By Cheryl Todd |
The lives of our children and grandchildren will be impacted by the decisions we make today. Are your decisions creating the pathway toward individual liberties for current and future generations? Or are you simply allowing cultural whims that seem to shift with the breeze to overtake our nation?
Whether you personally own firearms or not, you should recognize the value of the right and the liberty to do so. And, you should understand your responsibility to protect these rights for all future generations. Throughout the unrest of the past several years, with mandatory lockdowns, riots, and defunding of police departments across the nation, millions of people have realized the value of personal safety and gun ownership. Many of these same people had previously been actively anti-gun and had naïvely voted away their liberties.
Life moves quickly. Culture perhaps even more so. We must be intentionally mindful of the past, present in the moment, and prepared for what the future holds. Whether we are engaged in the events shaping our world or not, time will march on. Many of those events, it seems, are focused on cultural and legal shifts in how Americans view our basic individual liberties, specifically as they pertain to our right to keep and bear arms. In these moments it’s worth asking ourselves, “Are you creating more freedom and liberty or are you simply allowing those vital elements to be stripped away?”
Leadership expert, clinical psychologist, and New York Times bestselling author Dr. Henry Cloud has summed up leadership in one simple phrase, “You get what YOU create or what YOU allow.”
Too often, we point our fingers at elected officials, at “the media,” and a whole litany of “thems” and “theys” who are eroding our rights and infringing on our liberties. And, there is effort being put in by those who hate freedom and who love to live with the boot of tyranny on their necks and ours. However, the final outcome always comes down to personal responsibility.
Our Founding Fathers and Mothers certainly embodied these principles of creating and allowing. They fought, bled, starved, and died as they CREATED this nation which ALLOWED for their children and ours to thrive wrapped in the precious and unique American Constitutional Protections. They were the counter-culturists of their time. They had every force against them, as we do today, and yet they changed the entire world.
It’s important to remember they were just ordinary people who finally said ENOUGH, we will no longer allow unjust laws to slowly smother us. They said ENOUGH, you will NOT take away our life-saving tools of self-defense that protect us from predators—those with four legs and with two. And, they looked little King George III right in his wild, manic, power-hungry eyes and said ENOUGH. We will not be slowly smothered by unjust taxes, regulations, and laws!
And, as you stand at the crossroads of history you must decide what part you will play.
Our Founders, the famous and those forgotten by history, handed down the keys to the shiny new nation, wrote us an owner’s manual, and prayed that we would value their hard work and sacrifice and try not to wreck this beautiful new experiment in freedom and liberty. Unfortunately, we have slowly and incrementally allowed those who hate liberty to chip the paint, bald the tires, and stain the upholstery with a splash of tyranny here and a dribble of infringements there. You can see it firsthand in overreaching policies that have been proposed or implemented, including certain red-flag gun laws and universal background checks.
Let YESTERDAY be the last day you allow those Representatives to feign ignorance of the Will of the People. Let TOMORROW be the first day that you begin to teach your children and our children’s children the lessons of World History. Let TODAY be the day you become involved in the political process at local, state, and federal levels, and make the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Second Amendment the focal points of how you vet all candidates in every election.
When you do this, you will create a future that honors the sacrifices made by so many that will once again allow your children and your children’s children to live in a nation rooted in liberty.
Cheryl Todd has an extensive history of being a Second Amendment Advocate. Along with being a Visiting Fellow for the Independent Women’s Forum, she is the owner of AZFirearms Auctions, Executive Producer & Co-Host of Gun Freedom Radio, the founder of the grassroots movement Polka Dots Are My Camo, and the AZ State Director for the DC Project.
