Gun Rights Are Not a “Culture War” Issue -They Are a Civil Rights Imperative by James D. Tresmond, Esq.
In their endless quest to obfuscate, deflect, and trivialize, politicians and the media have taken to dismissing the right to keep and bear arms as just another front in the so-called “culture war.” This is a grotesque misrepresentation. To call the Second Amendment a “culture war” issue is to place it in the same category as petty political squabbles over pop stars, social media trends, and other frivolities that occupy the minds of our ruling class. Gun rights are not a “fad” to be debated alongside the latest manufactured outrage of the 24-hour news cycle; they are an unassailable pillar of individual liberty, as fundamental to a free society as the right to speak, to worship, or to seek redress against an oppressive state.
A “culture war” is, at its core, a manufactured conflict designed to inflame passions and distract the public while preserving the status quo. These skirmishes are waged not over principles, but over headlines. The right to keep and bear arms, on the other hand, is not a matter of mere ideological preference. It is the hard-won recognition of an existential truth: that power unchecked by the armed citizen is power inevitably abused.
The history of gun rights in America is not the history of suburban hobbyists or political slogans; it is the history of resistance against tyranny and a safeguard against systemic oppression. During Reconstruction, the disarmed freedmen of the South learned that their “rights” were nothing more than paper-thin promises when met with the iron fist of armed mobs and complicit state governments. Jim Crow laws went hand in hand with disarmament because those who seek to control and subjugate understand that an armed citizen is a citizen beyond their coercive grasp. The Second Amendment has long been the lifeline for those abandoned by the institutions meant to protect them.
Fast forward to the present day, and the lesson remains the same. The smallest minority in the world is the individual, and no right is more fundamental to preserving the autonomy of the individual than the right to self-defense. Those who would trivialize this right - those who would condescendingly lump it in with the day’s political entertainment - are betraying the very notion of civil rights. It is both appalling and unsurprising that the same politicians who wrap themselves in the language of “justice” and “equity” fail to grasp the cruel irony of advocating for an unarmed populace. An unarmed citizen is a subject, not a sovereign. And history has been unrelenting in its demonstration that disarmed populations do not meet happy ends.
This leads us to the so-called “gun rights champions” in the Republican Party - the same party that depends on gun owners every election cycle while treating them as disposable every legislative session. You know the people to whom I’m referring. They know who they are, too. The idea that Republicans can brush off the Second Amendment as a “secondary issue” and still expect gun owners to rally behind them is a delusion of the highest order. How often do we hear that it’s not the “right time” to push for pro-gun legislation? That we must “pick our battles”? That gun owners must be patient while courts slow-walk the most basic affirmations of our rights?
Gun owners are watching. They have seen the betrayals, the half-hearted advocacy, and the gutless surrender to media pressure. And let me assure these cowardly, calculating politicians of one thing: You will not win elections without the gun vote. You will not rally your “base” while treating their rights as an afterthought. And when the time comes for the midterms, when you crawl back to the podiums and make your feigned overtures to the people you’ve spent years dismissing, do not feign surprise when your applause is drowned out by silence.
A politician who treats the Second Amendment as a mere “culture war” talking point is a politician unworthy of office. A party that believes it can ignore gun owners and still win is a party that deserves to lose. And a media establishment that sneers at armed self-defense while enjoying the protection of armed security is a hypocrisy so glaring, it borders on parody.
Gun rights are not a political spectacle. They are not a partisan gimmick. They are the last line between liberty and subjugation, between self-determination and state control. Those who fail to recognize this simple fact will be discarded by history just as surely as those who have sought to erase this right before them.
Onward!
