{"id":102120,"date":"2024-05-27T20:37:44","date_gmt":"2024-05-28T01:37:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=102120"},"modified":"2024-05-27T20:37:44","modified_gmt":"2024-05-28T01:37:44","slug":"102120","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=102120","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

No Second Amendment, No First: God, Guns, and the Government<\/a><\/p>\n

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Today\u2019s Left endlessly preaches the evils of \u201cgun violence.” It is a message increasingly echoed from the nation\u2019s pulpits, presented as common-sense decency and virtue. Calls for \u201cradical non-violence\u201d are routinely endowed with the imprimatur of religious doctrine.<\/p>\n

But what if such teachings were misguided, even damaging? What if the potential of a citizenry to exercise force against violent criminals and tyrannical governments is not just compatible with church teaching, but flows from the very heart of Biblical faith and reason? What if the freedoms we treasure are intimately tied to the power to resist violent coercion?<\/p>\n

This is the long-overdue case John Zmirak makes with stunning clarity and conviction in\u00a0No Second Amendment, No First<\/span>. A Yale-educated journalist and former college professor, Zmirak shows how the right of self-defense against authoritarian government was affirmed in both the Old and New Testaments, is implied in Natural Law, and has been part of Church tradition over the centuries.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Zmirak further shows how today\u2019s mounting threats to the gun rights guaranteed by the Second Amendment are inexorably linked to the increasingly brazen attacks by secularists on human dignity as the \u201cimage of God.\u201d Indeed, the more than 200 million civilians murdered by governments in the 20th\u00a0century have in common two attributes: From Lenin\u2019s Russia to Hitler\u2019s Germany, from Mao\u2019s China to Castro\u2019s Cuba those murders were at the hands of rabidly anti-religious regimes; and the victims had first been disarmed in the name of \u201cpublic safety.\u201d The story is unchanging: always, the first move of authoritarians is to deny citizens the ability to defend themselves against the tyrannical state.<\/p>\n

America\u2019s Founders, themselves products of a vital Christian tradition where churches served as the nexus for organizing citizens militias for self-defense, were keenly aware of this. It is why they enshrined the Second Amendment as the last backstop against tyranny. They understood, as the Supreme Court has recently reaffirmed, that far from a \u201csecond class\u201d privilege, gun rights are the guarantor of all the others \u2013 and never more so than in a time when free speech and the free exercise of religion are under threat.<\/p>\n

No Second Amendment, No First<\/span>\u00a0is nothing less an urgent call for moral clarity, and a full-throated reminder of what is at stake in the war for our nation\u2019s soul.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No Second Amendment, No First: God, Guns, and the Government Today\u2019s Left endlessly preaches the evils of \u201cgun violence.” It is a message increasingly echoed from the nation\u2019s pulpits, presented as common-sense decency and virtue. Calls for \u201cradical non-violence\u201d are routinely endowed with the imprimatur of religious doctrine. But what if such teachings were misguided, … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102120","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-rkba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=102120"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102120\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102121,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102120\/revisions\/102121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=102120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=102120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=102120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}