The following piece was written by Paul Rogan who is the owner of the Canadian publication “Canadian Access to Firearms” or CATF for short. Paul is a gentleman in the truest sense of the word. He is an old school Parisian who first introduced me to the writings of Bastiat. I am proud to call him my friend and with his permission I am reprinting this here.
By Paul Rogan
As I grow older ( but, alas, obviously not wiser) I get more and more miffed and irked by the reaction of far too many of my contemporaries when acquainted, even in a casual set-up, with the fact that I am a gun user and a firearm collector with a strong individualist bent.
While most will not be brave enough to confront us one on one, I feel automatically and often rudely, to various but nonetheless obvious degrees, judged to be some kind of Cro-Magnon unsophisticated moron tainted with all sorts of shortcomings, misogynist, racist, islamophobic, ableist, transphobic morally and intellectually deficient, you name it, just a tiny degree short of a child molester ( Altho I have been accused of that as well for training my children to learn about shooting and hunting at a tender age – My oldest daughter shot her first bear when she was 12)
An attentive observation of the gun haters and their bottomless inventory of bowel inspired non-arguments, their vacuous emotional disquisitions, the only kind they have, finally brought to light a simple but obvious truth:
It is not the guns they hate, it is US!
They would never admit it as it would be accepting that instead of being sophisticated models of informed morality they are merely moronic intolerant people haters with no respect for facts or reason, historically ignorant, reflexively authoritarian, morally obtuse, economically Illiterate with zero understanding of the values we stand for.
They have no objection to calling 911 when in danger, hoping for a (preferably big) man with a gun to come and save them! Cops are an obedient part of the system and on with the program, whether they understand full well we are not!
How do we dare not submit, not grovel in guilt, not conform to their sheep mentality? How dare we prefer self reliance over cowardice, liberty over abject, obsequious and venal surrender?
CATF motto is “Ubi libertas, ibi patria” which means that our loyalty is to freedom and we shall always opt for more liberty over any other alternative. Even if there were not one single firearm left on the surface of the earth, they would still hate us for that.
I would not dare to speak for all gun owners, not even for most of them, but I shall tell you what I stand for.
Just a few days ago, an American friend of mine, or so I thought, declared that, in the coming US election, he would vote for Bernie Sanders.
He was quite taken aback when I told him he could no longer consider himself my friend to which he assumed I must be a Trump fan! Not so ! Not even close!
I had to explain to him why!
The only way you can expect my goodwill, friendship and respect is if you believe in :
- Freedom of Speech.
- Right to associate freely ( i.e. the right of withdrawal – to be allowed to leave ANY group or association at will – and the right to exclusion i.e. the right to prevent ANYONE you disagree with to forcibly join your group or association)
- Right to private property w/no illegal search and seizure, and no outright stealing by the State through taxation.
- Right to due process, no double jeopardy, no self-incrimination, no eminent domain.
- Guarantee of a speedy, public, impartial trial by jury of real peers ( and I mean REAL PEERS!). No cruel and unusual punishment
- Right to own and bear arms
- And finally that men, by the simple fact of being born, have natural rights that precede anything concocted by other men.
If you answer YES to all these (NB : Yes “but” … do not count as they are merely chicken shit ways of saying “no” ) you are my people and I love you, respect you, shall support you in any way I can, at any place, at any time.
Anything else and you are at the very least irrelevant to me, and, if it comes to that, regardless of your other qualities or achievements, my enemy. While I might not be able to fight you openly because of your vast numbers and your shamelessly oppressive bullying ways, I shall do everything in my power to fight you in any way I can, at any place, at any time, preferably in a non-violent manner.
Our views of the world and humanity are irreconcilable and we shall not cave in to yours, regardless of the odds or the consequences.
Notice that none of the above ever refers to your race, gender, religion, sexual pref- erences, what bathroom you prefer to use or what kind of junk you carry ( or don’t) between your legs!
There you have it !
I obviously do not have many “friends” but those who qualify, and are kind and forgiving enough to return the sentiment, are the finest people in the world and I love and admire them, each and every one of them, as the upstanding truly “civilized” people that they are, the true salt of the earth, the “remnants”, the last of the “just”.
I would risk my freedom for them and, in the direst extremity, my life.
The future seems bleak enough and it is time to take sides before “freedom” becomes just another quaint word in some old edition of a forgotten dictionary.
If you believe my plea is preposterous, overwrought and uncalled for, you probably have not been paying attention and my most profound wish is that you are right and that I am wrong!
Paul Rogan said :I shall do everything in my power to fight you in any way I can, at any place, at any time, preferably in a non-violent manner.
The problem Paul is that those that will come for your right are the ones with a monopoly on force. They’ll use the sledgehammer of the gooberment to hit you, the nail, on the head until you have been driven through the board .
This is merely the Statement taken from the founding documents that started this very country plus some cool additions.
I think I could be a friend of his with very little, if any friction. He’d have to recognize, however, that all men (and women) are NOT created equal – but all have “natural” rights – if you believe in that concept which I find increasingly funny as they seem to be taking them away from us at an ever more rapid pace.
I believe in the pursuit of happiness – not the guaranteed result. I also don’t believe in “natural” rights anymore than I believe a puppy knows how to crap outdoors at 3 months old. His “natural” right is to poop when he gets the urge and too many human beings act the same damn stupid way.
Takes training for the puppy and for humans? Takes a higher iQ than a lot of them have.
MA
Francis, thanks for posting this, well-written piece. I do have one “say what?” question about the author: his daughter shot a bear at age 12? Do they eat bear, or is the bear population such as to be a threat to human beings or other wildlife? I admit to thinking that trophy hunting ought to be considered as being beneath civilized people.
Anarcho,
Here is the honest answer.
I’m not sure what “Trophy Hunting” is other than a term used by people who don’t have a clue what goes on when legal/ethical hunters kill an animal (no offence intended) – whether it be a trophy or not. Even when I hunt in Africa the meat gets used locally (I’m not allowed to bring it back to North America as much as I’d like to). To answer your question – yes people eat bear. I chowed down on some last week when a friend brought some black bear pepperoni by to share. It was exceptionally good for bear. I’ve killed lots of bears personally – some because they were pests and some for sport. Most I have not eaten. I don’t really care for the meat that much. The meat I either give away to people who need it more than I do or it can get turned into dog food. The dogs seem to really like it.
Much to the chagrin of urbanites who frown on this sort of thing there is no shortage of bears in our part of the world. In some areas they are grossly overpopulated. If they were endangered or in danger of disappearing I wouldn’t hunt them. I believe in using a resource – not abusing it. To me game animals are a resource for food and for enjoyment. Not something to be exterminated. Like HSF says – we feed them they feed us. In the hunters case we steward them and they feed us – physically and spiritually.
People will ask why people like me (and there are millions of us) are compelled to hunt when we can simply go to the grocery store and buy our meat there or why we hunt for fun or sport. All I can tell you is that we are all different. I don’t understand how one man can look at another and be attracted to him either but it is what it is. I’m a hunter – my ancestors both recent and going back as far as we can trace our history were as well. Maybe it is something in my genes? I don’t know. I also don’t really care anymore. I’ve spent the better part of my adult life thinking about it and trying to explain it. From a libertarian perspective it doesn’t hurt anyone, it feeds me and the people around me and I enjoy it almost as much as chasing Mrs. Marion around the bedroom. Almost. 🙂 I have no moral or ethical reservations about it whatsoever. Perhaps it comes from being raised rural and being close to the cycle of life and death on a regular basis.
For what its worth when I got out of high school I tried a job in a slaughter house. I could’t do it. It was just killing and it wasn’t for me (I lasted one day). In my eyes the act of killing another living being is intricately connected to a sort of respect and understanding for life itself. The two things should never be disconnected or else we become something different. I hunt because I love life, it’s cycles and at all time and in all places am intimately familiar with my place in it.
I hope that helps answer your question. Cheers.
Good piece. Godspeed to the “remnants”, the last of the “just”. Wherever they live.
Paul is welcome in my home anytime. Encouraging to know there are remnants amongst our neighbors to the north. And reassuring that I’m not alone in the wilderness of empty vacuous thinking that passes for discourse in the US.
Francis: excellent answer! I stopped trying to justify hunting and the shooting sports in general a long time ago.
Francis,
Yes, excellent answer, for which I gave you a “thumbs up”. You correctly pegged me as an “urbanite”, but my father was raised in the country, so I have a little second-hand knowledge of that way of life. I use “trophy hunting” to mean killing an animal for no reason except to demonstrate one’s manliness or prowess, a motive that was much in evidence among the Big Game Hunters of the Victorian era. I just don’t see how being able to drop a big animal at 200 yards with a .50 caliber rifle makes one “manly”. I understand that hunting is very different from target shooting, with the whole “being out in nature stalking the elusive prey” dynamic going on, but the end result of trophy hunting is a dead animal and a wasted resource.
I consider human beings as part of the natural world, and hunting for food or other useable animal parts, pest control (even where I live, there are some towns where cougars wander down from the hills and snatch the occasional small child), wildlife management (trying to keep a balance between predator and prey species), or even just for pleasure, these are all good reasons, as long as some attempt is made to use the animal and it isn’t endangered as a species. Like you say, from a libertarian perspective, nothing wrong with that. But as I’m sure you’d agree, being intelligent, it falls on us to be responsible stewards of the natural world. Maybe it’s just all the images we get from the MSM about “endangered wildlife” that gives me a somewhat distorted initial reaction to the idea of hunting. So it is a pleasure to read a reasoned response from an ethical hunter. Cheers.