Gun Owners of America executive director Larry Pratt has recently gotten involved in the effort to stop comprehensive immigration reform, arguing that immigrants will “vote to take away our guns.”
Pratt employed the same logic in this weekend’s Gun Owners News Hour, when he claimed that the government shouldn’t provide for general welfare because the Bible says the government’s “only responsibility is to kill bad guys and scare the rest of them to death”… and because people who receive government assistance will “vote against freedom and against the right to keep and bear arms.”
The Bible talks about individual responsibility. There is no place in the Bible whatsoever that talks about the government taking over for my family or for my church, which is where the Bible says charity – welfare, if you will – is to be operated. Not the civil authorities, whose really only responsibility is to kill bad guys and scare the rest of them to death.
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It’s crucial for the cause of freedom if we continue to allow the government to glow a class of dependents, then you know what’s going to happen. Dependents don’t believe in, don’t want to bother, at a minimum, providing for themselves, really, in any which way. And it is they who will vote against freedom and against the right to keep and bear arms, among many other of our freedoms. So the gun owner has a dog in this fight. We had better come alongside of those economic conservatives that are making the arguments that Austin Hill is making in ‘The Virtues of Capitalism,’ and make sure we return to a capitalistic system.
