By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
“Remember what brought you to where you are. Remember why you love doing what you’re doing and keep it going.”
That was the message from Jared Yanis, host of the YouTube channel Guns & Gadgets, who addressed the Gun Rights Policy Conference, challenging the audience to not only teach the next generation how to shoot, but why Americans have the special right to keep and bear arms.
“We have some incredible firearms instructors in this country,” Yanis observed. “We have competitive shooting, hunting, concealed carry classes, millions and millions of parents are teaching their kids, sons and daughters, about firearms safety. We have a pretty good chance of them being taught the right way.
“What worries me is much bigger,” he admitted. “Will the next generation understand WHY they have the right to do this? That’s a much bigger question, because there are two different things:
“Knowing how to operate a firearm is a skill,” he explained. “But understanding why the American citizen has the right to keep and bear arms is true education. If we lose that education, we will eventually lose that right.”
Yanis was not so much “preaching to the choir,” he was challenging every grassroots activist in the room to go beyond passing along a tradition, and carry on the process to a next level.
“We need to ask ourselves a difficult question: What exactly are we trying to preserve,” he posited. “Are we trying to preserve gun ownership? I’m not. Are we trying to preserve the principle that makes gun ownership a right in the first place? That’s what I’m about, because they’re not the same thing.”
He acknowledged that people in other countries own firearms, but under far different circumstances. It might involve licensing, government approval, registration and other restrictions.
“America was built around something fundamentally different,” he said. “The government doesn’t give you any of our rights. They’re just stewards of our rights. The Constitution doesn’t give us the right. The Bill of Rights doesn’t give us the right. We had those rights before anyone put quill to parchment.
“Now, the Second Amendment recognizes a pre-existing right that belongs to us, the people and it tells government ‘You shall not infringe,’” he stressed. “That distinction is everything. I don’t think we’re teaching it that way nearly enough.”
One problem with the current battle to protect Second Amendment rights is that people have become focused on “the controversy of the moment,” Yanis explained. This could involve bans on so-called “assault weapons,” original-capacity magazines, pistol braces or the “zero tolerance” philosophy of the Biden administration, which focused on cancelling federal firearms licenses for literally any infraction.
“Sometimes we become so focused on fighting the latest infringement,” Yanis observed, “that we forget to explain why that fire we’re fighting matters in the first place.”
Yanis focused on semi-auto rifles. He brought up the argument anti-gunners have made, that “nobody needs an AR-15.”
“And you’ll say, ‘Yes I do,’” he noted. “But why? Because it’s my right, or because the Second Amendment says so.
“If our education ends there,” he said, “we have a serious problem in America, because somebody on the other side is going to teach that young person, they’re going to give them an explanation of why they think they shouldn’t have an AR15. They’re going to talk about public safety, crime, mass shootings; all the blue tokens they throw out there to make people feel it in their hearts.”
He then boiled things down for the audience to remember and take home.
“The Founders didn’t include the Second Amendment because they loved guns,” Yanis said. “They included it because they understood power, and that’s the conversation we need to bring back to the forefront.
“The Constitution is fundamentally a document about power,” he continued. “Who has it. Where it comes from, how much the government possesses, how that power is divided and what happens when government exceeds it.
“The Founders had just fought a revolution against the most powerful government that they knew, and the most powerful military on this rock,” Yanis recalled. “And they didn’t emerge from that experience believing that human beings would suddenly stop abusing that authority. In fact, they knew it would happen again. So they built a system based on the opposite assumption, that power must be divided, it must be checked, and certain rights must remain beyond government’s legitimate reach.”
Among these are speech, religion, assembly and the right to keep and bear arms. Yanis explained how the Second Amendment is not just about a right to keep and bear arms. It’s about the entire constitutional philosophy, he said; the relationship between the citizen and the state.
“Once you understand that philosophy,” he stated, “once you get that relationship, once you know what the founders believed when they fought for this, the Second Amendment makes a lot more sense to you.”
He closed by reminding the GRPC audience that passing on the tradition in all the traditional ways is good and proper.
“Taking your kids shooting is fantastic,” Yanis affirmed. “Teaching them firearms safety is essential. Teaching them how to hunt is wonderful. But at some point, maybe on the ride home from those things, turn around and ask them this ‘Do you know why you have this right?’
“Teach them about Lexington and Concord,” he advised. “Teach them what happened on April 19, 1775.
Tell them why ordinary people possess arms and why it matters. Teach them about the Bill of Rights.
Teach them that with rights come responsibilities and that an armed citizen should be safe, but a responsible citizen, an informed citizen and most importantly, a citizen, and not a subject.”
