Just this weekend, there were two mass shootings in the United States: one at a North Carolina dockside restaurant and another Sunday morning at a Mormon church in Michigan. But leftist ideology specifically encourages violence and fear by design, because people who are afraid are easier to control.
Every morning, it seems, there is a report of a fresh example of murder and domestic terrorism, and increasingly the perpetrators are ideologues radicalized by Democrat rhetoric into seeing themselves as heroic martyrs for killing strangers they perceive as representatives of “oppressor groups.” The Marxist revolution is here.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the famed Russian novelist and critic of Communism who survived a Soviet gulag, reflected on how effective fear is as a weapon of tyrants: “And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?”
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Had the people been less afraid and dared to stand up to the oppression, Solzhenitsyn stated, “The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough.”
Do we love freedom enough? It is very important that the Trump administration address the violent crime crisis in our cities and investigate and target domestic terror organizations. But there also needs to be a movement at the state and local levels to elect responsible politicians, encourage law-abiding citizens to be armed, and demand harsh accountability for those who explicitly call for and enact violence.
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Too many politicians have gotten away with protecting criminals and breaking the law themselves because they have titles. At least since the Charlie Kirk assassination, we have seen a movement where employers find themselves firing those who celebrate murder because of public backlash. That is good, but not sufficient.
It is said that the imperial Japanese, the same people who enacted genocide in multiple Asian countries and committed mass war crimes, decided not to invade the United States on land because practically every American citizen was armed. Between 1950 and 2018, 94% of mass shootings occurred in gun free zones. We of course don’t hold violent riots or shoot our political opponents, but our opponents might think twice about rioting and shooting us if they know they’re walking into a situation where their targets are armed and prepared.
Let it not be said of us one day what Solzhenitsyn and his fellow prisoners said in the gulag, “If...if...We didn't love freedom enough.”
