Op-Ed Thinks Founding Fathers Would Support Gun Control Because Of Dead Kids

by Tom Knighton: The Constitution of the United States of America is the most important document in the country. It lays the groundwork for our entire system of government, protects our natural rights as human beings, and sets limits on what the government can do. When you look at the history immediately proceeding its adoption, everything makes perfect sense.

After all, they’d just fought a war to get away from what they saw as a tyrannical government that wasn’t accountable to the people. They damn sure didn’t want to replicate those mistakes in their new country.

Yet now, a couple of centuries later, we find ourselves constantly battling against people who think they know more about what the Founding Fathers thought and felt despite their explicit writings.

Some of those people write opinion pieces for USA Today.mid all we know about the Founding Fathers, two things stand out in the wake of yet another mass shooting that underscores the desperate need for action and the depth of our paralysis.

The first is that nearly a third of the 39 delegates who signed the Constitution endured the tragedy of losing children. By one count, 24 sons and daughters born to a dozen signers died before adulthood. The second is that these and the other Founders were among the greatest change-makers in history. They were America’s first #Resist movement, and they fought an actual war to create a future unbound by the past.

Does anyone think they would expect us to live by a 230-year-old document? Would they stand by, reciting the centuries-old Second Amendment, if their own children were endangered — in school, at malls, in movie theaters, on city streets — by easy access to guns? Or would they start us on the road to universal background checks, mandatory waiting periods and other steps most Americans say they want?Well, they probably would. You see, they believed in personal freedom. I don’t see why they would jump in favor of gun control just because some writer thinks they would.

After all, many gun rights advocates have children, myself included. If we’re not convinced there’s this serious threat to our children’s safety, why would the Founding Fathers, many of whom took libertarianism to a radical extreme?

The op-ed continues:John Adams probably would have understood as well. He was away in 1776 when his wife, Abigail, unilaterally decided to have a doctor inject her and their four children with live smallpox virus. The inoculation was controversial and dangerous, but not as dangerous as contracting smallpox. Abigail’s bet paid off: Her whole family (including John, who had been immunized in 1764), survived the smallpox epidemic then ravaging the Boston area.

Does anyone doubt that this woman would be marching and lobbying if she were with us now and feared for her children?You see, this is all predicated on the idea that because people lost kids, they’d support any measure that claims to protect children. The assumption is asinine.

It’s asinine because it essentially believes that those who oppose gun control actually want dead kids. It’s their own warped delusion based on nothing but their narcissistic belief that theirs is the only path to righteousness. They refuse to accept that anyone who disagrees with them could possibly do so simply because they think anything other than the worst imaginable.

In this case, the writer is arguing that our Founding Fathers would support gun control because they lost kids. She’s oblivious to the fact that there are gun rights advocates who have lost children to disease, accident, and even a few to mass shootings, I’m sure.

As a parent, I fear for my children too. I fear a lot of things for them.

Mostly, I fear that some anti-gun zealot will get their way and my children will be defenseless against an attacker who isn’t following the damn rules in the first place when it comes to firearms and, because of those anti-gun zealots, there’s no one else able to defend them either. That’s why we want to see teachers opt to be armed while they’re at work. That’s why I want to see more school resource officers in our schools.

To pretend that gun control is the only path toward keeping our kids safe is ridiculous, as is the notion that our Founding Fathers would have supported something when, clearly, they didn’t.
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Tom Knighton is a Navy veteran, a former newspaperman, a novelist, and a blogger at Bearing Arms. He lives with his family in Southwest Georgia and contributes to PJ Media.

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