U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- One of the nation’s largest and most active grassroots gun rights organizations says the Russian invasion of Ukraine “underscores the importance of the Second Amendment to the defense of freedom in the United States,” a remark that so far has brought crickets from the gun prohibition lobby.
Reuters reported that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy “called on all citizens who were ready to defend the country from Russian forces to come forward, saying Kyiv would issue weapons to everyone who wants them.”
BULLETIN: In an appeal to gun owners around the world, the Second Amendment Foundation, which spearheaded the creation of the International Association for the Protection of Civilian Arms Rights, is reaching out to member organizations to support Zbroya, the Ukranian Gun Owners Association (UGOA). That group is a member of IAPCAR. Contributions may be made directly to UGOA by visiting the Zbroya page at the IAPCAR website here.
“Our brother and sister gun owners in the Ukraine are fighting for their lives,” SAF said in a prepared statement, “and now is the time for gun owners across the country and around the world to step up and help them in their hour of need.”
“When IAPCAR was founded,” SAF founder and Executive Vice President Alan Gottlieb recalled, “we stressed the importance of civilian arms rights because when a nation is threatened with its very existence, responsibility for that nation’s defense invariably falls to the people, the patriots willing to take up arms and stand on the front lines of freedom.”
The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (SAF’s sister organization) was blunt in a statement released amid international angst over the invasion, “The right of the people to keep and bear arms has protected (the United States) since the beginning, and what is happening right now in Ukraine should be a lesson to all of those who push for citizen disarmament and a ban on private gun ownership how perilous that would be.”
“While we’ve seen reports that the Ukraine Parliament (Verkhovna Rada) has voted to ease restrictions allowing civilians to carry arms outside their homes,” said Alan Gottlieb, in his role as CCRKBA chairman, “in our country this has been the constitutional law of the land since our nation was founded.”
According to CNN, Zelenskyy quickly ordered a general military mobilization, prohibiting all men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country. Ukraine citizens are allowed to own firearms, but they do not enjoy the Second Amendment-level right to keep and bear arms.
“Our Second Amendment was enshrined in the Bill of Rights by men who had just fought a war for independence,” Gottlieb observed in a prepared statement. “They returned to their homes from battlefields, not from some deer hunting camp.
“The right to keep and bear arms has never been about shooting ducks,” he added, “but about protecting our right as citizens of the greatest nation on earth to defend our homes and families immediately against the kind of international outrage now unfolding in eastern Europe.”
The nationally-known gun rights advocate took a swipe at the gun prohibition lobby—which includes the billionaire-backed Everytown for Gun Safety and its subsidiary, Moms Demand Action, the Brady group and the Seattle-based Alliance for Gun Responsibility—asserting those groups “would have America become vulnerable to such aggression as we are now seeing on television screens from coast to coast.”
Everytown had nothing to say about Ukraine, but it did lament in a tweet that “Gun violence has overtaken car crashes as the leading cause of trauma-related death in the U.S.”
“This isn’t some action movie Americans are watching,” Gottlieb said, “this is real life, and it vividly illustrates why so many of us fight day and night to protect and defend our Second Amendment rights.”
According to an estimate at GunPolicy.org, “Ukraine is home to an estimated ten million state- and civilian-owned firearms yet lacks cohesive gun laws. The nation inherited vast quantities of Soviet-era small arms and ammunition, and is a known source of weapons to regions of conflict and human rights abuse.”
A few lines later, the report notes, “Estimates of the number of guns in private hands range from 2.2 to 6.3 million. These suggest a median rate of 6.6 firearms per 100 people, although the higher figure would yield a rate of 13 per 100. In 2005, Ukraine ranked 84th in the world for the number of civilian firearms per capita.”
The group then notes, “As recently as 2006, Ukraine had the world’s sixth-largest military firearm inventory.”
Whether this squares with the data reported by Ammoland colleague David Codrea here isn’t clear. But it does demonstrate there are Ukrainians with at least some guns, and as Russian troops move into cities, they may face potentially nasty opposition. Wars, especially in urban settings, can be pretty dirty affairs where what substitutes as rules of engagement may amount to shooting anything that looks like a Russian, and for the invading Russians, anything that might be a Ukrainian resistance fighter in neighborhoods full of Ukrainians, whether they’re combatants or just scared civilians.
Those who have persistently argued that “weapons of war” do not belong in our neighborhoods might jump on the next plane to Ukraine in an effort to sell that notion to the citizens whose country has just been invaded.
Perhaps Gottlieb nailed it when he remarked, “We can only hope that gun prohibitionists, or at least their supporters in the establishment media, learn something from this tragedy. To live in peace, one must always be prepared to defend it.”
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About Dave Workman
Dave Workman is a senior editor at TheGunMag.com and Liberty Park Press, author of multiple books on the Right to Keep & Bear Arms, and formerly an NRA-certified firearms instructor.