Why Gun Advocates Need To Support Black Lives Matter Protests
By: Jaxson Hart
Tags: Republican Party, Blm, Activism, Protest, Guns

If you are a true believer in the second amendment [“the right to bear arms”], then you need to be in 100% support of the Black Lives Matter civil rights movement and protests that are going on in the United States of America right now. I’m going to try to be as brief as possible and tell you why.



There are many reasons for the right to own firearms, such as self-defense, hunting, and the fact that they are really fun to shoot. But the second amendment also states that citizens have the right to form regulated militias in addition to owning firearms. There are really only two reasons for citizens to have the right to both guns and citizen militias.



The first reason is so that the United States doesn’t have to worry quite as much about perpetually having a standing army on home soil to protect and deter the country from any sort of foreign invasion. Essentially, if most households are packing heat, then each neighborhood could turn into an ass kicking militia if an invasion did occur. If citizens want to privately train for that event than the US government has even less domestic military concerns.



The second reason is more strongly advocated by modern gun advocates than it was America’s forefathers. There is a logic that citizens should be allowed to have firearms that are of equal grade in firepower and capability to their own military so that citizens can protect themselves from the potential tyranny of their own government. This means that if the government and its military turned against the principles of its people by starting a genocidal campaign or attempting to take constitutional freedoms away from its people (like freedom of speech or religion), then the people could fight back and have a fighting chance while doing so.



Every libertarian-level gun advocate I know promotes this second reason for owning a gun, or more so, owning lots of guns. And I can get behind this idea too.



But what I have found as ironic in the past three months of talking to people in the Midwestern, Eastern, and Southern United States, is that many of the people that support the right to own guns for the sake of protecting against domestic tyranny are also against the Black Lives Matter protests that have been and are occurring across the US this year.

If you are going to support owning guns with the principle that you need them to protect against tyranny than you better be in support of protests and freedom of speech, regardless of the purpose of the protest.

Whether or not you agree with the reasons behind the Black Lives Matter protests, being in support of all protests is incredibly important in:

A) Protecting the constitutional rights of Freedom of Speech as protests are essentially a Freedom of Speech militia

B) Preventing our government from acting without their power being checked



I understand that some people are against the Black Lives Matter protests because they see them as more of riots than protests. I urge you to consider flexing your perspective and see that the majority of the people participating in their God-Given right to Freedom of Speech on the streets of our country are doing so peacefully. And if Freedom of Speech is being shut down by our federal government than you better expect that the removal of the right to bear arms is going to happen next!



It is 100% true that a number of private properties including small businesses and homes have been damaged in some of the BLM protests. But this should not be your focus!!! The people in the BLM protests feel that they are being oppressed, disenfranchised, and killed by their government and, rather than being docile sheep, they are trying to do something about it. A small amount of those protesters have participated in rioting as well but those who have accounted for less than 5% of the BLM participants. In a crowd of 100,000 peaceful protesters, all it takes is one person throwing one brick for news companies to call it a riot.



And the federal government’s response to these protesting has been nothing short of horrifying. Federal agents are tear-gassing innocents and arresting protesters without cause and throwing them into unmarked vehicles. Kind of sounds like getting black bagged and disappeared in communist Russia, eh?



If you are a gun activist and you thought the US government or the US military was oppressing you, holding you down, and unjustly killing people in your community, I’m hearing that you would stand up, protest, join a militia, and do something about it!



If this is true, don’t you think that you couldn’t account for all the people in your militia or movement. That if your militia went into a civil war, that there would be some collateral damage. That there would be soldiers who you couldn’t account for, stray bullets, destruction of physical property, and probably accidental death. That doesn’t mean that you would justify that collateral damage, but you would probably still accept its existence for the sake of what you were fighting for, wouldn’t you? I most likely would!

Point being, gun-rights advocates need to support all the ways that citizens have to protect themselves against oppressive governmental forces in this country whether that is owning a BCM Recce-16 MCMR AR15 or protesting in the streets with banners and, yeah, maybe a couple of bricks. Your support for Black Lives Matter protests doesn’t have to come from agreeing with their issues but it should come from defending our constitutional rights of freedom of speech.