Happy Patriot's Day!

April 19th, 1775, Old North Bridge, Concord, Massachusetts. The shot heard around the world began this nation's fight for independence. This day is a powerful reminder of many important beliefs I have. The first, and most important to me, is "No king but King Jesus!"

John Ashcroft was roundly criticized for his "No King but Jesus" speech at Bob Jones University, but he was only reminding us of our colonial and Revolutionary War heritage. In a 1774 report to King George, the Governor of Boston noted: "If you ask an American, who is his master? He will tell you he has none, nor any governor but Jesus Christ." The pre-war Colonial Committees of Correspondence soon made this the American motto: "No King but King Jesus." And this sentiment was carried over into the 1783 peace treaty with Great Britain ending that war, which begins "In the name of the most Holy and Undivided Trinity... ." (Catholic Education Resource Center)

(Is the United States a Christian nation? - No. Just read the news and anyone can see that it is not. Was it founded by mostly Christians based on Christian principles? - Yes!)

The second belief enshrined in that first gunshot is that free men have the God-given right to own and carry arms for self-defense and the preservation of liberty. The minutemen were massing arms (including cannons), ammunition and supplies for war, and the British were on their way to confiscate them. Before you can subjugate a populace, you have to disarm them. Adolph Hitler understood it. Josef Stalin understood it. King George understood it, and learned the hard way what happens when tyrants encounter free men with liberty in their hearts and guns in their hands.

The third idea I find in the hearts of the patriots is that of liberty - the desire to live a life of freedom. This is not libertine freedom - the freedom to do whatever we want, regardless of what happens to others. Government is given by God to "bear the sword" (Rom 13:4) and punish evildoers, but not to be a source of fear for the law-abiding citizen. Our freedom is the freedom to do what is right, loving God and loving each other without fear of a tyrant telling us what we will do, what we will believe, or what we will think.

Happy Patriot's Day! Wouldn't it be great if it was a national holiday?

No king but King Jesus!

Feedback for Walmart

I left the following feedback on the Walmart site today:

Dear Sir or Madam,

I was deeply disturbed to hear about the changes in Walmart's policies regarding the sale of firearms and related products. Because of your competitive prices, I have been purchasing all of my practice ammunition for both handgun and rifle at your stores as well as a number of shooting, fishing and camping accessories, and was strongly considering buying a hunting rifle from you next month as well.

Your new policy of videotaping all firearm sales as well as creating a computerized log of all firearm sales is an unnecessary invasion of my privacy. In order to purchase a firearm I already have to show a valid picture ID, fill out an extensive information form and submit myself to an instant background check. The measures you are taking will have a negligible effect on reducing the number of "straw purchases" of guns to be used by criminals - the buyers will simply shop somewhere else. All that these measures will accomplish is costing you the business of hundreds of thousands of law-abiding sportsmen.

I will not shop from your outdoors department again until you rescind these unnecessary policies that only serve to invade my privacy and drive away loyal customers. Any additional cost is well worth my privacy.

Sincerely,


Jeff Odegard
Colorado Springs, CO

Barack Hussein Obama, running for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States said last Friday in Pennsylvania:

You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them... And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

So, in his thinking, religious beliefs and second amendment support are on the same level as bigotry and hatred for immigrants. Faith is nothing more than a crutch for poor, embittered small-town hicks.* The right to keep and bear arms is an anachronism clung to by backwoods peasants. (In 1996 Obama supported a ban on the sale and transfer of all handguns or any semi-automatic weapons. He opposes concealed carry and the right to self-defense.)

How anyone could support such a pompous, condescending communist, I will never know. I sincerely hope Hillary wins the Democratic primary, dividing and destroying the Democrat party in the process, and that McCain can choose a true conservative as a running mate who can lead the party back to its roots.

* For the record, I grew up in a town of about 2,000 people in Montana.

Dancing Bears

While checking out the news this morning, I stumbled on this bear video on LiveScience.com. I showed the kids and they thought it was hilarious. So enjoy!