“Make it tough on public officials who do not recognize your rights and trample upon them. That’s your job as a citizen of this country.”So stated US Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) at the end of his valedictory address to activists in Los Angeles on the second day of the 20th annual Gun Rights Policy Conference (GRPC). Sponsored by the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) and Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA), this year’s GRPC was hailed as the “best ever” by gun rights leaders from across the country.
Craig, a member of the National Rifle Association’s (NRA) Board of Directors and the Gem State’s senior senator, spoke for about 10 minutes on a variety of subjects, ranging from legislation in Congress to protect gunmakers from harassment lawsuits, to the disaster in New Orleans.
He congratulated both SAF and the NRA for “moving swiftly” to secure a temporary restraining order against further gun seizures by officials in New Orleans and St. Tammany Parish, but he had a caution for the audience.
“For all of you who watched it in awe and disgust,” he observed, “I’m not sure why any of you would be surprised. New Orleans and Louisiana are the two most dysfunctional forms of government in the United States.”
“Why wouldn’t they start sweeping the streets for guns,” he questioned. “Their conclusion was, it’s the safest place to go to get a gun is from a free, law-abiding citizen who never intends to use it improperly anyway.”
Craig expressed a certain degree of contempt for the tradition of corruption in New Orleans, and he suggested that, with millions, and perhaps billions, of dollars pouring into the state and city for the rebuilding effort, “local control” may not be a very good thing for the disbursement of those funds.
“With billions and billions of your dollars headed down there,” he said, “my guess is local control means their hand in the pot—for them, their cousins and Joe Bob down the street. Because that’s the style of governance as we have seen it.”
“We saw the tragedy of the welfare state,” Craig added. “I felt sorry for people who did not know how to do for themselves; for generations there are thousands of people down there who were cared for and who were not expected to do anything for themselves. . . . They not only relied on government to protect them, they found out government didn’t protect them in the end.”
Calling on his western upbringing and his life in an environment where people had to do for themselves, Craig told his audience, “When you depend wholly on government, for your strength as an individual, your security as a family, your protection with private property; now we know, having watched down there, what our Founding Fathers were so concerned about and why the citizens were so concerned in demanding that our Second Amendment rights be inscribed within the Bill of Rights.”
Moving on, Craig suggested that the armed citizen should be a key element of any homeland security strategy.
“When we plan for national security and domestic security as it relates to national disasters,” Craig noted, “or terrorism attacks, why shouldn’t law-abiding citizens with their guns be factored into the whole effort at security? They ought to be. Because it’s exactly what our Founding Fathers intended.”
Craig may have been talking about armed citizens working together to keep the nation safe, but he reminded everyone that Americans are, or should be, rugged individualists.
“You’re responsible for your own actions,” he said, “and when you fail to respond appropriate to your culture, to your home, to your family, to your community, there’s a price to be paid. When and if we lose that principle in our society, then tragically enough we may well become as dysfunctional as what we saw in Louisiana. We may be the kind of people who are sitting around waiting for government to come and help us, saying ‘I’ve got rights and you should be here helping me,’ instead of saying to government, ‘You bet I have rights, step back and stand out of my way because I’m a free American citizen.’ ”
Closing his remarks, Craig told the audience to challenge public officials, “don’t let them off easy.”
“Cause them and the media to recognize that we have a Constitution,” he said, “and that Constitution safeguards our rights as free citizens.”