Summary: In Part One and Part Two of this treatise, we proceded from the premise that our governors respond, as we all do, to the emotion of FEAR. Responding as all statists do, they use fear projection to fight their own fear, so they are constantly imposing new controls on the population, controls which move this Nation inexorably towards the day when we will have to decide if the time has come to face down the governors, and demand that our stripped personal freedoms be restored. To implement such a potential restoration, the Founders thoughtfully provided us with a Civil Right, the Right to Keep and Bear Arms in order to form militias. We looked at the role of military veterans in this issue, and we examined the obvious fact that the governors have fear of veterans. We then looked at how the governors have started to put a wall around veterans and their rights under the Second Amendment of the Constitution, a supposed "mental health" wall, in order to prevent them from participating in "well-regulated" militias which might attempt reduction of these governors' fiat powers by force of arms, as the Founders correctly envisioned we must do if the Federal Government gained power in extremis.
In this Part Three, we will tie it all up with an examination of the logical steps for Veterans to take now, and plan for in the future.
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How do we fight this campaign of fear which is close to linking two dangerous ideas, that military-style rifles should be banned and veterans returned from combat should be assumed to be, to some degree, mentally ill? The end result of a link-up of those two ideas is foretold: disarmament of the Veterans, and as has been explained, the vehicle to disarm veterans is the mistaken assumption that all of us suffer some form of PTSD from our combat service, and will be so labeled until we can prove that we have no mental effects from combat service. After the Virginia Tech massacre, perpetrated by a person (not a veteran) diagnosed with PTSD, laws were made which require reporting of mid-to-severe diagnoses of the illness, and those persons are to be disarmed, although no effective mechanism exists to do that yet.
We fight this dangerous joining of illogic-streams by presenting ourselves to our citizens as persons of order and helpfulness. Every time a veteran or group of veterans does something in his or her community to assist that community in any way, it MUST be publicized in all available media. If this is done, soon enough, those attempting to portray veterans as dangerous crazies will be disregarded, and their increasingly-shrill rants will fall upon deaf ears.
At the same time, Veterans need to work with whatever organizations will carry the fight to end the presumption of PTSD. The military has plenty of means available to determine if a troop has PTSD, so the presumption that all must have been "exposed" while in combat is a lie. PTSD is NOT communicable, and you don't get it from battle-duties. The military must be REQUIRED by their leadership to abandon their complicity in this charade, which is nothing but fear management by fear projection, on the part of the statists.
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How do we solidify the Second Amendment as a Civil Right to remove it as a tool of fear-projection? This one is a no-brainer: we advance Civil Rights generally, and while we are seen to be doing that, we send the message that the Second Amendment is a Civil Right, and deserves to be supported and enhanced with all the other Civil Rights that have been enumerated as well as those interpreted into being by courts. This is a proactive stance, but when a denier of the Second refuses to admit that the 2A is actually a Civil Right, we directly and firmly confront that person and ask them WHY they deny Civil Rights, and we push the issue by asking them what OTHER Civil Rights they deny. The deniers must be verbally ridden down, trampled under the righteous outcry of supporters of ALL Civil Rights. This organization does the best job of that, IMHO, and you can subscribe to their work for no cost, join the group and/or donate to them for that work if you wish. I expanded on Civil Rights denial here.
As for the present climate of fear whipped up by the Civil Rights deniers and gun-fearing people in general, we do what anyone should do in the face of a panic: stand tall and remain resolute in the face of this adversity. This is NOT the time to flaunt the 2A by carrying arms openly; no matter how badly you might want to pass THAT message, it is the wrong one for the moment. Also wrong is the use of fanciful terms to describe ARs and AKs as "modern sporting rifles". If you mention a military rifle, just call it a "rifle". If someone wants to engage in a technical conversation, you may describe magazine capacity, function, effective rates of fire, range, accuracy or whatever else you want, but until you get into a technical discussion, a rifle is just a rifle, and there are no points to be made now by belaboring the advantages of semi-auto over manually-operated actions. A rifle is a rifle is a rifle. If someone challenges you on rapid-fire characteristics, you may refer them to old Annie Oakley films, she had effective rates of rifle-fire well in excess of what is normally achieved with ARs or AKs. As to handguns, you may refer to Joe Huffman's blog and his excellent You Tube demonstration about rate of fire with under-capacity magazines. You should and may demonstrate to deniers that all this fear is either unfounded, or makes no difference. You might refer to PawPaw's blog and his reporting of statistics on homicides by types of weapons, a real eye-opener. Smart tactics wins battles. Winning battles wins wars.
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Finally, we get to who can best lead this fight. I'm going to get all pointy-headed here, so you've been warned.
That leader is NOT the NRA. The NRA is NOT the "wartime consigliere" that we want and need. The NRA could fill that role, but to do it, they'd have to abandon, at least temporarily, all their other missions they currently hold dear, like competition work and selling us insurance policies. They would have to be all war all the time. Now, I know you defenders of the NRA are going to jump on me and call BeeEss, that's what NRA-ILA is all about, but no it isn't. If the NRA was a serious leader in the protection of the Second, ALL their money now would be going into the fight, and they would be carrying that fight to the enemy, but they're not, and I'm still getting the usual sales mailings. When I get the first NRA mailing that says that every nickel of my membership money and/or donation goes into taking Feinstein, Schumer and McCarthy out of the fight, THEN I'll donate.
I favor the Second Amendment Foundation and/or JPFO for this leadership role, on the strictly-2A issues. On the more important Veteran's issues, I think that the major Veteran's groups should step up to the plate. That would be the VFW or the American Legion, or perhaps a "wartime coalition" of all of them. If Readers are members of any of those groups, they need to make defense of the 2A the hottest topic at business meetings. Both of the major Veteran's groups I just mentioned seemed to have softened their political stances of late, trying to accommodate the liberal political tide. They need to be convinced that disarming veterans is one liberal idea that they will go to war with the political masters over, and if they refuse to stick up for their Constitution, those Commanders of those veterans' organizations need to to be retired, immediately. Your blogger belongs to one veterans's organization, MOAA, and I will be doing my damnedest to raise consciousness on this issue in the meeting next week.
At the end now, I'll conclude with Oregon Football Head Coach Chip Kelly's mantra: "Win the day". If we take each day as a contest, and do what we can to prevail on the day we are in, we will win the season.
We certainly can't afford to lose, can we?
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