In all the world the U.S. as a nation is utterly unique in its tradition of citizen rights to self-defense. There is no other protection written into any constitution anywhere that is as solid and unapologetic as the 2nd Amendment. Whenever I end up in a debate with a liberal European that wants to “educate me” on the level of gun ownership overseas I have to laugh because these people just don’t get it.
There are many countries where guns are allowed to be owned by the public, but in every case, this is treated as a privilege that the government can give and take away anytime it pleases. Only in America is gun ownership an individual right regardless of economic status or what the government or the so-called “majority” likes or dislikes. The government’s opinions on personal firearms are meaningless. The majority’s opinions on gun rights are meaningless. I own guns because natural law and the Constitution say I have an inborn right to self-defense. And, if someone wants to take those weapons from me, they better be prepared to die in the process.
This is not an attitude shared by most of the rest of the world because most of the world has never fought and defeated a global power to achieve independence. This experience of freedom is not written into their cultural subconscious. In fact, most of the world has lived under one level of authoritarianism or another for centuries. Many people inherently want freedom, but very few people have ever risked everything to get it and succeeded.
The only time you will see a mass awakening in favor of public self-defense is when a country faces an existential threat and total collapse, then suddenly people start to question why they are completely disarmed and helpless.
This is what has recently happened in Ukraine. As I write this the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv is being surrounded by Russian forces and the nation’s government is calling on all able-bodied citizens to take up arms and repel the invasion. This all sounds rather noble, but it reveals foolishness that plagues most societies around the world. Why wasn’t the Ukrainian public already armed and organized?
Ukraine’s gun laws are not as strict as many in Europe or Eastern Europe, but they are certainly not conducive to civilian defense. It’s generally not legal for anyone to own a pistol for any reason other than special government issues, while a person must be at least 25 years old just to qualify for a permit to get a rifle. The types of arms allowed are select and few, and magazines are limited to ten rounds or less. Overwhelmingly, it is the upper-middle class and the rich that obtain most of the permits, as is often the case through the majority of Europe. Middle-class and poor people are rarely allowed to own firearms.
This has left Ukraine with a highly disarmed population, with only 1 in 10 people having access to weapons of any kind, and a majority of these weapons are bolt action rifles and shotguns which are generally not effective for military defense (unless we are talking about long-range bolt-action rifles, and there are scant few people that have the knowledge to actually use such tactics effectively). In many countries, you aren’t even allowed to own military-grade scopes or red dots.
The reason for this is easy to figure out and it has nothing to do with preventing crime. Rather, government elites want to ensure there is little chance of the public ever overthrowing them should they implement controls that push the people too far. We have seen this everywhere in the wake of covid mandates and vax passport laws. There is a reason why these draconian measures were unsuccessful in the U.S.; we are heavily armed and there’s nothing Biden or anyone else can do about it without risking annihilation. It’s the same reason why the U.S. has not seen a major invasion attempt since the Mexican American War (I am not counting the minor incursions by the Japanese into Alaska during WWII). An invasion of the U.S. would be a quagmire unlike anything in history and far deadlier than trying to take over a country like Afghanistan.
This is not opinion; this is fact given the amount of training and combat knowledge common within the American population. The only way the U.S. can be taken over is from within, which is a subject for another article.
One area in which Americans have failed to remain secure is in the abandonment of the citizen militia, which is an element of the 2nd Amendment that is just as important as gun rights. For many decades we have allowed the now federalized National Guard to take the place of the militia system, which is completely unacceptable and not a viable replacement in any way. Luckily, there has been a resurgence of local organization in recent years, and though the “M word” has yet to make a major reappearance, this is what will inevitably happen as mainstream systems continue to fail, and people look to their own communities for safety.
In Ukraine, there used to be a more concerted citizen call-up effort but again, this was a strictly centralized government affair. Today, as Russia invades, the Ukrainians don’t even have basic measures in place. Their ability to hold off the Russians at all is predicated on American missile systems like the Javelin which are being steadily funneled into the Ukrainian military.
SIDE NOTE: Also, the methods which Ukrainian forces are using to ambush Russian tank columns are rather advanced, which suggests to me the possibility that there are outside military “advisers” (perhaps U.S. advisers) on the ground right now in Ukraine. The ambush tactics and the results look similar to training that is often given to Green Berets. If this is the case, it would be diplomatically disastrous if such adviser teams were ever discovered.
Despite all the help from the west, large chunks of their territory are now in the hands of Russia including two major cities so far. The Ukrainian government has offered to arm up any able-bodied people who want to fight, but the training I have observed in video footage is clearly substandard. Most of these people have never handled military-grade arms in their lives, never fired a gun and never shot a 3-5 round group at 100 yards, let alone faced the prospect of a two-way firing range and the sheer panic this can cause in untrained men.
Even more disturbing to me is that many of these call-ups for volunteers are peppered with young women. Guys bringing along their tiny 90-pound girlfriends and wives as if the whole thing is a vacation at a CrossFit camp. This is madness for a number of reasons, including the fact that having a loved one, especially a female, with you in the middle of combat can be a deadly distraction from the mission. Where is the soldier’s attention going to be? On the enemy in front of him, or his wife next to him who is screaming in horror as bullets zip past her head as she realizes it’s not like the movies where every woman is a natural sniper?
The reason this desperation is happening at all is because of Ukraine’s complete lack of readiness. I find it hard to believe that President Zelenskyy was really tricked into believing that Putin was bluffing about invasion. Even if he thought that was the case, he should have been preparing defenses anyway and forming citizen militias. He had months of prior warning to do this, yet he did not.
I’m not going to field any theories here on why the Ukraine government was so unprepared (though I have a pretty solid idea), and it’s not my intention to support one side or the other politically. As I have written in previous articles, Ukraine is a globalist engineered distraction from bigger things, including the inflationary decline of the global economy. My purpose here is to examine the reasons why Ukraine was so easily invaded and to use it as a cautionary lesson.
The bottom line is this: If Ukraine had true self-defense rights and a militia system in place then Russia may not have been able to invade at all.
I also find it interesting that the political left in the U.S., which has always been rabidly anti-gun rights for decades, is now cheering the prospect of the Ukrainian government arming civilians to fight a guerrilla war against the Russians. This reveals dangerous hypocrisy which conservatives have suspected for some time. Leftists are not necessarily “anti-gun,” they are just anti-gun when it comes to any person that disagrees with their ideology. When crisis strikes, they become pro-gun, as long as they are the only people with guns.
The Ukraine event sets an important example for conservatives and moderates in America in that it reinforces the reality that owning guns alone is not enough. Local organizations and public militias are the keys to the survival of a society under threat. In fact, public militias can even act as a deterrent to future attacks from without and from within.
Finally, local organization requires time and training. It’s not something you can slap together at the last minute and trying to form public security groups after an attack has already occurred will lead to failure. One thing that has always bothered me about the Hollywood notion of the Red Dawn scenario and tales of regular people networking to fight foreign invaders is that these types of groups rarely if ever actually get very far in real life. Rather, it’s the groups of people that were ready before the crisis happened that make the most difference.
You seldom see prepared people portrayed in the movies. I suspect because mainstream society has been conditioned to view preparedness as militancy, and militancy as extremism. God forbid a person is labeled as “extremist,” better to be apathetic and ineffective. It is always the people that step outside the artificial limitations of the mainstream that end up making a difference in the world, and it’s always the people that conform that end up becoming refugee fodder and victims of the historic tides. The Ukrainians are paying the price right now for this kind of attitude, let’s not allow the same thing to happen here in America.
To truth and knowledge Brandon Smith
