Fresh from his performance at President Obama’s second inauguration, James Taylor was interviewed by Nicholas Ballasy of The Daily Caller. Taylor made a number of interesting comments, but none more eye-opening than this one: “I think the nation is very divided on gun control, but I think the majority of us feel strongly — even the majority of gun owners feel strongly — that we need to make some sacrifice[s] to our freedoms, if that’s the way to put it. We need to make some sacrifices to what we might want to have, in order to safeguard our children.”
This is where the problem lies. Setting aside the question of whether certain gun control measures would be effective or not, the real issue we need to consider as a country is whether we want to be a free people.
Tyranny can always find a starting place in the matters of safety, security, and the common good, and it does so regardless of whether these matters are real concerns or merely imagined. A truly free society must therefore be willing to risk a great deal with respect to these matters in order to preserve liberty, even if the concern is very real, lest it destroy liberty attempting to preserve itself.
