I think what I found most amazing about this story is where it started. No, not Australia, although that’s where the author of the piece behind it started. She’s from there, moved here, and she’s running a Women’s gun rights group. Awesome, but I said amazing. The Concord Monitor ran her op-ed on July 9th.
Growing up in Australia, I lived in what most people would call a “free” society. But it wasn’t until I moved to the United States and embraced the U.S. Constitution that my entire worldview transformed. I realized that back home, freedom was treated as a privilege carefully defined by the government. In America, the Second Amendment taught me a profound truth: we are born free.
Today, as a firearms instructor and the Northeast Regional Director — and former New Hampshire State Director — of Women for Gun Rights, I live by a simple creed proudly stamped on my adopted home state’s license plates: Live Free or Die.
To me, the motto means embracing personal responsibility and never surrendering the agency that belongs to free people.
Well, yeah. And Bearing Arms picked up on this; a reader sent that link to me, which is how I found it.
Giddins now runs Joan of Arms, where she helps other women empower themselves to be their own protector. As she writes, “instead of looking to politicians or an unreliable government for a false sense of security, women are increasingly choosing self-reliance. Nationally, concealed carry continues to grow among women, reflecting a profound cultural shift.”
The Monitor article still has its amusements. The Featured image is a rubber blue practice “gun” in a woman’s hand. And the Capital Cities’ infamous fish wrapper doesn’t do comments, so while it published the thing, we can only imagine what its proglodyte readership had to say about it. Maybe on their Facebook page. I didn’t look.
It was good of them to share it, but all that triggering language likely caused more than one of them to cancel their subscriptions.
When I first arrived in America, I thought freedom was something carefully defined by the government. Becoming an American taught me something far more profound: we are born free. Liberty is our birthright. The Constitution did not give us that birthright — it recognizes it and establishes a government whose powers are limited so that liberty may endure.
Yet liberty is more than a birthright. It comes with a solemn civic responsibility. As a naturalized American citizen, I swore an oath to honor and defend it. That responsibility belongs to all of us: not only to preserve liberty for ourselves, but to pass it intact to the Americans who will one day inherit it.
Almost makes a Democrat believe in closed borders, vetting, and retroactive deportation, but we’re glad Kate’s here, that she found out what Liberty could mean, and decided to not just “stand a post” but to train others about self-defense and how fragile a thing freedom can be.
The government doesn’t want to defend your right to self-defense, nor any other. States, by their nature, evolve to remove or deny rights. It is why our Founders crafted the Constitution. It is why the left works so hard to undermine it, from education monopolies to funding strings to activist judges and corrupt mayors and Governors.
Their job is to protect individual rights, not collective ones. Democracy is a Devil that can take everything away from you with a 50% +1 vote. True, constitutionally protected freedom, while messy and unpredictable, makes that impossible. Unless you let it.
God help us if you vote for it.
Thanks for Coming to America, Kate. We’re happy to have you explain to some of the indigenous population how precious and rare freedom is and why they need to protect it.
