By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
Perhaps Massad Ayoob, president of the Second Amendment Foundation, explained it best during his opening remarks at the annual Gun Rights Policy Conference in September as he recalled an interview he gave earlier in the year.
“I was asked, ‘in the year 2022, how can the Second Amendment possibly be relevant in America?’ I was able to get it with three words: ‘Ask a Ukranian,’” he told the announcer.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine grabbed Europe by the jugular, and in the United States, it underscored the importance of the Second Amendment; an armed citizenry can mount a national defense against naked aggression by a superior force.
It became one of the biggest gun rights stories of the year, and it didn’t even happen in this country or even in this hemisphere.
When news footage showed Ukrainian officials handing out rifles and ammunition to citizens, without background checks or waiting periods, the gun control crowd became uncharacteristically quiet. It is hard to dismiss images of people lining up to get guns to defend their homeland, their neighborhoods, homes and families.
The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms issued a statement which cut to the heart of the gun rights debate in this country.
“While we’ve seen reports that the Ukraine Parliament (Verkhovna Rada) has voted to ease restrictions allowing civilians to carry arms outside their homes,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “in our country this has been the constitutional law of the land since our nation was founded. The right of the people to keep and bear arms has protected this country since the beginning, and what is happening right now in Ukraine should be a lesson to all of those who push for citizen disarmament and a ban on private gun ownership how perilous that would be.
“The gun prohibition lobby would have America become vulnerable to such aggression as we are now seeing on television screens from coast to coast,” he continued. “This isn’t some action movie Americans are watching, this is real life, and it vividly illustrates why so many of us fight day and night to protect and defend our Second Amendment rights.”
For grassroots gun rights activists, the debate over gun rights in the U.S. was never more defined than by the newsreels. This was armed self-defense on a massive scale, playing out on television screens from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon.
Yet, the U.S. gun prohibition lobby—knowing it had the political advantage of a Democrat-controlled Congress and a president who admitted during a CNN Townhall the previous summer that he not only wants to ban so-called “assault weapons” but also 9mm pistols—has pressed forward. Anti-gun elitists helped finance Oregon Measure 114, which is now being challenged in the courts. Anti-gun politicians in New York, New Jersey and California doubled down with restrictive legislation following the Supreme Court’s Bruen ruling in June, and gun rights organizations responded with legal challenges.
What cannot be argued, however, is how arming the citizens of Ukraine may have provided an important measure—they perhaps bought their country some time—for the military to get organized, get equipped thanks to foreign help, and fight back.
“Our Second Amendment was enshrined in the Bill of Rights by men who had just fought a war for independence,” CCRKBA’s Gottlieb observed at the time. “They returned to their homes from battlefields, not from some deer hunting camp. The right to keep and bear arms has never been about shooting ducks, but about protecting our right as citizens of the greatest nation on earth to defend our homes and families immediately against the kind of international outrage now unfolding in eastern Europe.”
The Biden administration’s zeal to provide arms for Ukraine while trying to disarm U.S. citizens became the zenith of hypocrisy, at least to the Second Amendment movement. But Joe Biden has always held American gun owners in low esteem, and he’s gotten in trouble for it.
In mid-2021, he was quoted by Business Insider, dismissing the notion that the Second Amendment was also important to preventing tyranny in this country, arguing that the government had nuclear weapons. It was during those remarks he once again attempted to misrepresent the Second Amendment.
“The Second Amendment, from the day it was passed, limited the type of people who could own a gun and what type of weapon you could own,” Biden falsely claimed. “You couldn’t buy a cannon.”
The Ukraine example has faded into the political fog, but it provided an opportunity to bring renewed clarity to the reasoning behind the Second Amendment, making it one of the more important gun-related news stories of 2022.
