By: José Niño
Jay Stanley, an American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) senior policy analyst, recently made the case for gun control by claiming the widespread availability of firearms has led to the violation of civil liberties.
The mental acrobatics used to arrive at such a conclusion are dizzying.
The Second Amendment is one of the foundational pillars of freedom in the United States. For an organization like the ACLU, which boasts of being a defender of civil liberties, to promote egregious gun control violations, is hypocrisy at its best.
Stanley declares that mass shootings “create a pervasive sense of insecurity and anxiety that politicians and policymakers will inevitably seek to address” and have spurred them to implement heavy-handed policies such as:
More physical searches, comprised of checkpoints, bag searches, magnetometers, body scanners, pat downs, and more.
Increased surveillance at schools featuring blanket video surveillance, tracking, face recognition, etc.
An expansion of databases, watch lists, investigations, and background checks that gives the government more access to people’s personal lives.
Stanley’s concerns are actually valid, but how we’ve created such an environment of invasiveness is the product of the political elite’s flawed ideology, not the presence of too many guns.
The problem American schools continue to face has to do with policymaker’s fanatic belief in top-down solutions and collective blind eye to the real problem schools face: gun-free zones, where 98 percent of mass shootings occur.
Schools should not be gun-free zones, but it’s a tragic truth in America today that solutions that empower citizens and restore their rights to self-defense are not deemed a politically correct enough to make it into the mainstream political agenda.
The ACLU: An Arm of the Radical Left
We needn’t pull off much of the ACLU’s mask to see the organization is the puppet of the radical political left. The ACLU only defends civil liberties when doing so benefits rabidly progressive causes. Hence why the ACLU has become more involved in political elections that advance this same agenda, rather than maintaining its traditionally neutral role in civil liberties matters.
Historically, the ACLU has been lukewarm on the Second Amendment, and when pressed to define their stance, have declared the right to keep and bear arms to be a “collective right rather than an individual right.”
So much for civil liberties.
Jay Stanley’s recent comments reinforce the ACLU’s tone-deafness on our right to self-defense. Let the record show that the ACLU is no friend of gun owners.
José Niño is a Venezuelan-American political activist based in Fort Collins, Colorado.
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