Dear Mr. Morgan,

I have seen in the news that a petition has been circulated on the White House website asking that you be deported for your rather vociferous commentary about the right to keep and bear arms, a right which is protected by the 2nd Amendment to our Constitution.  Please do not think that all people who live here believe that those who disagree with us deserve to be punished or sent away.  To me, the 1st Amendment to the Constitution is as necessary and important as the 2nd.  While I disagree with what you say, I truly do believe in your right, citizen or not, to say it.

Of course, I have also seen your article stating that if stringent gun control and curtailment of the right to keep and bear arms are not enacted by our government, that you will ‘self deport’.  Again, this is your right, and if you truly feel that you should not continue to be a guest in our country, I wish you success wherever you end up.

But before you go, let me point out a few things:

• I won’t assume presume to lecture you on the history of the rights of Englishmen, including the right to arms and self defense.  I will, however, remind you that the founding fathers, including Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin, were born Englishmen, and believed that they had the same  God-given rights as other Englishmen.  The issue that split our country from Great Britain was overwhelmingly the violation of these rights by the British government.  Up until the final split in 1776, they tried to find a way to stay Englishmen.  Paradoxically, they decided that the only way to keep their rights as Englishmen was to declare that they were no longer Englishmen, but were instead Americans.
• The rights to speak your mind, worship, keep and bear arms, and be treated equally under the law did not originate in Philadelphia in the 18th century.  They have existed in English law and political philosophy since the middle ages.
• I believe the difference between the way you look at the issue and how I do is fundamentally a difference in where we believe that all rights are created.  To you, a subject of the British realm, all laws and rights flow from the Crown, for good or ill.  Your government may restrict your rights whenever it feels it is necessary to do so.  As a citizen of the United States, all of my rights have always existed and will always exist, with or without my government approving of them.  My government does not have the power to dictate what my rights are, rather it is restricted by the Constitution from abridging them.
• The fact that British subjects have allowed their rights to be eroded over the past century does not matter to us.  It gives me no pleasure to point this out, but those who have surrendered their rights have no place criticizing those who are willing to fight for theirs.
• You point out your horror at seeing images from Dunblane and Sandy Hook, and of how seeing pictures of dead children and grieving families has moved you to believe that firearms are the problem.  Allow me, a former soldier who has participated in the exhuming of human remains, including those of small children, from mass graves in Bosnia, and who has visited Dachau and other concentration camps, to disagree.  At numerous places across Europe, Africa, and Asia, there are piles of bone and ash that might not exist had the victims of attrocities had the means and will to resist their captors.  Yes, mass shootings in the United States are attrocities perpetrated by evil men against the innocent and helpless, but disarming potential victims leads almost always to even bigger attrocities.
• Yes, our Constitution has flaws.  That is why we have gone through the trouble of amending it 27 times.  We recognize that we need to continue to improve our system of government, and have built in mechanisms to do so.  However, this means that if there are those who do not care for the fact that a large portion of Americans believe it is their God-given right to keep and bear arms, then they must amend the Constitution to remove the protections of that right in that document.  Executive whims, legislative bills, and judicial fiat will not do that.  Instead of exhorting anti-rights zealots to try to violate the Constitution, might I suggest that you try to get them to amend the Constitution?

Again, I wish you luck and happiness in whatever country you decide to settle.  I will close with this quote from Samuel Adams, another Englishman who realized that the only way to keep his rights as an Englishman was to become something else:

“If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.”

Sincerely,

Daddy J. Bear

Louisville, Kentucky