understand. They think it’s not about guns. It’s not.
It’s about the right of conscience and the responsibility to keep them secure for future generations.
Progressives want the Second Amendment to be overlooked… but we’re making it clearer: “The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed!”
A man goes out and commits an unspeakable act of horror with a gun. Don’t blame the gun. Don’t blame my gun or your gun or the NRA.
It is not the gun that commits unspeakable acts, it’s the individual.
A gun’s power— for good or for evil— is merely a reflection of the hands that holds it.
I have been looking for gunst hat tell the story and teach the story of the 2nd Amendment.
I want to start with this:
Barbary Powers Rifle
This is a gun that was used the first time we fought Islamic Extremists. Most people don’t even realize that’s what the Barbary Pirates were. It was on the shores of Tripoli.
Why were our marines called leather necks? ‘Leather’ implied you couldn’t be beheaded by the Muslim extremists.
Most people don’t even realize. Thomas Jefferson wrote in his version of the Koran printed by the U.S. government—the Koran in which he warned us about Islam—he didn’t want to have a foreign war, but we were paying 75% of everything that we had over in bribes to the Barbary pirates, so he sent the marines over. This gun was used against the marines.
But this is not a Barbary pirate gun, although it is decorated as one. This was first used in the American Revolution by a British soldier against us. That soldier was killed. The gun was then picked up and used by an American soldier against the British. Then that American died fighting on the shores of Tripoli and was picked up by the Muslim extremists.
So which is this gun? Is it good or is it evil. It is nothing but a gun. A gun is only a reflection of the people that use it.
It is the man, not the gun. People are different but the gun remains the same. When you get past the politics, when you get past the media, and you get to have a conversation with people of any party, any class or when you get to have an honest conversation, people will agree: this is crazy what’s going on…
How do we even protect our kids? Our families? I’m worried that our children aren’t going to have the opportunities that I had.
I’m worried about the kind of country that they are growing up in, which brings us to why we fight.
We have to have that conversation tonight: ‘how do I protect myself and my children and my loved ones? How do they protect themselves?’
We fight because we actually want to fix things.
Our families and our society are sick.
We have become a nation that is numb to the horrors of death unless it serves a political purpose.
Our ambassador is butchered in Benghazi, our military is told to look the other way and leave men to die on the battlefield, and the media fails to report it.
Our media does not report that it is too often safer to walk down the streets of Baghdad than Chicago, and yet the elites call the NRA and its members killers.
We would never discuss the fact that an abortion doctor in Philadelphia literally had jars of baby feet on his desk.
As we look away from the slaughter house and the fact that 41% of all pregnancies in NY end in abortion, our president becomes a champion for the over the counter abortion pill for 15 year olds.
Our society is sick. But while we are struggling on how to fix these things, we also have to beat back the power grabbers and their lies.
We know that the only thing that can stop someone from committing murder or from threatening our life is a law-abiding citizen who has a gun and knows how to use it.
If we’re really interested in solutions. That’s one. Because gun-free zones will do nothing but prevent the good guys from bringing a gun to school.
In the People’s Republic of Cambridge, they actually have a nuclear-free zone. I love that. No nuclear weapons in Cambridge! I feel so much better.
It’s a hate-free zone, too. No HATE!
What could possibly happen? Besides the fact that two of their own citizens plotted mass murder right there in nuclear-free, Kumbaya Cambridge. And you know what, they did it with a weapon of mass destruction.
Yes, believe it or not, that’s what they’ve labeled my grandmother’s summer pastime. This pressure cooker is a weapon of mass destruction.
Have we gone insane? Have we gone insane!
Yes we have.
After the Sandy Hook massacre, the government went in, seized the opportunity, exploited these families, and pushed for more control over our lives. It’s immoral.
Meanwhile they left our communities with “gun-free zones”
And for criminals, all that means is: “zero-opposition zone.”
The American People have the facts on their side. But the American people don’t know the facts.
We have the Constitution on our side. But we don’t know the Constitution anymore.
We have the truth on our side. But how many people can even recognize the truth?
The only way you can control a free people is to lie. The bigger the lie, and the longer you deny reality, the more apt people are to believe it.
Yet, someone will always stand up, and those who seek to control must make an example of them—smear them, isolate them, mock them, destroy them so the truth is no longer relevant. And nobody wants to talk about it any more.
“OK, 2+2 = 5!”
They call us rednecks, right-wing, anti-government and Christians. And people believe them, especially those who never grew up around guns, who are legitimately confused about the NRA and the right to bear arms. These are the people we need to reach out to because they really think the gun is evil. They really believe that we are the ones responsible for killing all those children at Sandy Hook, Aurora, Columbine, and the rest. They have accepted the media lie that the NRA is malicious.
And I don’t blame them. When your kids are being carted out of a classroom with a paper gun, with enough indoctrination, you would too.
It takes a lot of work to get around all of the lies of an out of control government and a media in collusion. And there’s another reason why people believe it. When a society is this sick and you are on overload as a parent, if someone gives you an easy answer, you snap at it because it’s convenient.
It’s easy, and it doesn’t require us to examine our lives or our role as a citizen or parent. Now, only 35% own a gun and that number is decreasing.
So let’s be clear:
Let’s talk about facts. Let’s talk about history. I don’t want you to take my word for any of this—look it up yourself. Do your own homework.
Let’s start by making something abundantly clear, over and over again.
Guns have lifted people out of poverty and over ands over have allowed the oppressed to rise up against tyranny.
Those who seek control ask: “How could you defend the use of guns…how irresponsible…”
“The gun is the most dangerous thing on the planet.”
They say no other country in the world has the problem America has with gun massacres.
“We need to be more like England where the police use batons. The only way to save the lives of our children is to ban assault-weapons and control the people’s right to own a gun.”
Our president said: “If there’s even one thing we can do, one life we can save—don’t we have an obligation to try?”
Let’s start here, Mr. President. I’m gonna explain why that’s wrong. using your logic: Mr. President, you authorized the killings of more than 176 innocent children in Pakistan. These children didn’t do anything. I have to say, these children were just as innocent as the ones who died at Sandy Hook.
Adam Lanza killed 20 children. Your use of drones killed 176 children. I’d say you’re the priority if we use your logic.
Mr. President, “if we want to save innocent children” we need to start by taking that button out of your hand.
It’s not about the drones. It is not about the war. It is not about the guns.
Let me clarify for those in the media: I am not acusing the president of killing children even though the President has accused Wayne La Pierre and the NRA of killing children.
We will not use the tools of Saul Alinsky.
We have read the Rules for Radicals, which starts with “a tip of the hat—to the first radical Lucifer.”
We will not tip our hat to Satan. We will bend our knee to God and let us honestly seek the truth.
We must remain calm and rational. We must hold on to logic.
Because in the heat of battle, people make mistakes out of fear. In the moment of battle, you make irrational decisions b/c you just want it to stop.
If you look at the countries that have banned guns, it’s always because of an emergency.
So let’s fix reason and logic firmly in her seat, question with boldness, and accept the answers that science and facts give us whether they hurt us or help us.
Let’s look at the countries that have rapidly undergone efforts to ban guns:
In every single place that all guns or handguns are banned,
the murder rates go up.
Compared to all other developed nations, the highest murder rates are not in America but in those countries which have the strictest gun control laws.
Should we ban guns and be more like England? Gun-related crimes doubled in England within a decade of guns being banned.
And 4 years after guns are banned, the English Bobby began to carry guns for the first time.
Ban guns, gun deaths double.
Mass killings are becoming an epidemic? No they’re extraordinarily rare.
513 people have been killed in mass killings since 1983.
That’s far too many. But 3,696 people have been killed by lightning in the same 30 years.
There are 30,000 firearms related deaths per year they say.
But what they won’t tell you is that 65% of those, including the one 2 days ago, are suicides.
Most of the remaining 35 % are for self-protection.
Or they are cops in the line of duty.
Once you factor suicide, cops, and protection that murder rate gets cut by over half.
The murder rates are less than half of what they were during the Great Depression. That seems to imply that the more people out of work, the more murders occur. I would bet that the same would be true for suicides—The Blaze verified that the man who shot himself at the Airport Thursday had just been fired.
So maybe you don’t need to ban guns.
If you want to save lives, Mr. President, fix the economy. Create jobs. If you want to reduce violence don’t close gun stores, or increase regulation or buy up all the bullets, remove the tax burden and clear the path for small businesses so that they can create jobs.
Facts matter. They say we have one of the highest murder rates in the world. But if you take out the gun-related deaths in cities like Chicago, Detroit, D.C., or New Orleans—where gun laws are the strictest—America would have one of the lowest murder rates in the world.
When you take out these progressive cities, America goes from the country with the third highest rate to one of the bottom ten.
When someone argues for gun-control, they are either living in self-imposed ignorance or they’re not arguing about guns. Simply control.
For us, tonight and every day forward, we must be about educating ourselves and our families and dedicating our lives to man’s liberty. It must become about the responsibility we keep for ourselves as citizens. And to make sure we give no more of our power to those in government at any level.
But we also understand many of our fellow citizens don’t want to accept more responsibility. That is why New York City has Mayor Bloomberg.
In fact, I’ve come up with a slogan…and this one, New York and Mayor Bloomberg, you will love!
You WILL LOVE NY!
Progressives like Mike Bloomberg know better than you but he also claims he doesn’t have to live under those rules. For instance, he said because of global warming, New York needed a law so you couldn’t leave your car idling—but of course he doesn’t like to get into a hot car so he lets his car idle.
When he got caught he said: “OK what’s fair is fair,” and he instead got an air conditioner that most of use in their apartment in NY, built a special contraption, and put it in his car.
He wants to control every aspect of your life, he wants to control what you drink, what you eat, how you eat, how much you eat.
He even talked recently he doesn’t think he could force everyone in NYC to exercise. Excuse me? You don’t think?
Progressives think they’re different They’re special.
They are the ranchers and we are the cattle.
There are members in congress who are absolutely pro-gun control but think it’s an outrage that YOU should have a gun.
But they carry a gun because they’re different.
Michael Moore is as anti-gun as it gets. His security guards have been arrested twice at an airport for carrying an illegal weapon in New Jersey. You shouldn’t have a gun—but Michael Moore needs one.
Even the first Progressive president, Theodore Roosevelt, had a gun. So don’t tell me the disease of Progressivism doesn’t affect both sides, because the man who started the Progressive movement was a Republican.
Teddy Roosevelt had the ultimate security system.
He had the secret service. He had them at his door, his entry way, all the way to his bedroom, but God forbid someone get past them, he wanted the chance to shoot the attacker before they shot him.
Theodore Roosevelt’s Nightstand Pistol
He had his own gun in the nightstand. Why would this president need a gun?
He’s different, “Because he has people who want to hurt him!” He doesn’t need a wallet, a driver’s license, he doesn’t need to drive because secret service does it. So why would he need to keep a gun?
Hollywood stars have Protective details. Not everyone can afford armed security, Jim Carrey, but everyone should be afforded a chance to survive.
I am sorry to say I don’t trust someone else with my family’s safety. How could anyone believe that the government is best at protecting us when they failed to notice three out of the four Boston bombing suspects overstayed their visas and one of them was deported on national security grounds by one arm of DHS only to be granted reentry by another three weeks later.
But it is more than incompetence. The Second Amendment was written because of our natural rights. And we have the responsibility to throw off the chains of tyranny.
But that sounds old fashioned, doesn’t it? That’s what progressives will tell you, they’ll use that old fashioned thing. They will always tell you: “You know, the founders only had flintlocks and couldn’t see the AR- 15.”
Maybe they couldn’t see the AR-15.
But whether or not they could isn’t what’s important. Why they wrote the words they did is what matters.
And if you don’t like the Constitution, use the constitutional process to change it. The Founders made that possible.
But there is only one way to do it. It’s simple, but not easy. It’s called an Amendment.
The founders were not anti-progress, they were anti-control. They not only expected change, they embraced it but change through the rule of law and the constitution, not around it with an executive order.
The founders, they may not have seen the AR-15.
However, President Obama, Mr. Bloomberg, and Joe Manchin –and Pat Toomey…they were sure the hell smart enough to see you coming.
The founders warned of the “monopoly of violence.”
Because they knew that governments could turn against their people.
And if the government had a monopoly of violence, tyranny would go undefeated. If you don’t believe me… ask the Japanese-Americans who spent the war in internment camps.
If you don’t think our government can do terrible things to its citizens? Explain this:
The Lakota Indians were asleep by the river when the US troops arrived on a freezing December morning. For everyone’s protection, the troops began to enter the tents of the sleeping Indians and confiscate their guns.
One boy, a deaf boy, tried to hold onto his gun. Trying to explain that he had paid a lot for it. In the struggle to hang onto it, the gun discharged.
The US Soldiers stepped back and unloaded on the group of around 300 men, women, and children. 150 were killed, another 51 wounded. Others tried to run to the creek, only to be caught and killed by the soldiers. Without any defense.
The Creek was called “Wounded Knee.” The year was 1890. To emphasize to the press the urgency and necessity of disarming those savage Indians, twenty medals of honor were awarded to the American Soldiers. That’s more than awarded for
D-Day…only four.
Battle of the Bulge…seventeen.
Pearl Harbor…fifteen.
Rifle from Massacre at Wounded Knee
This gun belonged to a member of that tribe.
If you wish to excuse the internment camps or Wounded Knee, ask what gun control meant to the Average African-American of the South in 1850. Or even after they were freed in 1880s.
After the emancipation proclamation, slavery was over, but not really, as we all know it. It’s why Martin Luther King marched. It didn’t end. Why?
The proslavery Democrats in the South tried disarming blacks because it was the last thing that they could do to prevent them truly witnessing freedom. Even after they were declared free and were reading, educating themselves, trying to lift themselves up out of poverty, up from slavery, as Booker T. Washington would say.
The very last attempt to keep them in check was gun control.
If they weren’t allowed to protect themselves, it wouldn’t matter how much knowledge they had. It would all be meaningless in the face of a gun or a midnight raid or a torch or a sword.
You have a right to life. The Democrats were not happy about this at all, and they had the power in the South and they weren’t going to change—war or no war.
The Democrats had the terrorist organization called the “Ku Klux Klan,” which was killing blacks, but not only blacks, any white who supported the integration into the Union as full citizens of any black man or woman. So, the Klan would kill anybody, but they loved to kill blacks, and they really loved to kill who they called “RADICAL REPUBLICANS.” Those were the Republicans who supported racial integration and equality for all.
Our history is so screwed up that they try to make all white people racists.
Both Republicans and blacks ended up on the KKK kill list, and so the Klan went around burning and lynching families, killing them, whites, blacks, just out of sheer hatred. 25% of all the lynchings in America were of white people who had committed to stand and fight for the liberties of all men.
A lot of times, people couldn’t do anything about it because they didn’t have a gun, because their gun was taken away.
Now, if you don’t have a gun, and the Klan comes knocking at your door, how is that freedom, exactly?
You could protect yourself if you have a right to use a gun, have a gun, keep it on you. The left will ask “why do you need more than a couple of bullets or what are you going to hunt with more than 6 rounds?”
If the Klan or the Crips or any of the gangs coming across the border unimpeded come to my neighborhood, I may require more than 6 bullets.
Unfortunately the people who need this more than anything is Americans will not see or hear it. They are those Americans who are trapped in the violence, death, and despair of our inner cities; It’s the death and despair by progressive governments and a collective whose failing schools were designed not to teach about personal responsibility and freedoms.
Teach them their own history so they may join us in the understanding that universal access to firearms is indistinguishable from emancipation.
I ask you: please, do not to take my word for it. Do your own homework.
It’s not about safety, it is about control. At a time in our country’s history when the average twelve year old could go out and buy a gun.
At a time in the 1950s where over 60% of Americans had a gun in their home, some Americans still struggled to feel the true impact of God given rights.
In Alabama in 1956 you needed a permit to carry a gun.
A black preacher who knew his rights and, more importantly, knew history, took his job as a father and his duty to protect his family seriously, and as things heated up he did the right thing—as a law abiding citizen he went to his police station and applied for a permit to carry a gun.
Unfortunately, because he was considered a challenge to the people who were in control of the system the Alabama police told Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King:
We’d like to have someone like you have a gun, but for your own safety, Sir, we just don’t think you should have one.
He was denied his right to carry a gun for his own safety.
Is there anybody within the sound of my voice that believes he was denied a concealed carry because it was in his best interest?
If we’re really concerned and serious about getting guns out of the hands of people who have proven themselves irresponsible and dangerous with guns,
Then we need to tell the truth:
Racists like James Earl Ray killed one.
Disturbed kids like Adam Lanza kill 26,
but our own history shows that
governments kill millions.
Let me come back to the picture of a naked hippie. And just so members of the press don’t get confused….
Early morning in California when a resident called the police to say that he saw a ‘naked hippie’ shooting birds. The California authorities responded by taking his gun away.
Charles Manson Shotgun
It was this gun.
Why am I telling you this story? Because it’s not the gun because the naked hippie went away without his gun but returned as helter skelter, a man known as one of the most brutal mass murders on record: Charles Manson.
He didn’t use a gun, he and his followers used knives.
It’s the intent and the person. It is the individual, not the weapon.
We must admit two things; that weapons will always find their way into the hands of bad people, but guns remain in the hands of good people. This is the beginning of the path to our solution: good people who are willing to stand.
9/11- Walter Reaver’s Revolver
September 11th, 2001. A moment in history that will define this generation. While victims were running away, men, were running into those buildings. Amazing men like young Walter Weaver, a member of the NYPD and an NRA life member. He was last seen in the world trade center trying to rescue people. He was in the lobby trying to free people trapped in an elevator. A servant fighting for the individual’s freedom until the very end.
After the towers fell and the nation mourned, we sifted through the rubble, this is all that was left as a reminder of Walter Weaver. A silent token of liberty.
Walter Weaver, I’m sure wouldn’t want to be called a hero.
He was simply an American.
He was an example of what we all should be—men, who just do the right thing when time calls our name.
When there is an emergency or trouble we are the ones that should run to help. We must be the action on the other end of the 911 call.
I don’t know, but I believe Walter Weaver would tell you that he wasn’t trained to be hero by the police academy.
But he was raised in a culture that taught him about self-sacrifice and to always do the right thing, even when no one else is watching. He had those things long before he wore a uniform.
How many of us can say that.
Good cops, bad cop, it doesn’t mean you take all the badges. It’s the people, not the badge.
As good as the policemen in our country are. When you are in trouble the average Police response rate is 8 minutes; most crimes take less than one.
If a responsible citizen with a gun had been in that movie theater in Colorado, or if members in the audience in that theater were allowed to bring their gun into the theater and not leave them locked in their cars, how many lives would have been saved?
How many of the mourning, children would instead have been able to spend time over breakfast with their mom or dad this morning if someone good was allowed to have a gun?
While our politicians from the local to the federal level have spent us into oblivion, and our public services are being obliterated and our police force is being cut.
I will no longer accept the media falsehood nor reinforce it by calling our brave men and women in blue on our cities and streets first responders. It’s time for America to recognize WE are the first responders.
They are the 2nd responders, we are the first responders.
When there is trouble let us be the first on the scene to help.
Let us be the first responder when someone is sick or hungry or frightened.
Let us be the first to share our bread with the hungry; Let us be the first to open our hearts to the homeless poor; Let us be the first to remove the yoke of injustice.
I don’t know what America will choose. But for me and my family, I choose to stand with courage. I choose to stand with selflessness. I chose to stand with God with Malice toward none and charity to all.
That’s who we are.
Forget what the media says, I know that’s who we are.
Our freedom is under attack. Our liberty and way of life is being legislated out of existence. Our rights are being diminished by a ruling power…an elite class is growing out of control.
We are in a really a precarious position, America. We have a government that is run by radicals actively working against us.
And there are politicians in the Democratic and Republican Parties who don’t fully understand that you’re dealing with a different enemy who is playing for the entire world.
They aren’t just tinkering around the edges anymore.
They are going after America at her very core.
Because they know: if you lose the 2nd Amendment
You lose the 1st, the 4th , the 5th, the 10,th the 14th, the 19th, then all you’ll be left with is the 16th Amendment, the income tax one.
And maybe if you’re lucky…you might still have that one about quartering soldiers.
Charlton Heston already stood in 1976
He drew that line in the sand. I will not give up my weapon. I will not comply. I will stand and fight.
But we must now define what it means to fight and it must allow us to remain true to who we are. Tonight begins a new chapter in the fight for liberty.
One that is about more than just our cold dead hands…it’s about the hearts of good people and the active minds of a free people, the actions of a righteous people.
It’s about who we are. As Americans, proud Americans with a cause greater than ourselves.
I believe it is time not to run from labels – instead embrace those things that will be the only life preserver of any value. Let us declare without shame: Yes- I will cling to my God and my guns.
He is my rock, and they are central to our foundation.
In the coming days I will announce an effort with major partners who know the time of our day.
I hope the NRA will join me on this.
We must begin to teach the American people how to stand for civil rights, with the same vigor and discipline that was taught to Alveda King and those around her by her Uncle Martin. We must learn what it means to passively resist.
Let us resist in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
This is the underground railroad and the lunch counters, and Tiananmen Square. Most God-fearing Americans have always associated things like ‘peace’ activists, sit-ins and resistance with pot smoking, naked hippies. By doing so, we have dismissed their power and their roots.
Because the cultural icon of that decade was the naked hippie we missed the truth, which truly moved us forward.
That free love had nothing to do with freedom and worse, love love should not be confused with sex.
The true and powerful message of the 1960s was that God demands equal justice and equal rights for all of his children. That was the center of MLK movement. And so we must pick up that truth again.
We must not respond in kind by getting angry, by playing dirty,
by calling the Progressives names and striking out .
Because we know who they are, we chose not be like them. Let’s not give them that satisfaction nor the media the story they’ve already written. We are better than that. We are the law abiding, god fearing members of the NRA.
We are Americans. We will be clear, and we will stand, we will march if we have to, but we will not be moved.
Our right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. We will follow in the footsteps of Jesus Christ, Frederick Douglass, Winston Churchill, Thomas Paine, Dietrich Bonheoffer, Ben-Gurion, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Gandhi, Thomas Jefferson, and MLK.
Hear me now: “We Shall Overcome!”
Let us not talk about cold dead hands, but rather the people who have a cause to use them. It is not the gun, the knife or, as Cain discovered with Able, a rock but the cold heart filled with error and darkness that must be corrected.
So we will use these hands and our warm hearts to lift up, learn, teach, help and heal. We will work together side by side, white, black, Hispanic or native-American. It doesn’t matter because we don’t see those divisions.
WE will work together as Americans not only to preserve our rights, but the rights of our children to be safe, our wives and daughters to not be held at knife or gunpoint by a rapist and our most precious and vulnerable little ones to have the right to survive a simple walk down a city street or, God forbid, survive a day of public education.
It is not our cold dead hands that will win this but as always when it comes to American victories, it is our strong backs, our strong will, and the ability to adapt and learn and our warm hearts filled with love for all mankind that will compel us to defend all men's right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
Churchill said, we shall not falter, we shall not fail. I will tell you if America falls, the entire world falls into darkness, so I will add: we cannot falter, we cannot fail.
We will not be the generations that historians look back to and question. We will not be the generation which loses mankind’s freedom
They will look back to us instead and with awe and inspiration that in our darkest times with the greatest reason for doubt or fear, we rose above it, pushed the darkness back, and held the torch of liberty high once again for all men of the world to see and aspire to.
I am not moving. Because I have the power of the ultimate truth:
Because I am on the side of nature’s law and nature’s god.
Jesus was a man of love, peace, and forgiveness. But make no mistake he was also immovable.
The right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. We will fight by strapping on the full armor of God. We will stand firm with the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, the sword of the spirit.
We will fight your tactics of fear, we will fight your darkness.
We will fight your lies and we will counter them with love peace and equal justice for all mankind.
