The War on Guns is running a guest editorial today. It makes some very good points and comparisons which I hadn’t thought about before.

The crucial question in the colonists’ minds, wrote John Dickerson in 1768, was ‘not, what evil HAS ACTUALLY ATTENDED particular measures — but what evil, in the nature of things, IS LIKELY TO ATTEND them.’ Because ‘nations, in general, are not apt to THINK until they FEEL, . . .therefore nations in general have lost their liberty.’ But not the Americans, as the Abbe Raynal observed. They were “an ‘enlightened people’ who knew their rights and the limits of power and who, unlike any people before them, aimed to think before they felt.”

He is making the comparison with the American Revolution and the lack of action by the German people when Hitler came to power. The Germans felt the impact of real, physical tyranny. The Founding Fathers anticipated the arrival of it and took action before it could irreversibly take hold.

At what point are we now? I am not sure, but we may be closer to the tipping point than any of us expect.