I never figured I'd see there be building tensions between the United States and Europe, but here we are.
To be fair, though, there should have been tensions a long time ago. After all, while many European nations like to consider themselves free societies, they're nothing of the sort. For example, gun rights are all but nonexistent for most people there. That's been the case for a long time.
But now, we're seeing that our European "allies" aren't on the same page elsewhere.
Famously, “60 Minutes” did a segment where they followed German law enforcement as they kicked in doors over memes. A more recent example is British police showing up at people's doors to investigate them for criticizing their children's school.
Another example is that yes, you actually can be arrested for praying inside your own home. It's not a blanket ban on prayer in your home or anything, even if you live in close proximity to places like abortion clinics, but you can if you're visible and someone thinks it's "performative," meaning they think you're protesting with that prayer.
Pray in front of your living room window, and the cops might show up.
That's a violation of people's freedom to worship.
Would these European despot — even if they happen to have been democratically elected, they're still despots — have considered any of this if the people had the means to fight back?
Their whole democracy hinges on people being able to decide for themselves how to address their nations’ problems, but when you control how and who people can criticize, you're tilting the machine. You're allowed to downplay the actual problems by limiting what they can say.
So, fighting back at the ballot box isn't going to happen because much of the population is in the dark about how bad some things actually are.
A lot of people here want similar laws. They want the government to step in and fight "misinformation" or "hate speech" and they lament the fact that the First Amendment prevents it.
What really prevents it, though, is knowing that We the People have the means to fight back no matter what they want to do. They can try to silence us but our Founding Fathers knew that was always something tyrants try, which is why the right to keep and bear arms is right there in the Bill of Rights.
Europeans, however, gave up their guns. They bought into the idea that security was more important than liberty, and now they are getting neither.
That's why we can't.
Right now, the tyranny in Europe is subtle. Many who live there are still delusional about the totalitarianism taking shape all around them. By the time they recognize it, it'll be too late to do anything about it.
If we give up our gun rights, that's what will happen here, too.
How long before the cops show up at your house because you recognize that your school sucks and actually say so? How long before a meme on X gets your door kicked in by the police? How long before all of our rights are stripped away because the elites have decided we're not worthy of being trusted with those rights?
Liberty can be kept, to a point, via the ballot box.
But while you can vote yourself into just about anything, there are some things you can only shoot your way out of.
That only works if you have guns in the first place.
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