AWR Hawkins, Ph.D.

So as not to leave Harvard’s Jill Lepore precariously perched out on a limb waving her “guns kill” flag all alone, Tina Dupuy, the managing editor of the website Crooks and Liars, has crawled out on the limb as well. And she’s done so with an embarrassingly incoherent article in which she tries to convince gun owners that they support gun control, whether they want to admit it or not. Seriously. (more)

When we think about what characterizes free men, what qualities or habits they usually exhibit, there are a handful of traits that seem to show themselves again and again. For instance, free men speak their minds: which is not the same thing as saying they run their mouths. Rather, it is simply to point out that when something needs to be said, a free man will often say it. And free men abide by the intuitive, internal witness to right and wrong embedded in them by God, through nature. In truth, they not only abide by it — they actually nurture it and expect others to abide by it as well. Thus they still live by maxims such as, “a man’s word is his bond.” (more)

Check out TheDC's Guns and Gear section for Second Amendment news, gun policy and reviews of the latest guns and gear. (more)

A recent article in The New Yorker titled “American Battleground,” by Harvard’s Jill Lepore, has been gnawing at me ever since I critiqued it last week for The Daily Caller. As I wrote then, it is a convoluted piece of quasi-academic work that is intended to make gun owners question the founders’ position on private gun ownership and, if possible, open 21st-century American minds to the idea of more gun control. (more)

Check out TheDC's Guns and Gear section for Second Amendment news, gun policy and reviews of the latest guns and gear. (more)

Check out TheDC's Guns and Gear section for Second Amendment news, gun policy and reviews of the latest guns and gear. (more)

Check out TheDC's Guns and Gear section for Second Amendment news, gun policy and reviews of the latest guns and gear.
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Check out TheDC's Guns and Gear section for Second Amendment news, gun policy and reviews of the latest guns and gear. (more)

Check out TheDC's Guns and Gear section for Second Amendment news, gun policy and reviews of the latest guns and gear. (more)

Check out TheDC's Guns and Gear section for Second Amendment news, gun policy and reviews of the latest guns and gear. (more)

We've arrived at that place Ben Franklin warned us of when he shared his concern that one day Americans would trade liberty for security. He had a frightful anticipation that a day might come when the citizens of this country would exchange their liberties, risky as they were, for the comfort and security offered by government. And here we are, with food stamp usage at its highest in U.S. history, Obama phones in our pockets, U.S. autoworkers propped up by government bailouts, 99 weeks of Obama money via unemployment checks, three meals a day provided in public schools and the list goes on ad nauseam. (more)

When George Washington wrote that “free people ought … to be armed,” he gave us a clue as to the kind of America the Founders envisioned. It was one where the government stayed within its bounds, carrying out its limited duties while leaving the people free to exercise their rights and liberties. Thomas Jefferson spoke to this when he described the “good government” as one that “shall restrain men from injuring one another [and] shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.” In other words, the “good government” is one that enforces the law, thus preserving order, but otherwise remains within the limited parameters established for it, so that people can go about their business, whatever that business may be. (more)

The Founders who “drafted and ratified the Second Amendment surely knew that the right they were enshrining carried a risk of misuse,” but risk is an integral aspect of freedom. For example, because we are free to speak our minds, we run the risk of hearing things we don’t want to hear, and of saying things others don’t want to hear. Because we have a God-given right to security in our own things, we run the risk of having people use their possessions in ways of which we don’t approve, and they likewise run the risk that we might use our possessions in a way they find repulsive. However, that’s the price of freedom, and an overreaching government that tries to squash the right in order to remove the risk is a government that has violated the people’s trust. (more)

In January, President Obama nixed the Keystone XL pipeline, which “would have carried as much as 830,000 barrels of oil a day from Alberta, Canada, and the Bakken Shale formation in North Dakota and Montana along a 1,661-mile path to Texas refineries.” Since that time, the price of gasoline has approached $5 a gallon in many parts of the country, yet Obama has criticized Republicans for trying to make the price of gas into an election-year issue. (more)

In June of 2010, when the Supreme Court ruled in McDonald v. Chicago that the Second Amendment is “fully applicable to states,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote a majority opinion that provides a rare and educational glimpse into the historical meaning of the right to keep and bear arms. (more)

Even though our Founding Fathers weren’t all orthodox Christians, they understood the importance of recognizing that we had a Creator who had “endowed [us] … with certain unalienable Rights.” And they expressed it that way in the Declaration of Independence to show that King George III wasn’t just denying them the privileges a government ought to afford them in the 18th century, but was actually standing between the colonists and their Creator. We see this spelled out clearly in Thomas Jefferson’s words: “Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not violated but with his wrath?” (more)

To this day, when video plays of the hijacked passenger planes crashing into the World Trade Centers, there is a hush that comes over many, and a feeling of angst that takes our minds back to that September morning. We think of the bravery of Todd Beamer and those who fought alongside him in the Pennsylvania sky, and we remember watching the black smoke rising from the Pentagon on our televisions, while so many news anchors around the world were all alike trying to calculate just how many Americans might have died in the cowardly acts committed by cowardly men. (more)

Every time I read the Bill of Rights, I am struck by the wisdom our Founding Fathers demonstrated in pronouncing and protecting our natural rights. From religious liberty to protections on private property and the security we have in our own persons, our rights are essential to our humanity because our Creator saw fit to endow us with them. Moreover, because they flow from God to man rather than from government to man, our Founders designated them as off-limits to government encroachment. (more)

As the outrage continues to grow over the birth control/abortion pill mandate the Obama administration is requiring all employers to abide by, there is an especially troubling possibility that needs to be drawn out into the light and examined. Namely, what if the mandate isn’t about “women’s rights”? What if it’s really a bald attempt to draw even more people onto the government dole by giving them “free” birth control pills and abortifacients? (more)

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