Last week, the Ukrainian Parliament passed a law liberalizing the possession and carrying of firearms by civilians, and President Volodymyr Zelensky said he would give weapons to anyone willing to fight. In his State of the Union speech on Tuesday, President Joe Biden blamed his administration’s crime problem on legal gun owners and wants to make it harder for law-abiding citizens to bear arms. He even said he wants to ban the very “assault weapons and high capacity magazines” that Zelensky is giving to Ukrainians.
One of these men is a leader, a student of history, and a hard-nosed realist who trusts his people. The other is Joe Biden.
While the world watches armed Ukrainian civilians fight for their country, the Left still thinks you don’t need to own a gun. How often have you heard an anti-gun politician make the claim that semi-automatic rifles are “weapons of war” that “belong on the battlefield, not on our streets”? But Washington Democrats wouldn’t dare tell Ukrainians they don’t need the weapons they’re using to defend their homes and families. Which means they shouldn’t say it to Americans either.
What’s unfolding in Ukraine is an illustration of why we need to defend the Second Amendment vigorously.
It is true civilians are no match for the power of a modern military. However, no army wants to invade a country in which every member of the population can kill its soldiers. It’s a force-protection nightmare that vastly increases the cost of taking and holding territory, especially in urban areas.
Armed civilians act as both a deterrent and a last desperate resort for resisting an occupier. This is why Switzerland and some other countries have made civilian firearm ownership a core part of their defense strategy. It’s also why it’s enshrined as a natural right in America’s founding documents.
The Left would have you believe that nothing in the U.S. Constitution provides an individual the right to own a firearm. In the words of Justice Clarence Thomas, they have made the Second Amendment a “constitutional orphan.”
They’ve achieved this only by lying for decades. We are expected to believe the absurd idea that while the other nine amendments in the Bill of Rights are individual liberties, the Second Amendment is a power given to the government. This argument was dismantled by the Supreme Court when it ruled in the Heller and McDonald cases that “the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm not connected to service in a militia.”
At the time of its drafting in 1789, the term “well regulated” had nothing to do with government control or “regulation.” The Founders meant well-supplied and trained. They meant for every American to own military-capable firearms, to keep a supply of ammunition at home, and to practice shooting just in case they were ever needed. It was an attitude born out of their experience of places such as Lexington and Concord.
Times change, but principles should not. America is fortunate to have the greatest armed forces in history and to be separated from potential adversaries by two oceans. But the founding fathers lived at a time when the country’s security wasn’t guaranteed by either factor and they wrote the Second Amendment to protect against future instability. The situation in Ukraine is proof they were right to do so.
Instead of trying to restrict firearms ownership, the U.S. government should be encouraging it. The National Firearms Act should be reformed to remove references to suppressors and to fix its pointless delays and arbitrary rules. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives’s recently uncovered database of firearms ownership should also be deleted, given that its creation is prohibited by the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act. And neglected federal programs such as the Civilian Marksmanship Program, which sells surplus government weapons and teaches people to shoot, should be rejuvenated.
That way, if civilians are ever forced to defend this country, we’ll be better prepared and equipped to do so. The Second Amendment isn’t about hunting or shooting skeet at a country club. It’s about the people’s right to self-defense, self-government and to fight for their country.
The situation in Ukraine shows that all peoples, not just Americans, deserve this fundamental right. If the Ukrainian constitution guaranteed the right to keep and bear arms, there would have been more civilian gun owners in the country before the war started. More ordinary Ukrainians would be familiar with guns, would be safer handling them, and would be better shooters.
In short, they would have been better prepared to defend their country when the time came. Ukrainians have an outstanding leader in Zelensky, but they should not have been helplessly reliant on their government to arm them at the 11th hour.
Americans and Ukrainians alike should remember this the next time their politicians tell them they don’t need to own guns.
Evan Hafer is a former Green Beret and CIA contractor and currently the CEO of Black Rifle Coffee.
