The Liberty Nuts, Part III

By John Longenecker —— Bio and Archives October 7, 2008

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No matter what happens in November - 2009 is going to be a great year for liberty.

I attended the 2008 Gun Rights Policy Conference this weekend in Phoenix. Second Amendment Foundation President Joe Tartaro tapped me on the shoulder to join a panel in place of Manny Fernandez who was unable to attend. The topic was Knowing Our Enemies and Their Targets. I have an hour-long talk in the can - Freedom Can Protect Itself - which I distilled down to the ten-minutes I had to speak. I began that, the way I had been observing it for years, one of the greatest stealth enemies of the United States is personal anger, an anger which can be expressed in the political arena where it will do the least good. I noted that three generations of broken homes have made a new generation of heartbroken, confused and anxious teens who then join gangs in their youth or become angry leftist adult activists, filled naturally with a sense of abandonment, driven to fight social injustice, or so they believe. Their struggle is to belong. I said that I believe they are really seeking to undo their own past injustices they suffered, the very same kind of things many other Americans seem to have overcome and who now work without a net. The division between liberty enthusiasts and the angry is that when we all experience the same adversity, some of us get over it and grow and some of us hold on to it. There is more to it than this, of course, but it's this simple, really. This means that our way of life is targeted and affected by an enemy already here, for three generations, anyway. Personal anger and anxiety loathe and even act out against all of our institutions from marriage, to child care to education content to privacy to gun bans, and seem to meddle, produce repeatedly failing policies, and back their effort with official force. Every corner of our freedom is under attack not only by enemies outside our borders who want to destroy us, but also by individuals within our borders who are only too glad to join them with personal reasons of their own to be against these. How do we meet this stealth challenge of hating America for personal reasons? If we see that the angry safety net people are on one side and the liberty enthusiasts who work without a net on the other, we see that there is a middle of teens and adults who are interested in information with which to make their better informed decisions, and those decisions now profoundly affect how we run our homes. Or not.. This is where the Liberty Nuts come in. I have been writing for years that the Second Amendment isn't about guns, it is - in part - about carrying our own burdens, and the first burden is that no one else is responsible for your personal safety, only you are. Further, the armed citizen serves an even greater role in continually impeaching the need for boondoggle policies sold as necessary when the armed citizen is more than adequate to discredit these. In this, I have said that the 80 million or so gun owners are not nuts about guns, but nuts about liberty. I refer to them often affectionately as the Liberty Nuts, not gun nuts. There is a uniting force in this, and new liberty nuts will write it. 2009 is going to be a great year to reach the middle of this demographic of adults looking for information in how to run their homes, and it will be the Liberty Nuts who will bring it to them in the new high-speed media. Many are already operating (thank you for your service!) and there will be exciting, informative podcasts, more Bloggers, new talkradio guests, new books, fabulous insight and observations in convenient, easily digestible information or highly detailed and thorough, however you like it. The groundswell will come not from pushing the idea, but from a demand for it. More individuals platforming their patriotism. More motivated involvement. More self-rule. We knew that no matter what happened in the Supreme Court's ruling of D.C. v. Heller, we would have our greatest work ahead of us. But it's not just about gun rights, it's about the totality of all of our rights - of everyone's rights - in a great debate of whether we carry our own burdens, or whether we wish to be carried by others. The truth is that no one can ever carry your burdens for you, no one, no matter what they promise. In many respects, we're always on our own, always. The Second Amendment is the best indicator of the overall health of all our other rights. This means your home, gun owner or not, and this is the unifying truth. So it is with the 2008 Election - no matter what happens, 2009 will be a fabulous year for the Liberty message to break away from the gravitational pull of the liberty community and speak to America which so dislikes big government and its interference just as much, and is waiting for promises to be kept. As with personal self-defense, friends, no one else is going to do it for you. Author Howard Nemerov [Contrast Media Press] points out that the armed citizen stands in the way of big government. Nothing could be more obvious to the 80 million gun owners in the United States, but millions of non-gun owner families have not yet seen the connection to bigger and bigger government, or, to put it another way, the path to reducing big government and how intrusion into parenting, what you eat, drive, or personal tastes, proven in a gun control formula can be reversed. The intrusion, the baffling policy, the disrespect for constituents, the total indifference to our children and family and the imposition of a National ID Card are all related to one movement which can be made to reverse direction, impeached and shrunk for greater liberty of the home, not greater freedom of movement of officials. Millions will be reading and hearing liberty nuts to reawaken liberty truths in dozens of topics in how to free their households. More to come.