No Quarter asked, none given, in our battle for our right to bear arms :: 04/14/2014

Tom King, an NRA board member thinks we're too loud, and not civil enough http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dailypolitics/nra-board-member-tom-king-laments-growing-ugly-rhetoric-pro-gun-rallies-blog-entry-1.1740376

Jews For the Preservation of Firearms Ownership, Herschel Smith, replies--in no uncertain terms--precisely what he thinks of NRA's advice and you can read it here: http://www.captainsjournal.com/2014/03/31/nra-board-member-tom-king-laments-rhetoric-at-pro-gun-rallies/

We can't tell you what to think, but we think the JPFO's position is superior; actually far superior, to the compromise attitude in the NRA director's letter.

The idea that we must be more "polite," lest we frighten "the very people we want to attract to our side," ignores the nature of the right we are fighting for. The Second Amendment exists to guarantee the people's right to the means of killing aspiring tyrants and their hired muscle. There is no polite way to say that, as insurgencies tend to be more than a little "rude."

We must be "frightening," because the people who would trample our rights will only lose interest in doing so if they perceive a very personal risk to themselves in continuing on that course. They will have no reason to perceive such a risk if they see that our strategy is to cross our fingers and let judges tell us what our rights are, and when those judges tell us that those rights are effectively nothing, we then reduce ourselves to hoping that our liberties can win a popularity contest.

When the Founding Fathers flew the Gadsden Flag, they did not rally under a banner saying "Please Don't Tread on Me, Unless the Courts Say You Can." Indeed, the choice of the rattlesnake as their emblem was calculated for its implied threat, or, more accurately, for its explicit threat. As Benjamin Franklin wrote in the Pennsylvania Journal :

Conscious of this, [the rattlesnake] never wounds 'till she has generously given notice, even to her enemy, and cautioned him against the danger of treading on her.

To attempt to hide the fact that we will fight any effort to disarm us is to withhold that "generous" warning that Franklin so admired, and will indeed make the fight's eventual necessity inevitable, because we will have given up on deterrence.

That is a course badly flawed both strategically and morally.