We, as Americans, have a special duty to our country.

We are the bastion of democracy, the experiment that worked. Yet, we have increasingly become lazy to our duties deciding to cede our responsibilities to the government. And, in turn, the government has predictably abused what never should have been entrusted to it.

It is what Thomas Jefferson feared. Americans would become content and indifferent to certain freedoms bestowed upon them by the creator.

You may be asking what freedoms I am talking about.

Freedom of speech, press, religion? While these freedoms have been attacked in the past, they suffered no hardship as great as our right to bear arms.

Next to our right to life, our right to bear arms is the single most important freedom we Americans have. It is greater than our freedom of speech and even greater than our freedom to worship.

How can this be? “There wouldn’t be the First [Amendment] without the Second,” says the slogan of the National Rifle Association, a group I am a proud member of.

This week and next I will discuss how the Second Amendment has slowly been eroded, and with it, other rights as well.

Don’t let liberals fool you into thinking we are safer with gun control. This is simply not the case.

Gun control is the first step tyrannical regimes take toward total domination of its citizens. It isn’t about the guns; it’s about the control. Without firearms the gun-less citizenry is left defenseless against its armed government. To see this, one needn’t look further than the two most brutal regimes of the 20th century.

The first was the U.S.S.R. Under Joseph Stalin, the communist government murdered 20 million disarmed citizens after a 1929 gun control law was put into effect. He took his cues from his mentor Vladimir Lenin, who said, “a system of licensing and registration is the perfect device to deny gun ownership to the masses.”

The other was Nazi Germany. After a 1938 gun control law, Adolf Hitler proudly declared, “for the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient and the world will follow our lead into the future.”

He then went on to systematically murder 6 million Jews and 7 million others in concentration camps.

The United States seems to be embarking on a similar path. In 1968 the Gun Control Act was passed limiting the access of guns to, among others, the mentally unstable and convicted criminals. This is not so objectionable, however, the doors this act helped open for gun grabbing politicians are.

Since 1968, no other administration has done more to limit our Second Amendment rights than the Clinton administration.

In 1993, Clinton signed the Brady Bill which established background checking for those who wish to exercise their God-given right to purchase a firearm.

This bill is totally useless, because it prevents law abiding citizens from obtaining guns, while criminals side step the law to obtain them, just like they have always done. The bill, in effect, not only punishes law abiding citizens, it erodes personal privacy as well.

I wonder why left-leaning politicians are so insistent upon limiting our Second Amendment rights for the people to keep and bear arms with a vigor not seen since Stalin and Hitler.

The argument boils down to trust. If the government doesn’t trust us with guns, why should we trust them with theirs.

Columns reflect the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the Northern Star staff.