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.
