A Gun Maker with Ethics

  Utah gun maker Desert Tech took itself out of the running for a $15 million dollar gun deal with Pakistan, according to yesterday’s Utah Valley Daily Herald. The reason, according to Mike Davis, the sales manager for Desert Tech: they fear their guns would be used against Americans.

It gave me goose bumps to read the article. I thought that kind of morality was gone—that nobody in the business world had the patriotism to put country before profits. As my husband said, it’s enough to want to seek them out and buy a gun from them just to say, “Thank you!”

There are plenty of companies that have used the war in the Middle East to get rich. This company, however, was founded in 2007 on the principle of keeping America safe. As a young startup, you know they could have used the profits. They made a sacrifice for an ethical reason. I applaud them!

There is interesting history behind the whole issue of gun ownership. Without it we don’t stay free. Taking away guns is an early step to take away freedom, and we are well into the “taking away guns” phase. We can still physically keep guns, but the government regulates purchases and is now making ammunition hard to get. Next they want to register our guns. After that comes a deliberate threatening disturbance to create the excuse to take the registered guns. This pattern has ended gun ownership in many countries.  

How do you protect yourself without a weapon? A young woman who had been raped in a dark parking lot made an interesting comment on TV some months ago. Since her attack, she has become involved in the gun rights movement. She said she would have defended herself if she had been carrying a weapon. The media frenzy tells us we are safer if we ban guns, but her eye-opening comment was, “How can taking away my ability to protect myself make me safer?” That’s a lot to think about.

Gun ownership used to be part of being a man and an American. If you didn’t own a gun, you were irresponsible. Richard Henry Lee, an early freedom fighter and signer of the Declaration of Independence, said in the Pennsylvania Gazette in 1788: “…to preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them…The great object is, that every man be armed.”

Why would things have changed? Enemies are both foreign and domestic—from outside the country and inside. We still need to have guns and know how to use them. Taking guns from us makes us targets.

Back to the ethical decision of Desert Tech to put action behind patriotism, we compliment the company for putting the right thing to do above profits. Our Founding Fathers told us freedom and morality are intertwined—that both live together or both die together. We could use a lot more ethical behavior in the public square.